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Serpent’s cyclic log: César, Sleipnir,adv

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Serpent
Octoglot
Senior Member
Russian Federation
serpent-849.livejour
Joined 6356 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 73 of 264
23 January 2013 at 10:06am | IP Logged 
Heh, I ordered the Danish book and also Ennen päivänlaskua ei voi (in German) and Naiv. Super from adlibris too :D unfortunately they couldn't deliver the stuff while i was in Finland but they were nice and helpful and I got my order when I went to Finland again :)
geoffw, Danish and Swedish weren't on the list because I'm not doing reading challenges in them.. yet :D the Swedish one was over 30 €, possibly even about 35 or 38, but the Danish one was better (and the paper/quality/etc is amazing!!!!)
1 person has voted this message useful



Kronos
Diglot
Senior Member
Germany
Joined 5020 days ago

186 posts - 452 votes 
Speaks: German*, English

 
 Message 74 of 264
23 January 2013 at 11:03am | IP Logged 
Serpent wrote:
1. HP 3 - 35 złoty
2. a Warsaw guidebook for football fans - about 20 złoty
3. a book about football - 27 złoty
4. A. Sapkowski - Żmija - 33 złoty
5. A. Sapkowski - Boży bojownicy - 45 złoty
+two football phrasebooks that don't really count
total: 160 złoty, ie about 38 €. not expecting to go to Poland again or order from there. (still need the two other books from Narrenturm, but hoping to maybe get them in German)

Obviously football crazy. Here is something for you:

Lernwörterbuch der Fußballsprache

Fußball-Wörterbuch in 7 Sprachen

Langenscheidt Praxiswörterbuch Fußball

Still some hope for your French. You could simply turn off the audio and learn the language via multilingual football phrasebooks. ;-)

There is even something current for would-be linguists:

Sprache und Fußball: im Blickpunkt linguistischer Forschung
2 persons have voted this message useful



Serpent
Octoglot
Senior Member
Russian Federation
serpent-849.livejour
Joined 6356 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 75 of 264
23 January 2013 at 12:53pm | IP Logged 
Heh thanks for the links.
My fr is doing embarrassingly well. I work with a lot of spam in it so i've started doing some gloss lessons every now and then. this is also a great way to train reading without vocalizing.
I've even decided that one day i'll read a small book in fr. yeah. would be a fun experience.
2 persons have voted this message useful



Serpent
Octoglot
Senior Member
Russian Federation
serpent-849.livejour
Joined 6356 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 76 of 264
24 January 2013 at 11:41pm | IP Logged 
Time to finally write an overview of 2012. a more personal overview here, in Finnish.

For Portuguese and Italian I'm aiming for writing fluency. Basic fluency minus speaking.
Ahahahahaha.
I do claim basic fluency in Portuguese now, but I've also changed my mind about my preferred order of acquiring skills. It used to be listening-reading-writing-speaking, but the difference between writing and speaking should be taken into account. Bad grammar looks more ugly in writing, so it makes more sense to learn to speak and then work on the grammatical accuracy of the speech and writing at the same time.

The nicest thing about it is that I thought I needed to speak/shadow a lot to learn to speak... but while these are important, listening also is. If you listen a lot your speaking WILL improve.

So, about Portuguese and Italian:
-I read the Da Vinci Code in Portuguese and I think I can safely say that my level is better than my Finnish from 2006-2007 when I read the same book.
-I'm quite satisfied with it, but sometimes I do have these moments: girl, you claim basic fluency in it!
-My decision to work more on my Brazilian Portuguese was a bit spontaneous. Inspired by Forlán's move to Brazil and the coming World Cup (and confederations cup...). LOL, was I really hoping to reach basic fluency without that?
2013: continue and don't stop.

-Italian's been much easier to practice, and I've even taken a class in it. Once. Basically a lecture about the past tenses - a nice format without the downsides of having regular classes with homeworks and exercises and translations and whatever.
-I've not read enough in it though, so now I'm ordering books like a maniac.
2013: read more. and use the Spanish-based book.

Finnish - speak it over skype sometimes, switch to the Finnish mode easier (if/)when I go to Finland
I'm pleased to say I managed, even without any skype sessions (apart from one with an infamous 'polyglot' who could barely understand me). I did meet Leopejo though and it helped. More with my longing for Finland than with any language skills, heh. I need to learn to spread my trips to Finland more evenly.
Oh and I decided that I want to move to Finland sooner or later. Need to learn Swedish first though, hoping to start this year.
2013: don't neglect it.

Spanish - I'd like to minimize the gaps in my basic Spanish, but that's not such a high priority. High intermediate would be good though. Bookmakers also say that's the most likely language I'll do for the August 6 Week Challenge (see below;)) If they are right, I'll try to reach writing fluency, maybe at the expense of Italian. If not, it would still be good to learn to write a little.
I did do it for the 6WC, but especially after that final, it really couldn't be at the expense of Italian.
I used it a tiny bit in Kraków.
During the 6WC, I indulged in the guilty pleasures (especially Destinos), and I think I've eliminated the basic gaps now. I don't think I'm high intermediate but I don't really care.
Passively I still have these moments when there's nothing specific I can look up but a sentence doesn't make sense. But much less than it used to happen. My overall passive skills are good.
I've finally found a site which seems to AIM to offer a variety of languages (probably for the sake of native speakers:P), so now there are much fewer cases when Spanish is the only interesting option. Apart from the Spanish-speaking countries, but that's understandable.
2013: do no harm and no harm will be inflicted on you.
(as in, maintain your current level. respect Spanish a bit more so that Karma the Bitch didn't let it hurt your Italian or Portuguese)

Romanian - would be nice to be able to write at least a little or at least to understand the grammar and structure(s) properly.
I don't know how this happened but I understand the structure much better. When I try, I can write something to.
2013: idk?
the next language inspires me to say: cheer up your Romanian friend in her native language when Barça fails

Catalan - not sure. Barça matches if possible, some grammar.
One more ahahahahaha. In my defense, I don't belong to the select few who knew already then that Luka Modrić would be coming to Real Madrid.
I still like the language, though, and I even still follow Barça on twitter because I don't want to lose contact with the language. But I need something more enjoyable in it, I think.
2013: unfollow Barça but find something worth your attention.

Croatian - would be nice to be able to read fiction and articles online.
Well, I've tried a bit of HP and it wasn't too bad. But I'm madly behind on the Super Challenge.
2013: readreadread but don't forget that reading will be easier if you do more listening. and never forget that you're also counting subtitled movies (mostly as halfbooks).

German - what a shame not to be using the opportunity. Basic fluency and aiming for advanced by the time I graduate (2014). I need loads of input and I hope the 6WC's and tadoku will help. It's the only language where I need this, really. Classroom study made me tired of it though I do love it.
What a shame to sincerely believe you can diligently do the homeworks and supplement that with self-study just because at the age of 8 you were able to do so with English. sounds awesome but time to admit that's not for you anymore.
on the bright side, I'm good enough to breeze through classes, apart from the grammar and the fricking Drei Kameraden book. (I so wish that dude with a french name had written that in french!)
The best news is that I needed Super Challenge stuff to read on my way from Savonlinna to Imatra, and I got a thin book by Joel Lehtonen. and oh myyyy German is so much nicer to read with Finnish names, places and culture stuff!
2013: improve despite the classes. read. do a slightly masochistic 2-week Tadoku with German as your strongest language (plus Dutch and/or Swedish). read my first German book from cover to cover - the aforementioned one.

Indonesian - my friend is coming here in summer. 6 Week Challenge in February, intermediate level in spring, high intermediate or "low" basic fluency after her stay. The first goal is more vocabulary, more roots.
my friend didn't come here:(
2013: GLOSS and then depending on whether she comes here.

Karelian - being able to write a simple text
I can't:/
2013: do a bit of Anki

Polish, Czech - 6 week challenge in May for some pre-Euro 2012 joy ;) And hopefully a trip. I'm going to experiment and learn to say some really basic things, basic grammar and a few hundred words, as well as a lot of shadowing to try to fool people into thinking I'm actually learning these languages. More or less Gunnemark approach.
Well holy f**k I totally AM learning Polish. People tend to think I've been to Poland many times and possibly have relatives there.
LR made a huge difference. I'm not far from basic fluency.
I ended up not going to Prague and in Czech I've only (sort of) learned to pronounce the famous ř. Needed it for a more complete overall picture.
And... Polish has simply become a pretty important language to me.
2013: a lot of Polish, maybe a little Czech.

Danish - I feel like I'm not benefitting from watching football in it and this needs to be changed. Been listening-reading, including accelerated audio. I'm tempted to just L-R and see how it goes but I'm afraid this won't be enough.
my typical LR wasn't enough, but reading+listening in Danish was immensely helpful. I feel like I'm out of a sorta wicked circle. at the end of the year it sounded so clear to me that I took it for Swedish. (or more like: this sounds like Danish... but this is too clear for Danish!)
2013: listen, even after completing the Super Challenge. find an excuse to read Naiv. Super.

toki pona - be more confident about the syntax. perhaps. that's a low priority tbh.
low priority is low.
2013: don't think of toki pona in these terms, think of it as a way to relax.
I think that next term I'll have an experiment where I write ONE sentence in toki pona each day when I don't meditate. A linguistic alternative...


New(ish) languages:
Norwegian
did about 8 Assimil lessons. can understand most tweets. it's brought some clarity to Danish too, as crazy as it may sound.
2013: do the rest of Assimil.

Something that starts with F and ends with h and is not Finnish
What's going on??? Is it the Sweden-France match on my birthday defining my year?
I now work for Kaspersky Lab and I analyze spam. In any language (we're required to use google translate if we don't speak it).
And I've started doing GLOSS lessons in fr.
2013: more gloss, maybe something else i can find.

Swedish
I've decided I want to move to Finland one day, and while I wouldn't need it, I don't want to miss out.
2013: Assimil, maybe. Also, would be fun to try it out in Finland, like ask the time maybe.



Oh wow. In a different thread I very accurately described my goals as complete the Super Challenge and the Assimil challenge.

Edited by Serpent on 24 January 2013 at 11:52pm

3 persons have voted this message useful



Serpent
Octoglot
Senior Member
Russian Federation
serpent-849.livejour
Joined 6356 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 77 of 264
28 January 2013 at 8:46am | IP Logged 
Got some stuff from the site with the gorgeous name ibs.it! lol oops none of this was in Italian originally.
I really gotta kill myself if I don't complete the Italian super challenge...

Polish:
1. HP 3 - 35 złoty
2. a Warsaw guidebook for football fans - about 20 złoty
3. a book about football - 27 złoty
4. A. Sapkowski - Żmija - 33 złoty
5. A. Sapkowski - Boży bojownicy - 45 złoty
+two football phrasebooks that don't really count
total: 160 złoty, ie about 38 €. not expecting to go to Poland again or order from there. (still need the two other books from Narrenturm, but hoping to maybe get them in German)

German:
1. Johanna Sinisalo - Troll - 14.5 €
2. Moomins - 22 € (huge disappointment! This is just a comic book, will count as a half-book at most)
3. Remarque - Drei Kameraden - 480 roubles (for uni so I'd buy it regardless of the SC)
4. Patrick Süskind - Das Parfum - 638 roubles (I'VE WANTED TO READ IT IN German FOR LIKE FOREVER)
5. Joel Lehtonen - Verdorrte Apfelbäume - 14.9 €
6. Krimis für Kids - Die Verschwundene Trom - 6.70 £ not including the shipping
Total: 88.3 € (7 £/9 € + 51.5 € + 1118 roubles/27.8 €)


Portuguese:
1. Paulo Coelho - O Alquimista - 14.9 €
2. Paulo Coelho - O Diário de um Mago - 14.9 €
3. Dan Brown - O Código da Vinci - 16.9 €
4. Jorge Amado - Capitães da areia - 69 roubles ie in between 2 $ and 2 € (published in Russia)
a cancelled order: HP 5, LOTR 3. about 20€ each plus 16 EUROS motherf**king shipping=54 €. Nope, not cancelled by me. IDK why it got cancelled:( Still looking to buy especially HP 5 to complete my collection) edit: probably cancelled because the total price was over 54€. got LOTR3 much cheaper in Italian :P
5. Harry Potter e a Ordem da Fénix - 24 £ (counting as about 30 € bc I didn't include the shipping)
total: about 80 €

Belarusian:
1. Shamiakin - collected works - 17.000 BYR
2. Bychkouski - Anamalia (a fantasy story) - 39.000 BYR
3. Zarecki - 27.000 BYR
total: about 82.000 BYR, ie about 8€, which is a more significant sum in Belarus than in Europe obviously

Italian:
1. Machiavelli - Il Principe - 80 roubles (published in Russia)
2. Amor di Roma short stories about Rome - 600 roubles
3. Che storia! about the history of Italy - 720 roubles
4. Beppe Severgnini - L'italiano: Lezioni semiserie - 690 roubles
5. Gramática Italiana para estudiantes de habla española (almost entirely in Italian) - 600 roubles
6. Il ritorno del re - 8.42 €
7. Materazzi - Che cosa ho detto veramente a Zidane - 4.50 €
8. Fiorentina da impazzire! - 6.72 €
9. John Foot - Calcio 1898-2010 - 11.82 €. (lol what names. does he think football died when Inter won CL? haha... inspired by the previous book on the list - too many mentions of teams that mean nothing to me)
10. Harper Lee - Buio oltre la siepe - 6 €
11. Chuck Palahniuk - Soffocare - 8.50 €
12. Tove Jansson - Racconti dalla valle dei Mumin - 6.63 €
13. Tove Jansson - Caccia alla cometa - 5.95 €
14. Mika Waltari - Sinuhe l'egiziano - 9.35 € (everyone in Finland has read this)
15. (see the Croatian section!!!)
Total: 134.89 € (including 2690 roubles/67 €)


Croatian
1. Njegoš - Луча микрокозма/Il raggio del microcosmo - 12.60 € (some poetry - parallel text in Serbo-Croatian and Italian!!!)
Total: 12.60 €

I'm also starting a separate list for Obscene Shipping Fees. I don't bother counting the 3-4 € ones though they can add up.
1. europeanbooks.co.uk - 7.10 £ ie let's say 8.49 €. that's muuuch better than what the Portuguese store offered so I bought HP5 from there, and I also got a German book. but still...gah.
2. ibs.it - Seeing il mio IBS is bad enough as it feels jinxy (I don't have IBS, fortunately :D), but the prices.. ohhhh. so far I've ordered from them together with a friend, so that we shared the base fee of 11.90 € (WTF), to which 20% the price is added. So, she paid me 15.70 € for the book that costs 6.75 €. the total shipping price was fuсking 20.46 € - and you're not allowed to make it too cost-efficient because the orders sent to Russia can't exceed the price of 50€, INCLUDING the shipping. damn FedEx. So anyway, this time I got away with paying "only" 11.51 € for three books (LOTR3, Materazzi, Fiorentina's history). But Italian books are so cheap themselves that I now have THREE more pending orders from them. all 49.something €. all for myself only. oops. If I don't complete the Super Challenge in Italian I may as well kill myself. But the good news is that the orders include some "soap opera fantasy" which should help.
3. more from ibs.it - 19.24 € for two moomin books, kill a mockingbird and calcio
4. ibs.it - 18.90 € - palahniuk, sinuhe, serbian poetry

To balance out:

GIFTS&Free stuff
-Two books in Swiss German from dad (bought in Switzerland)
-Three books in Portuguese from espejismo who also got them for free

I also get paid for reading spam (although the employer would prefer if I only read as much as needed and not entire messages in interesting languages (even so called Nigerian spam).

Edited by Serpent on 09 February 2013 at 6:18pm

1 person has voted this message useful



sans-serif
Tetraglot
Senior Member
Finland
Joined 4318 days ago

298 posts - 470 votes 
Speaks: Finnish*, English, German, Swedish
Studies: Danish

 
 Message 78 of 264
28 January 2013 at 12:51pm | IP Logged 
Serpent wrote:
14. Mika Waltari - Sinuha l'egiziano - 9.35 € (everyone in Finland has read this)

Ouch! I haven't--not yet anyway. Neither have I read any Johanna Sinisalo, and I've never even heard of Joel Lehtonen. If you were trying to make me feel like a terrible person, you succeeded. ;-)

Is there a hidden logic behind reading translations of books originally written in languages you're well versed in, or do you just have a list of books that interest you, which you then read in whatever language you happen to be working on, at the moment?
2 persons have voted this message useful



Serpent
Octoglot
Senior Member
Russian Federation
serpent-849.livejour
Joined 6356 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 79 of 264
28 January 2013 at 2:05pm | IP Logged 
:)
Well, I've read Ennen päivänlaskua ei voi in the original, and I want to read it in German as well. As for Lehtonen, see my note on German:

Quote:
The best news is that I needed Super Challenge stuff to read on my way from Savonlinna to Imatra, and I got a thin book by Joel Lehtonen. and oh myyyy German is so much nicer to read with Finnish names, places and culture stuff!
Not that I don't like the German culture, but nothing can beat the Finnish one.
(he was from Savonlinna and afaiu he's well-known and admired there. but I hadn't heard of him before finding the book)

Sinuhe was basically inspired by a need for big fat books in Italian. if it wasn't for the Super Challenge I'd just keep putting it off, I think.

You've read the Moomins at least? :D I haven't yet actually.

And as for English, it's just a tool for me. I don't really like it enough to read anything in it. But many of the books that interest me were originally written in it, so of course I buy them in other languages if possible.
1 person has voted this message useful



sans-serif
Tetraglot
Senior Member
Finland
Joined 4318 days ago

298 posts - 470 votes 
Speaks: Finnish*, English, German, Swedish
Studies: Danish

 
 Message 80 of 264
28 January 2013 at 2:47pm | IP Logged 
Nope, not even the Moomins, though I might in the future. I grew up watching the cartoon, but I'm not entirely convinced that I would enjoy the books at this age, despite all the nostalgia involved, and I'd hate to tarnish the happy memories I have.

Honestly, it wouldn't surprise me if you had read twice as much Finnish fiction as I have. Thinking back, I've probably read only about a dozen novels by a Finnish author, and that's counting Seitsemän veljestä and Tuntematon sotilas et cetera, which almost everyone has read in school.

Edited by sans-serif on 03 February 2013 at 1:29am



1 person has voted this message useful



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