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Tim’s Catalan Book (Team Caesar) | ||
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| Crush Tetraglot Senior Member ChinaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5862 days ago 1622 posts - 2299 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish, Mandarin, Esperanto Studies: Basque | Message 25 of 60 01 February 2015 at 4:49am | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||
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| Meddysong Triglot Groupie United Kingdom timeofftakeoff.com Joined 3604 days ago 56 posts - 84 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, French Studies: Italian, Catalan Studies: Swedish | Message 26 of 60 01 February 2015 at 10:18am | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||
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Lots for me to digest there, Crush. Thank you for taking the time to type it all up for me.
Before too long I'm going to start formally learning rather than just see what I can pick up from Asterix. So I'll soon know what the persons are, have an idea of verbal conjugations etc. I'm quite looking forward to it!
I thought adverb too but figured I'd better check or risk getting corrected. The Google hits for "french y" all mention "(adverbial) pronoun", however. I think I'll do some more Asterix later :) Edit: In one of those bizarre coincidences in life I've just opened my Comprehensive Grammar at a random page and the first thing that caught my eye was "12.7 THE ADVERBIAL PRONOUN hi". Wowzers! Edited by Meddysong on 01 February 2015 at 11:50am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Meddysong Triglot Groupie United Kingdom timeofftakeoff.com Joined 3604 days ago 56 posts - 84 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, French Studies: Italian, Catalan Studies: Swedish | Message 27 of 60 01 February 2015 at 12:12pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||
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Yay, Asterix is done! Here are my observations:
After Crush kindly explained to me above that "L'agafarem!" is the future rather than an imperative, what's the first thing on my page? "Agafeu-lo, covards!" It's followed by "O us faig devorar al circ, pels lleons!" So now I know what "or" is, I can see "do/make" in 1ps (faig) and can see that it's used in passive constructions of the form "I'll have you -ed", with the agent being introduced by "per". - Pietat! Pietat! No puc més! | No podria suportar aquests crits in un segon més! A-ha. "More" = "més". - Prepararé la pociò davant teu. There are stressed forms of pronouns then, with "teu" being used for "tu". - Començo a tenir-ne prou! | No puc més! Prou! "Prou" = "enough". - Però si no estic enfadat amb ningú 1ps of "estar" is "estic". We're using "estar" here because it refers to a temporary state rather than permanent characteristic of being an angry person. - Saps qué et dic ... demà m'afaitaràs Such a bizarre sentence out of context but I enjoy it. "You know what I'm telling you/you know what I'm saying." Now I know the word for tomorrow. I needed to check up on some other words too during the story,since they appeared on several occasions; potser = maybe; ara = now. - És que no tinc ganes de traballar! This may as well be Spanish :) It's nice to be able to register the existence of "tenir ganes" for future use. - Caldrà que vagi a buscar ingredients al bosc There were a few variations of "caldrà" and I took them to mean "you need/it's necessary" etc. It's clear as well that the subjunctive in -i that I mentioned earlier is also applying to the 1ps. - És que ... precisament, lluviàtem contra uns Gals ... - Uns Gals? Quants Gals ... ? - Dos ... Such a fabulous sequence! Grammatically, it's reinforcement for me of an indefinite plural and I now know how to say "how many?". - Vaja, vaja This seems to me "go on, continue", so I'll be keeping an eye out to see whether the subjunctive of "anar" is something along this form and whether the imperative is formed from it. Super fun! I'll have to get another Asterix soon :) Edited by Meddysong on 01 February 2015 at 12:14pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Ogrim Heptaglot Senior Member France Joined 4636 days ago 991 posts - 1896 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English, Spanish, French, Romansh, German, Italian Studies: Russian, Catalan, Latin, Greek, Romanian | Message 28 of 60 02 February 2015 at 10:29am | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||
Fun to see your grammar analysis of Asterix. I just wanted to chip in with one piece of information. You are right about "tenir ganes de" being the same as Spanish "tener ganas de". However, "gana" in singular means "hunger", "hambre". So if you say "tinc gana" it means "I am hungry". I mention this because when I first came across it I was confused about the use in singular. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Meddysong Triglot Groupie United Kingdom timeofftakeoff.com Joined 3604 days ago 56 posts - 84 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, French Studies: Italian, Catalan Studies: Swedish | Message 29 of 60 10 February 2015 at 7:01pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||
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Hello, again!
I've just finished a Catalan book ... albeit a children's one ... with only 14 pages in it. So it's not even as long as Asterix, which thrashes it handily at a colossal 48 pages. I must've bought it as a souvenir when Clare and I were in Barcelona for a weekend. I remembered I'd stored it away and decided to locate it and give it a try, which I found very rewarding. It's already pretty by the cover: 
But the best feature is the pop-outs on every page; I'd have loved this if I were a kid: 
I enjoyed reading it. The sentence structure was, of course, relatively simple, with lots of use of past forms. There were body parts mentioned (to explain the role of various bits of armour), plus some other basic words, the most of surprising of which to me was that "red" is "vermell". Now that I wouldn't have expected! I've been reading in a few other languages recently. Having finished the Catalan version of Asterix el Gal I decided to buy the Spanish one for £2 to compare them. I think it's genuinely the case that I find Catalan more intuitive; if there's a Spanish word that I don't know, there's a good likelihood that the Catalan one will be recognisable to me. I'm probably a little bit past the halfway mark, but these books are there to be enjoyed rather than rushed when I use them for learning languages. I'm probably about two thirds the way through La forma dell'acqua. That's sapping my confidence a little bit because of how impenetrable I find some of the vocab and dialogue. I've done better since deciding to stop reading one chapter in Italian and then read it again in English before repeating the Italian. I now do three chapters in a row in Italian, which takes me away from the stop-start. I feel I'm making progress that way. I started reading the French version of C.J. Sansom's Dissolution. I'm maybe 100 pages into it. I loved the first ever book that I read in the series (the third) and subsequently bought them all, but this one seems to be slow moving. Clare said the same when she read it in Serbian last year. (I have no idea how she managed to do it in Serbian - she'd only started Croatian about 2.5 years prior!) Still, I find French effortless (there's maybe one word per page that I don't know) and so I can easily dip in and read 40 or 50 pages. That's always good for my confidence. Edited by Meddysong on 10 February 2015 at 7:04pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| eyðimörk Triglot Senior Member France goo.gl/aT4FY7 Joined 4096 days ago 490 posts - 1158 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French Studies: Breton, Italian | Message 30 of 60 10 February 2015 at 7:10pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||
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That is one awesome pop-out book!
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| Meddysong Triglot Groupie United Kingdom timeofftakeoff.com Joined 3604 days ago 56 posts - 84 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, French Studies: Italian, Catalan Studies: Swedish | Message 31 of 60 10 February 2015 at 7:16pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||
Yep! I couldn't photograph it because the animation won't be captured, but there's a part where you can make a crusader and his counterpart kick each other! Oh, related to Catalan:
Nearly every past form on that page was of the GO - INFINTIVE variety. Does anybody have any insight as to why the first example takes haver? My thinking is that it's because it's talking about duration (so, imperfective) but then if that's what the author is trying to capture, why not use the -av- form? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| anamsc2 Tetraglot Groupie United States Joined 4556 days ago 85 posts - 186 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Catalan, German Studies: French | Message 32 of 60 10 February 2015 at 7:28pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||
In Catalan, the present perfect (han viatjat) is used as the past tense while we're still in that time period, if that makes sense. So, for example, you always use it to refer to something happening "today." In this case, pilgrims traveled and are still traveling to Jerusalem, so since it's still happening we use haver. I hope that makes sense! 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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