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Radioclare’s tac log 2015 (*jäŋe/*ledús) | ||
Tags: Macedonian | Serbian | Serbo-Croatian | Croatian | Esperanto | Total Annihilation Challenge (TAC) | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| 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 65 of 292 14 February 2015 at 5:53pm | IP Logged | |||||
Wow, okay. I would never have guessed that in a million years!
As far as I'm aware it's just used to distinguish between two words which look the same but have different meanings when they are written next to each other. There are four accents in BCMS (kratkouzlazni, dugouzlazni, kratkosilazni, dugosilazni) and so basically every stressed vowel has either a long or a short vowel sound and a rising or a falling tone. These don't get marked in normal writing and not even in all textbooks. I think I have read that they are most noticeable in Bosnian, which is therefore supposed to sound more melodic than other variants of the language, and that not all speakers of Croatian or Serbian make all of the distinctions. I am taking the same approach as you though and mostly ignoring the finer details of all this for now :) I definitely have bigger problems to sort out and if I ever get to the stage that I can speak fluently enough to worry about whether my vowels are rising or falling, I will be chuffed! In the mean time I am just trying to apply basics like not accidentally stressing clitics and making vowels long in the genitive plural, and hoping that if I listen to enough audio I will subconsciously absorb some of the correct sounds anyway :) 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 66 of 292 14 February 2015 at 10:55pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I've had a really relaxing day today, which has involved quite a bit of Serbian.
I read 63 pages of 'Чаробњак из Оза' (The Wizard of Oz) this afternoon and my reading speed in Cyrillic is definitely improving. I also practised my handwriting by copying out some of the Serbian Cyrillic texts from my BCS textbook. There are still some letters in definite need of attention, but I'm happy because I can see a big improvement from when I started. Getting this right suddenly feels achievable :) 
Of course, today was Valentine's Day and as one of my presents I got this book... 
I'm very excited because I have wanted this book for over 10 years. I used to go to the university bookshop and stroke it, knowing that there was no way I could afford it and wishing that I was doing a languages degree. It's great to finally have a copy. 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 67 of 292 17 February 2015 at 10:58pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I have been a bit lazy over the past week or so with not reading in Croatian, but this morning I read another 20 pages of 'Krv Bogova' on the train.
I'm not finding it quite as exciting as the other books in the series so far. I've been collating a list of useful Macedonian links in Evernote: Macedonian Language E-Learning Center Learn Macedonian Macedonian alphabet tutorial to download (this is really cool) Macedonian grammar Online multilingual Macedonian dictionary Exercises for the second edition of Christina Kramer's textbook Deutsche Welle in Macedonian 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| 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 68 of 292 19 February 2015 at 8:21pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Good studies with that great present, Radioclare! I've been through it, but of course my German being at most intermediate I could learn (i.e.retain) much less from it than you probably will.
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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 69 of 292 22 February 2015 at 9:56pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Thanks Expug :) It looks like a really good book and I really like the way it is laid out with practical examples of grammar usage. If only I
could find something like that in Croatian! *** I've been a bit remiss about updating my log again this week. To be honest I feel like I have failed with everything in my life except work so far this year. I'm setting 1 March as the date from which I try to start working on my resolutions again. All I have done in Croatian this week is listen to a lot of Brkovi (this is my favourite new song this week) and read a bit more of 'Krv Bogova', which I'm continuing to find a bit slow. I've been reading in German for at least half an hour every evening, and finally got to end of Schutzpatron, which I thoroughly recommend. I spent this weekend visiting my sister, who lives about 2 hours away by train. I spent my journey studying the second chapter of my Macedonian textbook. Writing out the exercises was a bit difficult in the cramped conditions of the train, but my Cyrillic handwriting is a lot more fluid now and feels more natural, even if it isn't necessarily pretty :) The chapter covered the gender of nouns (rules are pretty similar to Croatian, but with a few more exceptions for masculine nouns) and asking questions. Edited by Radioclare on 22 February 2015 at 9:58pm 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 70 of 292 24 February 2015 at 11:25pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I'm quite excited about the fact that I've found Deutsche Welle in Macedonian. I've
found for Croatian and Serbian that the speech on Deutsche Welle is quite slow and easy to understand, so I'm hoping for great things from it :) They don't seem to make a full 30-minute programme each week like for the bigger languages, but there are a few videos of news items available to watch which are about 5 minutes long each. I started watching them on Sunday evening, mainly just to start getting a feel for what Macedonian sounds like, and was devastated to find I couldn't understand a single word in the first few sentences. Then I realised that the presenter had been speaking in Albanian (with Macedonian subtitles) :D When the next person spoke, they did so in Macedonian with Albanian subtitles and I was relieved to find that I could indeed understand a bit :) The video was about the Swiss Franc exchange rate, so probably not the best topic for a beginner, but I enjoyed it anyway. I've also been listening to the audio for the first few chapters of my Macedonian textbook. It's mostly straightforward, but some of the vowels sound a bit different to how I expected. 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 71 of 292 04 March 2015 at 10:25pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Massive thanks to mrwarper for recovering my posts for me :) I'm just about to repost
them all so that my log remains coherent ***** 28 February: I've read 95 pages of 'Krv Bogova' so far this week, but still not got to the end. Another 100 pages or so to go, I think. I'm certainly finding it a lot easier to read than the earlier books in the series, but not as exciting. What has been exciting this week has been 'Budva na pjenu od mora'. I've watched a total of five(!) episodes this week and thus got to the end of the second series. I watched two episodes back-to-back last night because I couldn't wait to find out how the series was going to end. Don't want to spoil any of the storylines, but it involved Italian mafia and a lot of guns. A couple of points I found interesting were that they sometimes referred to Italy as "preko" (normally just means 'across'), and at one point when two of the (originally Montenegrin) mafia sidekicks started talking in Italian, the mafia boss interrupted them saying "Nismo sada u Italiji - govorimo po naški!" I thought that was a nice expression and neatly got around the issue of whether they were speaking Serbian or Montenegrin. The Output Challenge starts tomorrow - beginning to feel a bit nervous about what I'm letting myself in for! 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 72 of 292 04 March 2015 at 10:34pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I've made a start on the Output Challenge this afternoon. I had been trying to write 350 words in Croatian every week already this year and been slowly
working my way through a description of my holiday in Macedonia. But I've decided that it wouldn't be a true challenge to continue with that, because I'm quite confident with holiday- related vocab now and it's easy to get stuck in a rut of saying "First I went here. Then I got a bus to there. Afterwards I did this". I liked the list of topics which rdearman posted in the the Output Challenge Discussion thread, mainly because I had no idea what I would write for some of them in English, never mind in Croatian, so I've decided to work my way through them chronologically until/unless I come up with a better idea. I think this is going to be a good tactic because it removes any element of choice as to what I'm going to write about and means I won't waste time that I could spend writing in trying to think of a theme. So, today I have started with the title: What was your favourite food when you were a child? Is it different now? Why did it change/not change? The first challenge was trying to translate the questions into Croatian :D But this is what I have come up with.
Quick translation for anyone who isn't learning Croatian (so about 99% of the forum!): "When I was a child, my favourite food was grapes. That's what my boyfriend thinks at least because not long ago we found an old schoolbook in which I had written that. I don't remember at all that I ever loved grapes that much. I remember that I sometimes used to eat them for lunch when I was at school, but I don't believe that I really liked them more than chocolate, for example. Now I'm an adult and I still like grapes, but only when they're in a good wine! My favourite food today is probably chocolate, because I can't imagine living without it. When I'm sad, when I'm angry and when I have loads to do, I eat chocolate in order to survive. I know that that definitely isn't a good strategy for coping with stress, but I do it anyway. I like English chocolate best and I work in a town which has a big chocolate factory. But I like German chocolate too, particularly Ritter Sport. I think it's good that it's not easy to find that chocolate in England, because I always eat too much of it. These days I eat a lot of pasta, but I remember that I hadn't even heard of that kind of food until I was ten. My parents only cooked typical British food, so we didn't eat pasta, rice or pizza until I went to secondary school. My mother is from Ireland and so she loves meals of potato and cabbage. I have always hated those ingredients. When I was young, I was scared that my mother might perhaps force me to eat cabbage by hiding it somewhere in another dish. So I was always a bit suspicious whenever I ate something new. There were often arguments at home while we were eating dinner because I'd refuse to eat something. I'm glad that I'm an adult and never again have to eat something that I don't like. I think that food today is more interesting than when I was a child, because it's easier to try dishes from the whole world. We often eat Indian food, for example, which would have been unheard of twenty years ago. Of course, when I'm learning a new language, I want to learn about the food of that country too. When I learned German, I learned to love not only long sentences without verbs, but also Kaiserschmarrn, Käsespätzle and Rösti. There wasn't anything similar when I learned Esperanto, because that special language doesn't come from any country and so doesn't have any kind of traditional food. Before I learned Esperanto, however, I was teetotal and now I drink wine almost every day, so I think that Esperanto has nevertheless taught me a lot about alcohol. At the moment I'm learning Croatian and when I go to the Balkans I try the local cuisine. I love Zagreb Schnitzel,fritule, čevapčiće and - of course - burek. But I know that I still need to practise drinking rakija like a Croat :)" 1 person has voted this message useful |
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