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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 345 of 522 02 October 2014 at 2:12pm | IP Logged |
Nah, use them to practise whatever language you happen to be learning. Croatian, Macedonian, Hungarian...
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 346 of 522 02 October 2014 at 10:53pm | IP Logged |
I'm hoping I get him in the office Secret Santa this year so that I can buy him a book
about Japanese :)
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 347 of 522 03 October 2014 at 11:26am | IP Logged |
Last night on the train home from work I finished reading "Ušica igle". The end of it was really exciting and again there were so many bits I understood from the book that I had missed in the audio, for example one of the characters unscrews a lightbulb and sticks her finger in the socket to short circuit the electricity and stop the German spy from transmitting a message to a submarine. I didn't follow any of that from the audio, mainly because I didn't know the word for bulb (sijalica)or the word for submarine (podmornica).
I was hesitating this morning over whether to start another book before I go on holiday, but in the end I couldn't resist temptation. I picked another Ken Follett novel, 'Dolina Lavova' (in English I think it's 'Lie Down with Lions'). I've only read 25 pages so far but it's so exciting already that I think I'm going to have to bring it to Sardinia with me, despite my resolution to spend holidays reading in English.
I watched one more episode of 'Bitange i Princeze' last night but I didn't get all the jokes. It wasn't so much the language, but more cultural references that went over my head. I think there were a lot of jokes about Serbian stereotypes, eg. there were some characters from Zemun who looked a bit like gangsters (and I know that is a place linked to Serbian mafia) and somebody singing in a way which was dreadful enough to be Turbofolk. I still need to work on finding a tame Croatian who I can ask to explain things like this to me.
I didn't do anything else last night because we drank a bottle of wine to celebrate my promotion (which became official on 1 October) and my pay rise. I'm already thinking about the holidays and language books I can spend it on :)
Cristina's log is wreaking havoc with my life because now I'm feeling unhappy with my decision not to start Russian in 2015. I want to go to Russia so much and I have four different Russian holidays planned in my head already, but I don't think my Croatian is at a high enough level for me to take on another serious language, so I had decided that I will wait until 2016. But 2016 feels like such a long time away and given that Russian seems so much more difficult than Croatian, I think it will take me years to get to a useful level where I am brave enough to travel. I need to give it some more thought!
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 348 of 522 04 October 2014 at 11:01pm | IP Logged |
Hello from Cagliari in Sardinia :) It was already dark when we arrived so have no idea
what it's like here except that it is fortunately a lot warmer than the UK.
The flight took a couple of hours so I was able to make some progress with 'Dolina
Lavova'. It's really, really exciting. I got through another 98 pages before we
landed, which takes me up to 125.4 books and so I get another star for reading :)
Being abroad in a place where I don't have to speak Croatian feels a little weird
after having been in Serbia less than three weeks ago. On my way to the hotel I was
busy working out in my head how I was going to explain that although they'd told us to
take a taxi from the airport, when we got to the taxi rank there weren't any taxis and
we couldn't find the bus stop for the airport, but then we saw a sign pointing to a
train station. And that was really confusing, because the guidebook I had about
Sardinia didn't mention anything about the airport having a train station. Perhaps
it's because I bought the guidebook for £1 in a discount book store and it's so out of
date that the station hadn't been built when the book was written.... I got as far
with this train of thought as wondering how I was going to express the concept "out of
date" in Croatian, before I remembered that I was in Italy and speaking Croatian
wasn't going to get me very far :D
1 person has voted this message useful
| Kerrie Senior Member United States justpaste.it/Kerrie2 Joined 5393 days ago 1232 posts - 1740 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish
| Message 349 of 522 04 October 2014 at 11:44pm | IP Logged |
Radioclare wrote:
I picked another Ken Follett novel, 'Dolina Lavova' (in English I think it's 'Lie Down with Lions'). I've only read 25 pages so far but it's so exciting already that I think I'm going to have to bring it to Sardinia with me, despite my resolution to spend holidays reading in English. |
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Haha, I have that book on my Kindle and started reading it a week or two ago. Unfortunately, I got sidetracked with The Hunger Games, but now I think I will go back to that one. Do you get most of your Croatian/Serbian books while you're on vacation, or have you find some online somewhere?
My Croatian is your Russian. I know I can't devote the time to it right now, but I really miss studying it, and I always think of going back. Maybe 2016. It's really only a year away. :)
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 350 of 522 05 October 2014 at 9:47am | IP Logged |
I'm glad I'm not the only person who has a language like that :)
I've bought most of them while on vacation. For the past two years I managed to
convince my sister that she wanted to come to Zagreb with me the week before Christmas
to see the Christmas markets, and I managed to get lots of books really cheaply in
sales. The first book I read was Murder on the Orient Express and I bought that from
a Croatian website Superknjižara but the
shipping costs and taxes ended up being more expensive that the book. A few of the
things I've read (Twilight and 50 Shades) I haven't purchased and have just 'found'
online. Unfortunately ebooks don't seem to have taken off in the Balkans yet so it's
really difficult to find ebooks to purchase legitimately. The 50 Shades books I read
were pdfs which seemed to have been published by the Serbian company
Laguna but I have tried searching their website for
ebooks and I can't find any. I keep checking periodically just in case.
2 persons have voted this message useful
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4705 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish
| Message 351 of 522 05 October 2014 at 10:35am | IP Logged |
The nice thing about Russian for you is going to be that it's much easier if you already
speak Croatian, especially if you know the Cyrillics (I'm guessing you do given
Macedonian/Serbian?). The distances between some of the Slavic languages, I feel, are
comparatively less than between some of the other major language groups in Europe and you
should be able to take on Russian fairly swiftly - for example, you will know all about
cases, verb aspect, and such already (and also about morphology). So I think you could
maybe set it for july 2015 :D
Personally, for me Serbian/Croatian is definitely a future project, the question is more
one of when than of if.
3 persons have 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 352 of 522 05 October 2014 at 1:42pm | IP Logged |
Very true. I'm not sure where you got the idea that Russian is more difficult. Most difficulties are present in (Serbo-)Croatian too, apart from its much more phonetic writing. And you won't have to worry about dialects/different standards in Russian.
Also, you don't have to learn Russian actively at once. You could learn it passively first and then activate.
Edited by Serpent on 05 October 2014 at 1:45pm
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