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Radioclare’s TAC log 2014 (*jäŋe/*ledús) | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Radioclare Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom timeofftakeoff.com Joined 4581 days ago 689 posts - 1119 votes  Speaks: English*, German, Esperanto Studies: Croatian, Serbian, Macedonian | Message 97 of 522 06 March 2014 at 11:21pm | IP Logged |
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On the train this morning I read about 20 pages of 'A handbook of Bosnian, Serbian and
Croatian'. These covered pronouns, the declension of adjectives and the conjugation of different verb types. Some of the stuff on verbs was too difficult for me, but the pages on pronouns were really useful. I've continued planting vocab from 'Teach Yourself Croatian' on Memrise and am now somewhere in the middle of the letter 'i'. I'm very excited because my copy of 'Mazedonisch Wort für Wort' arrived in the post today. I'm trying to restrain myself from reading the whole thing cover to cover before I go to bed. *** La ceteron de la vespero mi pasigis per esplorado pri diversaj temoj por la diskutrondo kiun mi ĉeestos ĉi-semajnfine. La temoj kiujn ni diskutos jenas: - Skota sendependiĝo - Hidraŭlika frakasado - Ĉu oni reformu la ortografion de la angla? - Prognozoj kiuj ne realiĝis - Kroz-ŝipoj - Chelsea Manning kaj fajfilo-blovado Mi sciis entute nenion pri hidraŭlika frakasado, kaj post horo da esplorado mi nun scias nur ke mi ĝin ne komprenas. Tamen mi esperas ke mi ion lernos el la diskutoj! *** I may not be able to update my log over the weekend because I'm attending an Esperanto discussion circle at a venue with dubious Wi-Fi. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Radioclare Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom timeofftakeoff.com Joined 4581 days ago 689 posts - 1119 votes Speaks: English*, German, Esperanto Studies: Croatian, Serbian, Macedonian | Message 98 of 522 11 March 2014 at 12:08pm | IP Logged |
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As expected, I didn't really have internet access at the weekend so now I'm a bit behind with my log...
Friday I read some more of 'A Handbook of Bosnian, Serbian and Croatian' on the train to work. There was a section on syntax which was particularly interesting and gave some good examples of word order in different sentences. One of the things I have been struggling with when writing Croatian on my own is knowing when a word (eg. a conjunction) is deemed to "occupy" the first position in a sentence, causing the clitics to come after it, and when it isn't. I'm sure when I learned German, I had textbooks which listed words that were counted as occupying the first place in a sentence and words which weren't, but I've struggled to find anything similar in Croatian. I stopped reading the book when I got to the section on negation, because it was before 7am and I thought I needed to be fully awake to stand a chance. In the evening I took a train to Stafford for the Esperanto event I was attending. I didn't do any more reading because I wasn't completely sure where to get off the train and didn't want to miss my stop, but I made some progress with Memrise. We started the Esperanto event on Friday evening with a discussion of Scottish independence. I was pleased/(surprised!) that I managed to get my words out in the correct language. Saturday This was a full day of Esperanto activity. There was an awkward moment when I wished someone "Bonan jutron" rather than "Bonan matenon" but other than that I think it went okay. We discussed fracking, reform of English spelling, whether there are countries in which the World Esperanto Association shouldn't hold its annual conference and predictions which never came true. Fracking was probably the weakest discussion, as none of us knew a lot about it. I escaped during one of the breaks and spent half an hour on Croatian vocab. I'm still planting the 'Teach Yourself Croatian' course on Memrise and managed to get up to the end of the letter 'i' on Saturday. On Saturday evening there was a lecture on Esperanto which dealt with some linguistic aspects of the early language and how it has evolved. The person giving the talk pointed out some differences between the first Esperanto textbook (published in Russian) and the English translation of it, eg. the Russian version implied that if you couldn't understand where to use the definite article "la", you could safely ignore it. I found that really interesting because it is definitely the main 'mistake' made by otherwise extremely fluent speakers of Esperanto from Slavic backgrounds. Another interesting point was when he drew our attention to one of the basic 16 rules of Esperanto, which states that you should only negate one element in a sentence. The first time I read that more than 10 years ago I couldn't imagine why it needed to be specified, but having now struggled to grasp the Croatian system of negating as many words as possible, it suddenly makes a lot more sense. All in all it was a really thought-provoking session. Sunday This was a half-day of Esperanto. In the morning we discussed the ethics of cruise ships, as well as Chelsea Manning and whisteblowing, before heading home after lunch. Croatian-wise I spent the best part of an hour on Memrise and am now halfway through the letter 'm'. There were a surprising number of words starting with 'k', so I haven't got as far as I expected. I am dreading when I get to 'p' because I know how long it took me to input those in the first place! We went to the pub in the evening and I brought my book on the war in Yugoslavia with me. I seem to have been reading it for several weeks, but so far I've only just got to the death of Tito. I'm getting the impression that when I get to the war the viewpoint is not going to be completely impartial, but we shall see. Monday Monday was my Croatian class again and I had been naughty this week and not done my homework. Luckily it was only one exercise from 'Teach Yourself Croatian' on telling the time, so I was able to answer the questions live as she went round the class. It wasn't a bad lesson actually. She asked us to read the dialogue at the start of chapter 7, which is the one where Mark and Sandra go round to Rudolf's flat and meet his mother. She gave us all a big sheet of paper and then we had to brainstorm each character, writing as much about them as we could from the information given in the dialogue, eg. "Mark ima brata" etc. It was good practice and it didn't matter too much if people didn't understand cases, because there was a lot which could be copied straight out of the text. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Radioclare Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom timeofftakeoff.com Joined 4581 days ago 689 posts - 1119 votes Speaks: English*, German, Esperanto Studies: Croatian, Serbian, Macedonian | Message 99 of 522 11 March 2014 at 11:28pm | IP Logged |
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Today I finished reading 'A Handbook of Bosnian, Serbian and Croatian'. The section on
negation wasn't actually as bad as I expected and I think I learned something. My initial assumption when I started reading it that it was way above my level was correct overall, but I think it was worth it anyway for the bits I did get out of it. I'm going to keep it on my Kindle to reread when my Croatian is better. I am persevering with Memrise and am now partway through the letter 'N' :) 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Radioclare Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom timeofftakeoff.com Joined 4581 days ago 689 posts - 1119 votes Speaks: English*, German, Esperanto Studies: Croatian, Serbian, Macedonian | Message 100 of 522 12 March 2014 at 11:46pm | IP Logged |
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There was a slight disaster on my commute this morning when my train broke down. The
result was that everyone had to get off and the equivalent of two train's worth of people had to cram onto the subsequent train. Standing packed like sardines was not very conducive to any proper Croatian studying. I did, however, just about have enough space to do Memrise on my phone. The train was delayed for long enough for me to finish the letter 'N' and complete 'NJ' and 'O' as well. I even made some initial progress with the letter 'P'. I now have over 2,500,000 points on Memrise, which makes me happy :) Unfortunately, I've realised this evening that something has gone wrong with the syncing between my phone and the web and somehow I have lost half of the planting I did in 'O' (though, bizarrely, not the planting I did in 'P') so I have just had to replant them online. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Radioclare Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom timeofftakeoff.com Joined 4581 days ago 689 posts - 1119 votes Speaks: English*, German, Esperanto Studies: Croatian, Serbian, Macedonian | Message 101 of 522 13 March 2014 at 10:33pm | IP Logged |
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This morning on the train I started reading 'Kroatisch Wort für Wort' which I bought
recently along with the Macedonian book in the same series. I am trying to be good and resist the temptation of my shiny new Macedonian book (because I'm not going to Macedonia until September, which is still a very long way away) and so reading the Croatian book was a compromise. Having read about 60 pages in total today, I'm very impressed by how good it is. It starts with a grammar section which succeeds in striking a balance between being simplified and comprehensive. Certainly it's significantly better than any grammar explanations I've read in a phrasebook before, and I've been enjoying seeing the language presented from a different viewpoint; it's differences to and similarities with German. Memrise is still going strong, of course - an awful lot of watering to get through today! 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Radioclare Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom timeofftakeoff.com Joined 4581 days ago 689 posts - 1119 votes Speaks: English*, German, Esperanto Studies: Croatian, Serbian, Macedonian | Message 102 of 522 17 March 2014 at 12:40pm | IP Logged |
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Another weekend which wasn't very conducive to updating my log!
On Friday I finished reading 'Kroatisch Wort für Wort'. Referring to it as a phrasebook now seems unfair given the quality of grammar explanations it contains. There were also a lot of interesting cultural observations among the phrases and I definitely learned a few things. I think Croatia would be the ideal country for my boyfriend to live in given that it is allegedly regarded as polite to turn up 15 minutes late for an invitation ;) A lot of the phrases in the real 'phrasebook' part were more natural and conversational than phrase books normally are, so I am tempted to put them into Memrise so I can learn some of them. My desire to do this is possibly outweighed by my complete lack of time to input anything at all into Memrise at the moment. Saturday was a busy day but I had a train journey in the early evening, so I took my 'Beginner's Croatian' with me to read. I forget the number of the chapter now but it was the one where Marijana, Darko and Ivan are travelling down the coast to Split, and stop at a service station where Marijana loses her purse. In terms of grammar, it's one of the more difficult chapters and deals with aspect. I got about halfway through it before I had to get off the train, so I will need to pick it up again at some point. On Sunday I had quite a bit more free time. I felt ambitious in the morning so tried to watch some of Saturday's 'Dnevnik' from the HRT website. This was useful in confirming that my level is definitely 'Tomica i prijatelji' ;) I was quite pleased though that I managed to follow the gist of the first few items, which were about Crimea and the missing aeroplane. I only learnt the word for 'disappear' last week on Memrise and this was the first time I had seen it in practice, so that was nice. I struggled to understand anything meaningful once the themes became more local, for example about the Serbian elections, and eventually gave up. I went on the treadmill later and listened to three of the dialogues from 'Beginner's Croatian'; the ones from the chapters which cover the past tense, the future tense and aspect. It worked quite well actually because I could run during the first instance of the dialogue and slow to a walk during the repetition so that I had enough breath to say the words out loud. In the afternoon I tackled by BCS textbook. I am disappointed by how little progress I have made with this, given that I think it's an amazing textbook and I could learn so much from it, but the problem is that it's so big and unwieldy that I can only really use it if I'm at home and sitting at a desk. This is an extremely rare occurrence, hence lack of progress. Yesterday though I had a spare few hours and I worked through the exercises in chapters 3, 4 and 5. I've decided to say the B exercises out loud and only write out the C exercises, at least for these initial chapters where I already have a good overview of the content. These chapters were mainly dealing with accusative and genitive case endings, which were fine. As a general review of where I am, I feel like I made really good progress in January but that February and March so far have been less structured. This reflects the amount of time I have spent travelling with work and the hours I have been working. I'm pleased that I have managed to do something each day, but there have been quite a few days where that has just been a bit of Memrise. I'm hoping that by the end of March/start of April I will be back to normal days where only 12 hours are dominated by work, and therefore have no excuses if I don't progress ;) 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Radioclare Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom timeofftakeoff.com Joined 4581 days ago 689 posts - 1119 votes Speaks: English*, German, Esperanto Studies: Croatian, Serbian, Macedonian | Message 103 of 522 17 March 2014 at 10:51pm | IP Logged |
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I went to my Croatian lesson tonight and it was actually okay. We continued with
chapter 7 of 'Teach Yourself Croatian' and read the opening dialogue around the class. Unfortunately I got the part of Rudolf, who only had one line, but I think it was useful for everybody else. Then we practised saying how old we are, which was also worth doing. The only confusion came when someone in the dialogue said "sjednite" and she started trying to explain the difference between "sjednite" and "sjedite", which went completely over everyone's heads (both because she wasn't explaining it very well and because the concept of aspect has never come up in our lessons before). In other (non-Croatian) news, I forgot to say that on Saturday I met up with an old friend and acquired a belated Christmas present; a copy of Arika Okrent's 'In the land of invented languages'. I have heard this book referred to so often but never read it myself, so am looking forward to it. Although it is currently at the bottom of a big pile of books on Balkan history which I want to read first. At this rate there is a reasonable chance that I will 'kabei' before I get around to it. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Radioclare Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom timeofftakeoff.com Joined 4581 days ago 689 posts - 1119 votes Speaks: English*, German, Esperanto Studies: Croatian, Serbian, Macedonian | Message 104 of 522 18 March 2014 at 11:25pm | IP Logged |
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I had to travel down to London this morning which meant I had an hour of free time on
the train. I was lucky enough to get a seat where I could get my laptop out, so I was able to use my pdf version of the BCS textbook on the computer. I read through chapter 6 and made notes on some of the most useful content, including the list of words which take 'u' as opposed to the list of words which take 'na'. I got through al the B exercises but ran out of time to do the C exercises before I arrived in London. It was a nice relaxing start to the morning, despite the fact I'd had to get up at 5am. In the evening I wasn't so lucky with the train and had to stand. I spent the journey home on Memrise and I am making progress with the letter P. I've planted 607 of the 980 words in my 'Teach Yourself Croatian' course now. Tonight after tea I finished the C exercises from chapter 6 of the BCS textbook. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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