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 9 of 292 04 January 2015 at 10:12pm | IP Logged |
Just got home from Belgium this afternoon, and it's back to real life/work tomorrow
morning. Christmas is over way too fast!
As I mentioned in my initial post, I plan to relax my Super Challenge activity a bit
this year, and one of the upsides of that is that I potentially have more time to read
in other languages. I took advantage of that on the journey today and started reading
a German translation of the Robert Harris novel 'Enigma' which I had for Christmas. I
don't normally read translations of English books into German... actually this may be
only the second or third time I have ever done this... because my level is high enough
to read native literature and having access to that is one of the main attractions of
reading in German for me. But I have been enjoying reading 'Enigma' today and I have
already read over 200 pages, which is more German than I read in the whole of 2014
(and possibly 2013 too!) so it has definitely been a good present :)
Everything is still going to plan with my Croatian resolutions. I've written 70 - 80
words every day so far. I'm writing them the old fashioned way on paper, trying to
express what I want to say with the words I already know rather than using a
dictionary. If I'm unsure about a bit of grammar (what case comes after 'oko', for
example, was something which stumped me today) I'm just giving it my best guess at the
moment. When I type up what I've produced to be corrected on Lang-8 I will double-
check and fine-tune things like that.
Macedonian is off to a slow start. I'm just learning some basic words on Memrise at
the moment. I have a busy week in store so I think it will probably be next Saturday
before I sit down and seriously study my textbook. I've set up a Macedonian keyboard
on my laptop so that I can type answers in Cyrillic on Memrise and I nearly had a
panic attack yesterday when my laptop went to sleep in Macedonian-mode and I thought I
wasn't going to be able to enter my password to log back in. Luckily it turns out you
can change the keyboard settings before you enter a password :D
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rdearman Senior Member United Kingdom rdearman.orgRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5237 days ago 881 posts - 1812 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian, French, Mandarin
| Message 10 of 292 04 January 2015 at 10:20pm | IP Logged |
Serpent wrote:
rdearman wrote:
I would also like to thank you for your log. Because it has identified a number of languages I want to steer well clear of because they look bloody difficult! |
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says a learner of mandarin :) |
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Yeah but like a billion people speak Mandarin, so it has to be easy to learn right?
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tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4708 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 11 of 292 04 January 2015 at 10:23pm | IP Logged |
About the keyboards, I have that all the time, especially because I type in Russian
nearly as often as English. I keep wondering why sites don't take my password and
realising that I left the Russian settings on my keyboard on (or the
Greek/Chinese/whatever else fancy thing I am up to)
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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 12 of 292 05 January 2015 at 9:17am | IP Logged |
I'm glad it's not just me! After making that post I then proceeded to almost get locked out of my Internet banking for exactly the same reason.
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Sooniye Diglot Groupie Sweden Joined 3898 days ago 44 posts - 52 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: Spanish, Danish, Turkish, Japanese, Croatian, Hindi, Hungarian, Albanian
| Message 13 of 292 05 January 2015 at 11:40am | IP Logged |
I am greatly looking forward to reading your new log. Started reading your log last year and
felt very inspired to continue with Croatian.
I wish you best of luck this year!
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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 14 of 292 09 January 2015 at 10:47pm | IP Logged |
Thank you Sooniye :) I am really excited that there is another person learning Croatian
for the TAC this year. I look forward to following your progress with Albanian as well.
When I went to Macedonia last summer it was really fascinating to see signs written in
Albanian - I couldn't understand a single word!
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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 15 of 292 09 January 2015 at 11:10pm | IP Logged |
Well, having updated my old log almost every day in 2014, I've now not updated my new
log for nearly a week. You'll hopefully be pleased to know that I've not dropped out
of TAC 2015 already but have unexpectedly been ill for most of the week, which has
been rather unfortunate and resulted in me doing absolutely nothing in Croatian or
Macedonian since Monday and breaking every single one of my new year resolution's
already! Except for losing weight, which is seemingly really easy to do if you just
don't eat for two days.
Anyway, I am just about starting to feel human again now so I will hopefully get stuck
back into things over the weekend.
The one thing I have achieved is to finish reading 'Enigma' in German. I really
enjoyed reading in German and I was reassured by how effortless it still felt. One
interesting side effect was that when I was unwell and had a high temperature I was
having some sort of delirious dream in German :D I can't remember most of it (and it
wouldn't make any sense anyway) but there was definitely a part where I was being
chased by angry people dressed in black and shouting "Hau ab!".
The other good thing which happened this week is that my boyfriend bought me some
handwriting paper :) It's like the stuff we used to have in primary school with lots
of lines to help you get the size of the letters right. It should definitely help me
improve my Cyrillic handwriting (which is very uneven at the moment!).
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Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6598 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 16 of 292 10 January 2015 at 7:21am | IP Logged |
Get well soon!
And yay lined paper :)
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