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Radioclare’s TAC log 2014 (*jäŋe/*ledús) | ||
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| Radioclare Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom timeofftakeoff.com Joined 4584 days ago 689 posts - 1119 votes  Speaks: English*, German, Esperanto Studies: Croatian, Serbian, Macedonian | Message 225 of 522 13 July 2014 at 8:36pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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This morning I went for a walk and re-listened to the first 45 minutes of the 'Grimizna Studija' audio. I was pleased that I could understand quite a lot of
it without having the text, though I did have to be careful to walk on quiet roads because every time a car passed me it drowned the audio out! When I got home I watched two more episodes of 'Bitange i Princeze'. It would be good if I could watch one episode every day but I don't know whether I have the discipline. The characters talk so fast, I'm still finding it very hard to catch full sentences even if I probably know all the words in them. The audio in the audio book is miles slower, which is great. After doing some Memrise watering and reading a couple more chapters of the BCS grammar, I decided to do an experiment where I took a page of 'Bogovi Rata' (the book I am currently reading for the SC), wrote down what I understood from the Croatian text and then read the same page in the English version, which my fiance fortuitously happens to possess. I chose the first page to start with, which in Croatian is as follows. The words in bold are the ones I don't know.
Some of the words in bold I don't know more than others, if that makes sense. For example, I have no idea at all what 'žbuka' but although I have also never seen the word 'podsjetnik' before, I can guess from other words that I know that it might have something to do with remembering. What I understood from this without looking anything up is below. I've put question marks where I'm just guessing what a word means and italics where I have absolutely no idea.
The actual English translation is as follows:
Hmmm. I'm not sure whether the results of that are depressing or encouraging. I guess it's encouraging that I understood enough to follow the sense of what was happening. But perhaps discouraging that there are still so many words I can't even guess. If I was looking up all the words I didn't know then my Super Challenge reading score would only be a fraction of what it is now! Edited by Radioclare on 13 July 2014 at 9:07pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Radioclare Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom timeofftakeoff.com Joined 4584 days ago 689 posts - 1119 votes Speaks: English*, German, Esperanto Studies: Croatian, Serbian, Macedonian | Message 226 of 522 14 July 2014 at 11:54pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Today's log update is sponsored by a large glass of wine and a double Bailey's. I may
not be entirely sober. But I found out today that I am going to be promoted to an assistant manager at work (with effect from 1 October) so there was some cause for celebration. In more relevant news I read 18 more pages of 'Bogovi Rata' on the train to work this morning. I only have another 100 pages to go and then I never have to read another word about Julius Caesar in any language as long as I live. I have to walk a mile or so from the station to my office at the other end, so I experimented with using this time to listen to some of the Sherlock Holmes audiobook. It worked quite well (because the city centre is pretty quiet before 8am) and so I managed to listen to 21 minutes. I tried to repeat this success at lunchtime, but it was soon clear that it wasn't going to work out so I didn't count anything towards the Super Challenge. Even sticking to pedestrianised roads, the city centre is just too noisy in the middle of the day to be able to hear Croatian audio with sufficient clarity. I manged to listen to another 30 minutes on the train home, so perhaps I will change my schedule so that I read on the train to work and listen to an audio book on the way home. Having read the Super Challenge discussion thread today, I have been giving some thought to what I've been counting towards films and whether I'm properly entering into the spirit of the challenge. Given that this is a challenge which is supposed to involve watching 100 films and so far I've only watched one actual film (Pjevajte Nešto Ljubavno), possibly not. My films stats so far can be broken down as: Children's TV - 45 minutes Proper film - 107 minutes News programmes - 125 minutes Theatre - 100 minutes Football - 90 minutes Audiobook - 146 minutes Sitcom series - 864 minutes Subtitled films - 608 minutes It seems like the news programmes, the theatre, the football and even the audio book could potentially be considered dubious. That said, the only ones which I would have watched if it weren't for the challenge are the news and the theatre, so whichever way you look at it I think I have more exposure to Croatian than I would otherwise have had :) Edited by Radioclare on 15 July 2014 at 12:00am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Radioclare Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom timeofftakeoff.com Joined 4584 days ago 689 posts - 1119 votes Speaks: English*, German, Esperanto Studies: Croatian, Serbian, Macedonian | Message 227 of 522 15 July 2014 at 9:03pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Positives from today... I didn't have a hangover after my weird combination of
celebratory drinks last night ;) .... I managed to read 20 whole pages of 'Bogovi Rata' on the train to work, so I think my reading speed in Croatian is definitely improving... I managed to listen to a whole 56 minutes of 'Grimizna Studija' (Sherlock Holmes audiobook) while commuting as well. Negatives from today... I definitely had misunderstood the Super Challenge rules to mean that you could basically watch anything which was on TV and count it as a 'film' and so I shouldn't have counted the 'Eurobox' current affairs programmes which I sometimes watch on Croatian/Serbian Deutsche Welle. This makes me sad as out of all the things I watch, they are probably the ones I understood best and enjoy the most. I will probably still watch them, just not count them. The discussion on the rules today has made me think that maybe - as a person who struggles to enjoy films - I simply shouldn't have signed up for a challenge which involves me watching 100 films. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6598 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 228 of 522 16 July 2014 at 12:42am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I hope Cristina re-thinks it. Frankly speaking I think some are too attached to the Original Idea, but that's not how challenges work. If you look at ALL other challenges, the original idea is always just a spark, and the challenges are what people make them.
Also there's a blurry area between the news and current affairs. TV-programmes generally count, and the Deutsche Welle stuff is weekly. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Radioclare Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom timeofftakeoff.com Joined 4584 days ago 689 posts - 1119 votes Speaks: English*, German, Esperanto Studies: Croatian, Serbian, Macedonian | Message 229 of 522 16 July 2014 at 10:47am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Well I guess it is impossible for Cristina to please all of us all of the time and I definitely don't envy her the role of trying to enforce fair rules when all of us have our own ideas about what should count :)
It does feel counterintuitive to me not being able to count news programmes though, because I feel like I get so much more out of them that watching a film or a TV series. Newsreaders normally speak slowly and clearly - using textbook language rather than colloquial/slang - so I find what I can understand is limited only by the size of my vocabulary rather than my ability to penetrate a regional accent or tell where one word ends and the next starts. Plus I'm sure it helps my listening comprehension more than watching Twilight films in English with Croatian subtitles. The most ironic thing is that out of all the things I have counted towards my SC 'films' so far, Deutsche Welle is probably the only thing I have watched legitimately :D Everything else, either someone else has probably bent a law putting it on Youtube or I have probably bent a law by downloading it for free. I mean, if I could find a website which would allow me to pay for and legally download ebooks/audiobooks/films in Croatian the same way I know I could in French or German then I definitely would. But I think when you are learning a language with fewer resources you have to be less scrupulous about where your material comes from or sometimes you just wouldn't have any material at all. Part of me is hoping that when I go to Macedonia in September I will absolutely hate it, because I think if I love it and decide I actually want to properly learn Macedonian, the lack of resources is going to make me cry! 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Radioclare Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom timeofftakeoff.com Joined 4584 days ago 689 posts - 1119 votes Speaks: English*, German, Esperanto Studies: Croatian, Serbian, Macedonian | Message 230 of 522 17 July 2014 at 12:05am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Today is a momentous day - I finally got my first star for films :)
In total I listened to 67 minutes of my audiobook and watched a further two episodes of 'Bitange i Princeze', which brings me up to 25.3 films. Yay! I didn't do any reading today but I will hopefully finish 'Bogovi Rata' over the next couple of days; I'm on just over 72 books at the moment so close to getting another star for those as well. I'm trying to take Vivian's advice now to look at the SC film thing more positively and think of it as an opportunity to explore foreign cinema. I did some googling earlier and found a few websites which look like they have quite large selections of ex-Yugoslavian films to watch and download. They are not the sort of sites I could link to here; you need to be pretty confident in your anti-virus protection before you click on them ;) I am going to try and challenge myself to watch an entire proper film at the weekend. Edited by Radioclare on 17 July 2014 at 12:06am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Radioclare Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom timeofftakeoff.com Joined 4584 days ago 689 posts - 1119 votes Speaks: English*, German, Esperanto Studies: Croatian, Serbian, Macedonian | Message 231 of 522 18 July 2014 at 3:44pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Yesterday was a really weird day because for once I was working in the same town as my other half. Normally I commute 25 miles in one direction and he commutes 25 miles in the exact opposite direction, but yesterday I was able to get a lift to and from work with him. It was amazing, but meant I didn't did anything done towards the Super Challenge during the day.
In the evening I decided to be virtuous and watch an actual film. Unfortunately my computer took that as it's cue for the sound to stop working, so I wasted goodness knows how long turning it on and off and installing updates. It was after 10pm by the time I got it working and so I only had time for a short film. It was a Serbian film called 'Љубав долази касније', which I chose because it was only 75 minutes long. This turned out to be its only virtue. In the end a combination of being tired and the film not being very exciting meant I gave up half way through and went to bed. To be fair to the film, it probably just wasn't a very good film for someone with an imperfect command of Serbian, because there was no action. The film is set over one evening and features a guy whose girlfriend has left him getting drunk, going to visit a prostitute and telling her all about his problems. The prostitute seems to have relationship problems of her own, and the film moves on to show her arguing with her boyfriend who looks just enough like the original man to cause confusion. How it ends I don't know, but the first 45 minutes were all anguished talking about emotions. I understood more than I expected to but I wouldn't say it was captivating. It now seems that news programmes do count for the Super Challenge after all, but I shouldn't have counted anything which is less than 15 minutes. That rules out 'Jezik za svakoga' which is a documentary about language that I had watched a few episodes of on HRT (each episode is only 10 minutes), but it doesn't matter; I had only watched a few and I just won't watch any more. Jeffer's infographic does make things a lot clearer :) 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Radioclare Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom timeofftakeoff.com Joined 4584 days ago 689 posts - 1119 votes Speaks: English*, German, Esperanto Studies: Croatian, Serbian, Macedonian | Message 232 of 522 20 July 2014 at 11:54pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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A busy weekend, which hasn't involved quite as much Croatian as I'd hoped.
On Saturday afternoon I watched the remaining half an hour of 'Ljubav dolazi kasnije'. I didn't enjoy it any more than I did the first 45 minutes, but I did understand quite a lot of the dialogue. It's not a film I will be watching again though. I then spent some time reading my BCS grammar book and felt like I was getting something out of it. It is definitely a book to read after 8 hours sleep and two large cups of coffee. Some of it still goes over my head, but I think that each time I reread a chapter I am remembering a little bit more. We went to a party on Saturday evening and slept a sofa at my boyfriend's sister's house. It was convenient but not very conducive to a good night's sleep and so I was awake by 5am. The only advantage to this was that it meant I had two hours to sit and read in peace before there was any chance of getting breakfast. I got through the final 54 pages of 'Bogovi Rata', which were actually quite moving. I'm glad to have finished it though and I will definitely be reading something lighter (trashier!) next. When we got home later on Sunday I had a random moment of panic when I realised it's now only 7 weeks until I go to Macedonia/Serbia and I still haven't improved my Cyrillic reading capabilities. It might seem counterintuitive when I need to learn to read better, but I think the key to improvement it for me to learn to write. My brain is a bit old-fashioned and it only learns things if I write them out by hand. My inability to do this was the main thing which made me despair of learning Russian when I first started in 2004. My inability to learn Russian in 2004 was directly responsible for me having to learn Esperanto instead, so in effect it ruined my life ;) Anyhoow, I am posting today's effort here in order to shame myself to practise more and do better. I was going to list the letters I have problems with, but actually that would be most of them. The situation isn't helped by the fact that my handwriting isn't very neat anyway and I can't even seem to get all the letters the same size. I am comforted by the fact that I will never have to master this handwriting well enough for anyone else to read; I just need to learn to reproduce the letters well enough that I can understand what I've written myself :D 
Moving swiftly on, I tried to read some more of the BCS grammar book and I made it to the end of chapter 6 (which is about 100 pages in to a 400-page book) but then I actually fell asleep. Whoops! When I woke up I decided to try watching another film. I wanted something with more action this time so I decided to try and find a war film. A Google search came up with a 2011 film called 'Korak po korak', which tells the story of a woman who refuses to leave her bombarded home (I think in Osijek) even when her husband flees and her son joins the army. I think it is probably an excellent film (although understandably pretty gory in places) but I couldn't understand it well enough. I needed to turn the volume up quite high to be able to catch the words, but there was a limit to how high I could have it because there were necessarily a lot of exploding noises in the background. I really needed subtitles; preferably in Croatian but English would have been better than nothing. Unfortunately, I can't find Croatian subtitles for Croatian films anywhere at all (only Croatian subtitles for American films). I gave up watching after 70 minutes because I just didn't feel I was getting anything from it. There's no point sitting in front of films I can't understand just for the sake of Super Challenge points. This evening my boyfriend wanted to watch a film about Julius Caesar so in the end we put it on with Croatian subtitles. I've been trying to tune out the English and just focus on the subtitles. Having read 3 books in Croatian about Caesar now, I already know a lot of the vocab :) 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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