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Radioclare’s TAC log 2014 (*jäŋe/*ledús) | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 5167 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes  Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 505 of 522 10 December 2014 at 8:49pm | IP Logged |
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Congrats on finishing the TV series! I'd certainly take a look at it when I start Croatian. I know how you feel, being 'orphan' of a series (Norwegian ones are particularly short and so I'm constanly going through series finals).
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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 506 of 522 11 December 2014 at 12:04am | IP Logged |
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Thank you Cavesa, I have definitely enjoyed the 6WC and I am already looking forward to
the February one when I will hopefully be doing Macedonian :) Expug - You are right, I really do feel orphaned! I need to try to find another series that is quite long I think. And I am looking forward to the day you start learning Croatian :) 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 507 of 522 14 December 2014 at 4:11pm | IP Logged |
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I haven't updated my log for a few days, but I have still been busy doing stuff.
Yesterday I finished reading 'Nespokoj' (Restless) by William Boyd. It was such an exciting book and so well-written that I think I am going to read it again straight away. I think it's okay to count the same book twice for the SC. I have also been reading my Serbian children's book 'Три Мускетара' and have got through 90-odd pages, of which I have counted 30 towards the SC. It's slow progress, but any sort of progress is good. Following the end of 'Bitange i Princeze' I have started watching a new TV series called 'Budva na pjenu od mora', which is a Montenegrin soap opera set in Budva. My first impression is that it is like a Montenegrin version of 'Sunset Beach'. If you haven't seen it, 'Sunset Beach' was an American soap opera in the 90's and it was probably the worst soap in the history of the universe. It was characterised by appalling acting and completely unbelievable storylines but it was one of those things that was so bad you just had to watch it, and somehow it became really popular in the UK, at least among teenage girls... Anyway I am being completely unfair by comparing 'Budva na pjenu od mora' to 'Sunset Beach' as the acting is infinitely better, the storyline seems perfectly reasonable so far and there have even been some humorous moments. But there are a few 'Sunset Beach'-like elements to it, including atmospheric music, lots of shots of the sea/beach, characters with big luxury houses and more money than sense, and a fair bit of time wasted at the start and end of each episode by recapping what has happened before and what is going to happen next. If that sounds derogatory than it wasn't meant to, as I have only watched two episodes so far and haven't got far enough to judge. I think the storyline is going to be loosely 'Romeo and Juliet', with two young people whose families are feuding with each other falling in love. The girl's father is a rich businessman from Nikšić who is buying up land in Budva for big construction schemes. The guy works as a fisherman and his family are poor. His aunt is a building inspector who is trying to stop some of the building schemes going ahead because the girl's father is trying to build without planning permission etc. His granddad also hates the girl's family because her father has purchased the piece of land he wanted to be buried on. The thing that surprised me most about the plot was that they have planning regulations and inspectors in Budva :D When I visited there two years ago it actually made me really sad because there was a hideous sprawl of new buildings along the coast and up the surrounding hillsides. I've never been to Ibiza or anywhere like that but Budva looked how I imagine one of those cheap Spanish package holiday resorts that my colleagues go to must look. It honestly felt like anyone who had ever owned so much as grass verge had decided to construct a concrete apartment block on it in the hope of selling it to Russians. There didn't appear to have been any thought put into what was appropriate to build where, what would spoil the view of something else; there was ugliness everywhere you looked. I was sad that in the next 10 years the whole of the Montenegrin coast might turn in to something like that, and glad that I'd got to experience it before that happened. So Budva is not a place I would choose to spend my holiday, but in the TV series they have managed to make it look really attractive and so it is definitely a cheerful thing to watch on a cold day :) I have to say that I am having some problems understanding the Montenegrin accents, although I think I did slightly better in the second episode than in the first one. They don't talk as quickly as the characters in 'Bitange i Princeze' but some of the speech seems quite mumbled/unclear to me. I'm going to try and persevere with with first series at least and see whether it gets easier for me. 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 508 of 522 15 December 2014 at 10:03am | IP Logged |
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Yesterday I said I was going to reread 'Restless' straight away, but later in the day I remembered that I had had another Serbian novel for my birthday: 'Misionarska pesma' by John le Carre. I decided to start this again and then probably come back to 'Restless' again before Christmas if I have time.
I have signed up to the TAC with Croatian and Macedonian. I am going to write out some specific goals for things I want to achieve in Croatian so that my study has a bit more focus next year. I think this year has been quite haphazard and also dominated by the Super Challenge. I still haven't decided whether to continue with that or not. I am very excited about starting Macedonian but trying to restrain my enthusiasm because I know January is actually going to be hell for me. I go back to work on 5 January and have two days working locally, before heading to South Wales for three days. Home for the weekend, three more days in South Wales, one local day, London for a day. Weekend, then two local days, two days in Scotland (involves getting up at 4am on the Wednesday and home at 9pm on the Thursday!), one local day. Mon, Tues, Weds of the following week in Scotland again, fly home on the Weds evening and spend Thursday until the following Wednesday working flat-out on a project with a crazy deadline, ie. I'm not allowed to take time off for the weekend. Then it's already February and the first weekend of February is the Esperanto trustees meeting, so somewhere in my spare time (haha!) I need to have written a Treasurer's report and got our financial statements to a stage where they can be signed and filed. What I'm trying to say is that I know in advance that January is not going to be the most conducive environment to language-learning and it will be a test of my time management skills as to whether I actually manage to do anything at all for the first month of the TAC. But hey, it's Christmas first and there's always a chance that between now and January 5 I might win the lottery :D I will write up a summary of my progress this year at some point over the following week. 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 509 of 522 15 December 2014 at 10:34pm | IP Logged |
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I forgot to mention earlier that today is Zamenhof Day, the birthday of the guy who created Esperanto. Traditionally Esperantists get together on this day for small parties and try to use the occasion for a bit of Esperanto-related publicity.
Some people take this more seriously than others. I don't take it very seriously at all, although seemingly Stephen Fry does because he tweeted a link to an Esperanto petition today. I'm not attending a Zamenhof Day party and I haven't even bought a book today to support Esperanto literature (which apparently is the patriotic thing to do) but I thought I might share a few fun pictures of me and Esperanto-related memorabilia in honour of the occasion :) And where would we start if not with the Esperanto flag. If anyone finds out why a language needs a flag, please let me know. 
Although I am not a fan of the flag, I do rather like that picture, which once featured in an article about me and Esperanto in my local newspaper This is me with the official monument to Zamenhof in his hometown of Bialystok: 
(I wish I still looked so young and thin - this was 5 years ago!) This is me on Zamenhof Street, also in Bialystok: 
I was walking down a street in Vienna in 2011 when I unexpectedly found the Esperantopark which contains this bust of Zamenhof: 
Vienna is actually a pretty cool city for Esperanto because it is home to the Esperanto Museum They have some interesting things in the museum. Not just portraits of Zamenhof... 
...but also collections of historical Esperanto posters and advertisements. I definitely recommend it if you ever have time to kill in Vienna. 
And finally, this is a memorial to Zamenhof on a random wall of the Italian city of Udine. I have literally no idea what it is doing there. I was just walking through Udine one day when I thought "Hey, that guy looks kinda familiar..." 
Feliĉan Zamenhofan Tagon :) 5 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 510 of 522 16 December 2014 at 9:58am | IP Logged |
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I didn't watch any Croatian TV last night because I was too busy admiring pictures of Zamenhof. Haha no, not really, I was working on my American listening comprehension by watching a wrestling PPV :)
I've read 44 pages of the John Le Carre book and it seems surprisingly interesting. I say 'surprisingly' because I've previously read two of his books in English and found them quite dull, considering that they were supposed to be about spies. But I didn't want to get off the train when I was reading this one this morning, which is a good sign :) I have learned a new word - 'sem' - which apparently means 'except', but I am very confused about why I have no recollection of seeing such a common word before. I have always learned 'osim' for except. I need to figure out what the difference, if any, is between those two words. The novel is a Serbian translation but I think I'm now on my eighth Serbian translation so it isn't necessarily a Serbian thing. 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 511 of 522 19 December 2014 at 11:22am | IP Logged |
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I'm struggling to find a way which sums up the past few days and doesn't involve an expletive. Let's just say I was working at home until 22.45 on Wednesday night and I stayed in the office working late last night, getting home just after 21.30. So no, I haven't done any watching for the Super Challenge or indeed anything else at all.
I do have some notes which I made earlier in the week about what I have and haven't achieved this year (in general, not just on the theme of languages) so I will hopefully be able to write up the bits relating to Croatian as an end-of-year summary over the weekend. I have still been reading in Serbian on the way to work, so I'm on page 96 of 'Misionarska Pesma'. I'm finding the main character very irritating, but as you may have gathered I'm not in a very good mood so it's probably me, not him :D 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 512 of 522 22 December 2014 at 12:51am | IP Logged |
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I can't believe that this year is nearly over! At work the other day I accidentally wrote the date as 2013 in a set of accounts, never mind 2015, so I really don't know where 2014 has gone. I've been reviewing my year in general and making a list of the things that went well and the things that didn't. This is my end-of-year summary as far as languages go.
What went well this year? * At the start of this year I'd been learning Croatian on and off for nearly two years, but it had really been more off than on, so my main goal in January was revision. I started by rereading 'Teach Yourself Croatian', which was the first resource I had started with in 2012. Once I had reread it I went through it a second time and wrote out all the exercises. Then I went through it a third time, typed all the vocab into Memrise in alphabetical order and spent several weeks learning it by heart. By the end of that time I could honestly say that I was finished with this resource. And it was a good job, because the pages have started to fall out of my copy :) * I spent a bit of time working through exercises in 'Colloquial Croatian' and 'Beginner's Croatian', but I didn't do all the exercises from start to finish. That was probably because I hate the first resource (and don't recommend it to anyone!) and love the latter, but had spent Autumn 2013 studying it obsessively, so probably needed a bit of a break from it. * I was proud in the first half of the year that I got so far through 'Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian: A Textbook'. I have worked through all the exercises and learned all the vocabulary in chapters 1 - 16. I've also inputted all the vocabulary to Memrise, which took aaaaages but was totally worth it because I think this is what has made the difference between me not being able to read in Croatian and finishing my first novel. * The BCS Textbook also helped me to master some of the areas of Croatian grammar that I was particularly struggling with. At the start of the year I didn't really know how to form comparatives/superlatives, my choice of aspect was more guesswork than knowledge, and the conditional confused the hell out of me. I am still far from perfect on these subjects, but I feel like I have a much better grasp of them than I did 12 months ago. * My obsession with listening to a Croatian punk rock band called 'Hladno Pivo' (Cold Beer) has continued this year. I discovered the websites Tekstovi.net which is a huge database of the lyrics of song from all over the ex-yu region and Lyrics Translate which has (primitive) translations of song lyrics from all sorts of languages, including Croatian. * I think the thing I had most success with in the first quarter of the year was vocabulary. I used Memrise almost every day during those few months and the result was a massive expansion in my vocabulary These are the Memrise courses I have used most this year: 20 fruits - This course teaches you the names for 20 different fruits in Croatian. I'm still not sure I have mastered the difference between 'trešnja' and 'višnja' (both types of cherry), but otherwise the words are pretty self-explanatory. Croaticum - I am sometimes a bit nervous about using other people's courses on Memrise in case they have errors in them, but I thoroughly recommend this one which has been created by the 'Centar za hrvatski kao drugi i strani jezik' (Centre for Croatian as a second and foreign language). There are 19 levels which cover all kinds of basic vocabulary including family members, animals, colours and verbs. Teach Yourself Croatian - All the vocab from the book, arranged in alphabetical order i.e. one letter per level. A Valentine's Day Lesson - This one is just a bit of fun with some relationship-themed words for Valentine's Day. BCS - A Textbook (Croatian vocab) - This is the vocabulary from chapters 1 - 16 of the BCS Textbook, arranged with one chapter per level. Where there were Croatian/Serbian/Bosnian alternatives for different words, I've only inputted the Croatian ones. Animals - This one does what it says on the tin, but some of the animals are so unusual/exotic that I'm not even completely confident about what they are in English :) In total I have planted more than 2000 Croatian words on Memrise since January 2014 :) * On 25 January I took this online Croatian test and scored 46/50. I took it again this evening and scored 54/60, so I have definitely improved at least a little bit :) * At the start of the year my Croatian listening skills were almost at zero. I started trying to develop my skills by watching children's programmes such as 'Thomas the Tank Engine' in Croatian. The Super Challenge forced me to move on to adult material and since May I have watched 5 series (over 100 episodes) of a famous Croatian sit-com called 'Bitange i Princeze'. I hardly understood any of the first series. I understood a fraction of the second series. Somewhere in the third series things began to click and by the fifth series I was laughing at the jokes. The second thing which really helped me was listening to Serbian audiobooks for hours on end as I travelled around the Balkans in September. I had several sessions with seven hours of continuous audio while I was travelling and I think the sheer volume of it worked miracles for me. The improvement in my listening comprehension has been quite dramatic, although at times the road has been quite painful. I have tried to watch some Croatian and Serbian films, but I have come to accept the fact that films in large quantities are just not for me. * At the start of the year I knew almost nothing about Serbian. I hadn't read any Serbian books, listened to any Serbian audio or learned any Serbian vocabulary, and I'd specifically ignored any bits of grammar which I felt were 'Serbian'. Early in 2014 I decided to plan a holiday for September which would involve visiting Belgrade, and so I suddenly became a lot more interested in the Serbian language. To try to increase my awareness, I went through the vocab list in the BCS Textbook and made a spreadsheet which indicated which variants of words were typically Croatian and which Serbian or Bosnian. Chung made what must surely be the best post in my log all year highlighting the difficulties of taking such a black-and-white approach. Since then I have started reading novels translated into Serbian and not only improved my familiarity with the vocab/grammatical structures but also got used to understanding the ekavian spellings. Now I am at the stage where I can tell whether I am reading in Croatian or Serbian but it doesn't really matter to me which it is. I guess I have a slight preference for reading in Croatian, in the same way that I have a preference for reading in British English. One of the highlights of my year was visiting Serbia (and Belgrade in particular) this September and getting to practise my language skills in real life. * In my very first post in this log I said "I also have a pile of Croatian-language novels which I bought in Dubrovnik and a big goal for this year is to be able to read them in a meaningful way".. Joining the Super Challenge was the catalyst for me to be able achieve that goal this year. As of today I have read 25 novels, of which 18 were in Croatian and 7 in Serbian. Most have been translations so far but I did read my first two novels originally written in Croatian during October. * I had an amazing holiday travelling around Macedonia, Montenegro and Serbia. This is the somewhat crazy route I took around the Balkans. The planning and execution of it was stressful at times, but it was totally worth it and one of the most exciting trips I have ever had. Particular highlights would be: The exhilarating craziness of Skopje - what capital would be complete without a giant horse on a podium illuminated by neon pink lights and surrounded by jets of water dancing in time to 'Valkyrie'?! 
The excitement of being able to explore the ruins of the ancient Roman city of Heraclea (just outside Bitola) completely at will. 
Everything about Ohrid. How can you not want to learn Macedonian when you find somewhere as beautiful as this?! 
Stari Bar. We spent 12 hours on a coach from Serbia to get to Bar, but a view like this made it all worthwhile. 
And last but by no means least, my first visit to Belgrade. 
Overall travelling around the Balkans was probably the best experience of my year. I think at the time I described Serbia in my log as being like "a giant language-learning playground" :) * Last but not least, I also did some random fun stuff with Croatian this year. I discovered 'Twilight' (how did I miss this when it was current?!). I had an educational reason to read the entire 'Fifty Shades' trilogy from cover to cover again. I discovered the joys of the language section in Foyles bookstore in London. I went to Nottingham to watch a Chekov play in Croatian (quite surreal). I bought a Croatia shirt and wore it to watch the opening game of the World Cup in a London pub (even more surreal). * Some good stuff happened outside of Croatian as well, most notably getting promoted to an Assistant Manager at work and getting a little pay rise :) What didn't go so well this year * I spent the first six months of the year in a state of extreme frustration with the very poor level of teaching in a BCMS class I was attending in a local town. This is probably the biggest waste of £200 I've ever made in my life. Lesson learned - no more taught classes for me. * I got a lot out of the BCS textbook this year but I feel like I have under-utilised the corresponding BSC Grammar book. This Autumn I have started going through it and making notes, but I am not even half way through it yet. I know there is so much I can learn from this book to perfect my grammar and improve my confidence in writing so I want to prioritise working with it in 2015. * Cyrillic. Can I read better in Cyrillic than I could this time last year? Yes. Can I read well in Cyrillic? No. I probably spent more time this year complaining about how difficult Cyrillic is than actually trying to master it. I did have some bursts of activity when I tried to learn the order of the Serbian alphabet, work on my hand-writing and start reading a children's book in Cyrillic, but overall I haven't made anywhere near as much progress with this as I should have. * Writing. I haven't done any and so I haven't got better at it. I have done a lot of reading and listening, and so I have got better at reading and listening. Unfortunately there hasn't been a magical side effect which means I have also got better at writing and speaking. I am not a 'speak from day one' kind of person, so a major goal for me in 2015 will be to improve my writing so that ultimately I will have more confidence with speaking too. * I had a small fire in my home, which resulted in me not having proper electricity for several months. This made it difficult to watch films, read books once the light fell or indeed focus on anything except general misery. Other languages I didn't read a single novel in German or Esperanto this year, which makes me sad. I'm not concerned about my Esperanto because I live with an Esperanto-speaker and could practise the language every day of the week if I wanted to. But I do worry about my German a bit and whether it is getting rusty from lack of use. I haven't even been to Germany since 2012. I was tempted to join the TAC Advanced Team with German but in the end I have decided not to, because I don't think I realistically have time with taking on Macedonian this year. I do read a little bit in German every day, through my Twitter feed, a couple of blogs I follow and the fact that one of my email addresses, for reasons too complicated to explain here, is at yahoo.de. I know I can sound a bit down about Esperanto at times, but I have had some good experiences with it this year. The British Esperanto Conference in Sheffield was a lot more fun than I expected. It was also great to meet up with Esperanto-speakers in Madrid and Belgrade :) Overall I was pleased that I spent last time on Esperanto admin work this year and spent more time away from my computer. There were a horrible few days in June when I thought I was going to have to learn Spanish, because my boyfriend's new passport hadn't arrived days before we were due to depart for a two week holiday travelling from Bilbao to Seville. Luckily it did arrive, or I think I would still be stuck in Bilbao right now. Romance languages are not for me. I found Spain to be a confusing country, full of foreigners who don't speak Croatian. I learned that 'kurva' in Spanish doesn't mean the same as 'kurva' in Croatian. It was actually a great trip, the particular highlight of which was visiting the Alhambra in Granada. Interesting books I read this year in English this year about the Balkans and/or language in general: In the Land of Invented Languages The Britannica Guide to Russia Europe's Backyard War: The War in the Balkans Through Another Europe: An Anthology of Travel Writing on the Balkans The Balkans: A Short History Language and Identity in the Balkans Realm of the Black Mountain: A History of Montenegro All in all I think it's been a pretty good year. There has been a tangible improvement in my Croatian and I want to continue to build on that in 2015. Keeping this log has been a massive motivation for me to keep going with it and I'm proud of the fact that I've managed to do a little bit of Croatian study every day this year so far. At this point I would like to say thank you to everyone who has been reading, in particular to Chung for taking the time to write some very informative posts and to Serpent for her general awesomeness :) I think I will start a new log for 2015 to reflect the fact that I will have a greater focus on Macedonian as well as Croatian, but I probably won't set it up until near Jan 1. EDIT: Fixed typos Edited by Radioclare on 22 December 2014 at 11:01am 7 persons have voted this message useful |
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