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Tim’s Catalan Book (Team Caesar) | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Crush Tetraglot Senior Member ChinaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5871 days ago 1622 posts - 2299 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish, Mandarin, Esperanto Studies: Basque | Message 41 of 60 22 February 2015 at 4:19am | IP Logged | |||||
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Past forms are really easy, just use va, vas, vaig, etc. plus the infinitive. In speech/informal writing, you will rarely see the simple past forms. The imperfect tense is pretty similar to Spanish (in use and form).
Also, thanks for the link to the Esperanto video :) 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Meddysong Triglot Groupie United Kingdom timeofftakeoff.com Joined 3613 days ago 56 posts - 84 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, French Studies: Italian, Catalan Studies: Swedish | Message 42 of 60 22 February 2015 at 8:42am | IP Logged | |||||
Yep - that was the first thing about Catalan that I picked up, hence writing "haven't formally learnt". It was a convenient excuse for explaining why I didn't take the time to post in Catalan after all (the real reason being that I have no active knowledge of the language and a very limited vocab). I did notice in the verb book that the GO-past is called the periphrastic but that there's also the conventional HAVER+PP, so that's another reason. I've got a quiet day today. Clare's visiting her sister (although her Macedonian grammar book went with her, of course!), so I think I'll treat myself to Asterix. (I've just bought a bunch of the French ones cheaply too!) And do another chapter or two of TY. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Meddysong Triglot Groupie United Kingdom timeofftakeoff.com Joined 3613 days ago 56 posts - 84 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, French Studies: Italian, Catalan Studies: Swedish | Message 43 of 60 22 February 2015 at 8:58am | IP Logged | |||||
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Wowzers, Crush - I just noticed in your thread that you're learning Esperanto. Give it a year or so and I may be able to help you. I'm building a big web suite for the Esperanto Association in the UK, and one of the projects is using an adapted form of the engine that powers this Chinese-learning site so that we have a course that dynamically adjusts to the learner's mistakes. If you get something wrong (a missed accusative, say), then it will give you a reminder of that lesson and throw in some questions where you have to get the accusative right, before reverting back to the original plan.
Work will be starting on that over the summer. A couple of colleagues and I will be sitting down to prepare the supporting course material, using video and audio etc. And the whole thing is supported by modern forum and blogging software, so the language logs look nicer and work better than do others: 
It's a huge project but there's clearly a massive gap for something like this and I'm looking forward to getting stuck into it. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Meddysong Triglot Groupie United Kingdom timeofftakeoff.com Joined 3613 days ago 56 posts - 84 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, French Studies: Italian, Catalan Studies: Swedish | Message 44 of 60 07 March 2015 at 11:22pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I'm still enjoying my Catalan. That's a good sign. I've worked through 13 of the 16 chapters in TY, although I don't have the audio so it's not quite as thorough as it could be.
I've just finished Astèrix al país dels Helvecis too, which I've enjoyed, same as ever. There's something making me think that Asterix might even have been designed for language-learners - this story is packed full of subjunctives! - Val més que Obèlix et porti tot sol, cap - Hi vaig ... que portin les tripes de senglar - És clar, és clar ... au, amics, que els que puguin caminar s'enduguin els altres - Fes que m/acompanyin a les meves habitacions i que em serveixin un brou de llegums - No m'agrada que els romans es posin malalts - Amb una condició: que vinguis a casa nostra com a ostatge fins que tornin els meus amics - Cal que sapiguem on creix aquesta flor - Així que sigue bosc - Vull que totes les tropes disponibles vagin cap a l'indret de la festa! - Hem d'aprofitar que els romans no ens hagin trobat encara - Cal que vagi a buscar l'estel d'argent abans que arribin - Socorrem tots els combatents, tinguin la nacionalitat que tinguin - Quina mala sort que els teus homes no tornin I've also seen some use of the subjunctive which suggests to me that it's used sometimes to indicate a future: - Quan baixis, revisaré els teus comptes - El que perdi el seu trosset de pa dins el formatge fos, paga penyora! And there's been a verbal form with -ss- in it that I've noticed used where the subjunctive would be used if the situation were in the present indicative, so I'm going to hazard a guess that the language features an imperfect subjunctive: - Us aniria millor se caminéssiu pel pendent d'una muntanya - Només faltaria que ens rentéssim les mans - Jo els he demandat que vinguessin I've seen some nice phrases making use of haver in different moods and tenses to express different sentiments such as "should have", "having -ed": - No hauria hagut de manjar - Els hauríeu hagut de declarer - Gràcies per haver-nos tiret del llac! - Havent vist com mangeu, no penso pas que per beure necessiteu copa And there have been useful phrases such as: - Ens podríeu ajudar? - Deixa-ho aquí - Vés a buscar-lo - A mi no em cal beure'n There are some things I'm not happy with. For a start, I'm naturally reading the masculine personal article en as the preposition en every time I see it and am having to correct myself. The instinct isn't yet there to wait for context with that particular particle. I know I'm not absorbing it anyway; when I practice the exercises in TY I'm concentrating on what I'm supposed to be doing (verb form etc) and not even thinking about personal articles. I'm also not getting used to the pronouns inverting when they come before the verb. Yes, I know they do this but I'm constantly treating es as és and having to correct myself. On the positive side, when I write down my notes from Asterix, I'm not having to think about it. I read the sentence in the book, think "aha", and then write it in one go. When I first started doing this, I would have to do it one word at a time, check whether there was an accent or what the last letter was, and so. That I've absorbed enough of the language that I can now pretty much automatically recognise what Catalan is is definitely progress. I ordered a dictionary the other day, so even though my target was only passive knowledge, I might just try writing something anyway :) 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| kanewai Triglot Senior Member United States justpaste.it/kanewai Joined 4895 days ago 1386 posts - 3054 votes Speaks: English*, French, Marshallese Studies: Italian, Spanish | Message 45 of 60 12 March 2015 at 9:13pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I like the idea of writing out sentences from Asterix - I might have to try that too.
I'm naturally reading the masculine personal article en as the preposition en every time I see it and am having to correct myself. I have similar problems with the pronoun "ne" in Italian. My brain keeps insisting that it negates a sentence, even though consciously I know it doesn't. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| chokofingrz Pentaglot Senior Member England Joined 5195 days ago 241 posts - 430 votes Speaks: English*, French, Spanish, German, Italian Studies: Russian, Japanese, Catalan, Luxembourgish | Message 46 of 60 12 March 2015 at 9:50pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I'm enjoying reading your log as I'm also flirting with Catalan this year with scarce resources, including Routledge's A Comprehensive Grammar (digital version). I can devour sections of that book. I've picked up some useful tips from you here, and will soon go on the hunt for some comics. I admire how analytical you manage to be about the grammar.
My other sources of learning currently are chugging through Memrise's Catalan Vocab course, and the 4900 sentences which I extracted from Tatoeba. My goal is general written/oral comprehension before precision. I wish I had a better audio source because Catalan TV programmes are a bit too rapid-fire for me. Am also looking forward to being able to write something. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Meddysong Triglot Groupie United Kingdom timeofftakeoff.com Joined 3613 days ago 56 posts - 84 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, French Studies: Italian, Catalan Studies: Swedish | Message 47 of 60 12 March 2015 at 10:20pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Oh, hello both. Thank you for popping by :)
It's all a bit quiet on the Catalan front. I finished TY a while ago and have a reasonable passive knowledge. There's no way I could write anything though! I need to go back through the book and make sure I learn the days of the week and so on. I can recognise them but I couldn't come up with them blank. I'm fairly sure I found someone on Memrise who had all the TY material, so it would be wise to make use of it. And as for other vocab ... well, this arrived today: 
Likewise! It doesn't help that ne is no in Esperanto and it's rare for me to go a day without reading the language in my email or on Facebook.
Heh, thanks! I think it's probably a sign that there's something not quite right up top ;) I'm going to have to add some more language-related stuff later. The mini lion who shares our house has decided that my arm's for cradling her whilst she sleeps and so I'm resorting to typing with one finger and thumb. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Meddysong Triglot Groupie United Kingdom timeofftakeoff.com Joined 3613 days ago 56 posts - 84 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, French Studies: Italian, Catalan Studies: Swedish | Message 48 of 60 12 April 2015 at 11:52pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Has it really been a month? Whoops.
I was holding off on writing something here because I intended to try writing in Catalan. I've been a bit busy though; next week is the annual Esperanto conference in Brighton, and since I'm organising it (fourth year in a row *shudders*) I've been tied up. Anyway, the big news is that I started reading my book and am now one quarter the way through. It doesn't sound like much but I'm trying to tell myself that 312 pages would probably be the whole of many normal books. I took vocab notes during the first fourteen chapters. What a drag that is - it takes all the fun out of reading. The list is standing at 641 words. I'm now pretty much capable of reading it without needing to resort to notes, and I'm now on chapter 21. I was saying to Clare whilst reading in bed that you know you're doing fairly well with a language when you can understand a sentence like "they knew to see whether she had the mark of the Devil - a third nipple". (The word nipple, for some reason has appeared a few times, so was already on my vocab list as early as chapter 10.) It was slow going at the start, particularly the frustrations involved in writing a vocab list when so many new words appear, especially when they turn out to be useless for anything other than this book (stonemason, rye, scaffold, wooden beam). I'm happy since deciding to simply read the book to find that I can do it largely as well as Italian, although my knowledge of Catalan is purely passive. I don't think I could write very much without a dictionary. Let's think what my language-related reading has been lately. Um ... I read Frederick Forsyth's The Afghan in both French and Italian. And William Boyd's L'attente de l'aube, which I presume is Waiting for Sunrise in English. Asterix got a quick read too in French in Astérix aux Jeux olympiques, there was a book called The Welsh Language, and an Esperanto graphic novel about the Decemberist Revolution of 1825. Edited by Meddysong on 13 April 2015 at 8:56am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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