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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 257 of 522 31 July 2014 at 2:50pm | IP Logged |
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Today's the last day of the month so I'm going to take advantage of my power supply at work to do a SC update.
During July I have read two more novels: 9. Bogovi Rata 10. Pedeset Nijansi Siva That brings me up to 82.8 'books' and 10 actual books. 'Pedeset Nijansi Siva' was the first book I have read in 'Serbian'/ekavian spelling. In total my reading stats so far are as follows: May 2014 - 1 808 pages June 2014 - 1,441 pages July 2014 - 872 pages So July is quite a dramatic reduction but it has been a strange month, with the first week being spent on holiday in Spain, getting promoted in the second week and having a house fire in the final week! Filmwise I have watched 10 episodes of 'Bitange i Princeze', 3 episodes of 'Eurobox' on Deutsche Welle which just about count, listened to some of the audiobook 'Grimizna Studija', watched two actual Serbian/Croatian films ('Ljubav dolazi kasnije' and 'Korak po korak'), one English film with Croatian subtitles (Julius Caesar) and one documentary. My film stats are like this: May 2014 - 941 minutes June 2014 - 713 minutes July 2014 - 1,081 minutes It's quite encouraging to see that my film stats did improve in July, mainly helped by the audio book. How August goes is subject to when I get my electricity back. I'm not signing up for the 6WC because there's too much uncertainty about how much time I'll be able to devote to it. I'm going to Macedonia on August 31 so I have exactly one month to learn some useful phrases and finalise my itinerary. Also to brush up on my Croatian in preparation for Serbia and Montenegro. I have a pre-arranged trip to London this weekend so will enjoy having some power there and hopefully be able to do some SC reading on the train at least :) 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| rdearman Senior Member United Kingdom rdearman.orgRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5234 days ago 881 posts - 1812 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian, French, Mandarin | Message 258 of 522 31 July 2014 at 3:44pm | IP Logged |
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I was thinking about your electrical handicap and the film portion of the challenge. The only thing I could think of which would help would be to load audio books on everything that will hold one!
Taking myself as an example, I could travel to work and charge: 2 x smartphones (personal & work) 2 x laptops (personal & work) 1 x iPod 1 x MP3 player. So these last between 45-minutes to 6 hour of charge, so I could potentially watch/listen to 24 hours of audio (or even video on laptops & smartphones) which could count toward my film. So I don't know how much technical equipment you have available but it would be worth charging everything you can lay your hands on. Don't give up on SC Films! “Improvise, Adapt and Overcome!” 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 259 of 522 31 July 2014 at 8:47pm | IP Logged |
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Haha, there was me thinking I had a get-out-of-jail-free card for lack of progress with SC films and rdearman has ruined it with a great practical suggestion ;)
I haven't done any Croatian at all (not just no films, but no reading or studying either) since the fire because my limited daylight time at home has been taken up by more urgent stuff. But hopefully by next week things will have normalised a bit and I'll be able to give some thought to how to continue the SC. I do indeed have a smartphone, iPod and two laptops that I can potentially charge from work and next week I am back in my base office where I know I can steal quite a few sockets. This week I have been on site with a client, so I've had to try and give the impression that I've come there for some reason besides free electricity ;) It is giving me a good incentive to work late, though! I wish I had one of those fancy Kindles that are backlit to read in the dark. Or a book light, as Serpent suggested. I will see if I can find one in London at the weekend. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6595 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 260 of 522 01 August 2014 at 12:51am | IP Logged |
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...incentive? ;(
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| 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 261 of 522 03 August 2014 at 11:53pm | IP Logged |
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Just got home after a lovely weekend in London. We stayed in a hotel on Saturday night and it was great to have a working shower and electric lights :) I
didn't get around to watching any films but I have at least managed to charge my laptop. And I've read 225 pages of 'Pedeset nijansi mračnije' so my SC is not quite dead. We were just in London being tourists for once (rather than being there for work or some Esperanto-related chore) and thanks to rdearman I discovered the joys of Foyles bookshop on the Charing Cross Road. Oh my God, this place is seriously amazing. I have never seen so many language books in one place in my entire life. There were two shelves of Croatian, three shelves of Serbian and even a handful of books on Macedonian. I think all the Slavic languages were represented, and if you were learning Polish or Russian there was an entire aisle of books for each. I wanted to buy everything. I particularly wanted to buy this and this and this. In the end I bought nothing. Partly because it was all so expensive and - although the insurance is paying for our post-fire house repairs - I still have to find the cash to pay the excess on our insurance and the excess on our neighbour's insurance, so I can't really justify spending money on non essentials right now. Partly because it's not that long until I go to Belgrade anyway and any novels I want to buy should hopefully be substantially cheaper there. And partly because I really should not buy an expensive textbook to learn Macedonian before I have even been there. It was a great way to spend a Saturday afternoon though. This bookshop covers so many languages that it even has a half-shelf of Esperanto! There were a few novels, a couple of textbooks and several copies of 'Star in a night sky', an anthology of translated Esperanto literature. My other half and I went back to the shop on Sunday morning and spoke to the guy who runs the languages floor to see whether he'd be open to extending the range a bit. He was (surprisingly!) receptive to the idea and gave us his details so that (in our roles as trustees of the Esperanto charity) we can supply the shop with a complimentary box of books to expand the Esperanto shelf. No one gets rich out of publishing in Esperanto, and from our charity's point of view it's far better to have the books on display in public than sitting on the shelves of our headquarters and gathering dust :) Edited by Radioclare on 03 August 2014 at 11:57pm 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 262 of 522 05 August 2014 at 4:26pm | IP Logged |
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126 pages of the second 50 Shades book read since my last update. I've managed to charge my personal computer, on which I have the book as a pdf, so I've been able to read for a few hours. Unfortunately my Kindle objects violently to this particular pdf and won't display past page 6. I'm about halfway through this book now and everything that I remember about the plot has already happened, so not sure how it is going to continue for another 200 pages or so. It's massively improved my ability to recognise ekavian spellings though and reading Serbian now feels a bit like reading American English; it mostly makes sense but every so often they spell something wrong and use a word I've never heard of ;)
I've listened to a bit more of the 'Grimizna Studija' audiobook but now my iPod has died and I haven't figured out a solution to charging it yet. In other news I went to one of the Waterstones in Birmingham today and found they had a surprisingly good selection of German literature. Last time I went in there to look at German books - admittedly perhaps two years ago - all they had was a few parallel texts. But now they have several shelves and I even found a few books I wanted to buy (a couple of novels I haven't read yet by Martin Suter, my favourite Swiss author). It doesn't rival Foyles, but it's a definite improvement. For a brief moment I thought it might be a good idea to start a Super Challenge in German (that would be sooooooo much easier than Croatian!) but actually it would be a really bad idea. For Cristina's August challenge I am going to look for sentences including the future exact, because while I feel I could recite the explanation of this tense from my textbooks, I have never successfully used it myself. I may need to start reading a different book to accomplish this, because some of the sentences I've been reading this week wouldn't be ideal choices to reproduce on the forum. 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 263 of 522 06 August 2014 at 10:49pm | IP Logged |
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Another 196 pages read and that takes me to the end of the second 50 shades book. I'm now on 93.7 'books' and 11 books :)
I've got the final 50 shades book - 'Pedeset nijansi slobodniji' - so I'll probably read that next and then aim for something a bit classier. Just when I thought things couldn't get much worse, my other half's car died yesterday. It seems to be a problem with the clutch, which I assume is expensive to replace. This makes life without electricity even more complicated (because now we can't even go out to eat, for example) so I'm pretty fed up. 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 264 of 522 08 August 2014 at 3:58pm | IP Logged |
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I've started the third book in the series - 'Pedeset nijansi slobodniji' - and read 95 pages so far.
The car is still broken, the electricity is still off and I still haven't watched any films. I have acquired a graded reader in Serbian Cyrillic. I don't know what a graded reader is but I'm assuming everyone else does because it's one of those mysterious terms like 'Assimil' that gets used on HTLAL all the time but completely goes over my head. As far as I can tell it's a book of short texts for primary school children. It has pictures and exercises where you can draw things. This is just about the right level for me in Cyrillic. I have read about three pages so far at snail's pace. The first page was a poem about a dog. I was reading so slowly that it was only on my third attempt going through it that I realised it rhymed :D I have started compiling sentences using the future exact for the August challenge. I have 21 so far. I've attempted to translate them on my own and when I have time I'm going to compare my translation to the actual proper sentence in the English version of 'Fifty Shades of Grey' which I hopefully still have somewhere in the depths of my Kindle. My hope is that seeing the English sentences which have been translated using the future exact will help me understand better where to use it myself. This weekend my boyfriend and I are going to Brighton (a popular seaside town on the south coast of England). I'm looking forward to have a shower and electric lights again. It is a language-related trip because Brighton will be the location for the British Esperanto Conference in April 2015. The plan is to meet up with the local Esperanto group there (all three of them!) and then scout out locations for post-conference excursions, the group meal, accommodation for participants etc. We're hoping the conference will be a big success next year; Brighton ought to be a popular choice for Esperantists (it's the sort of town that has vegan shoe shops) and it's relatively easy to get there from France, so we're hoping to attract lots of overseas visitors. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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