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Cristina’s way TAC 2013 TEAM MIR/SPARTA

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Kerrie
Senior Member
United States
justpaste.it/Kerrie2
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1232 posts - 1740 votes 
Speaks: English*
Studies: Spanish

 
 Message 57 of 248
06 January 2013 at 11:43pm | IP Logged 
Solfrid Cristin wrote:
Great minds think alike :-) Holiday in Egypt in 8 days is the immediate Arabic reason. I get to fight and protect a 13 year old beautiful, blonde Norwegian girl (my daughter) who thinks she is and looks like she is 18. I am doing push ups already to improve my strength to fend of the suitors, and will not accept anything below a million camels :-)


That might make you rich in Egypt, but #1) How would you get them home? and #2) What use, exactly, would a million camels have in Norway?

I think I would ask for a more globally accepted form of payment. Besides, you shouldn't be selling your daughter off yet. She's only 13. :-)
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mrwarper
Diglot
Winner TAC 2012
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Spain
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Speaks: Spanish*, EnglishC2
Studies: German, Russian, Japanese

 
 Message 58 of 248
06 January 2013 at 11:50pm | IP Logged 
Congratulations on a very strong start, captain!

While i wouldn't discuss a superior officer's decision to make the pilot walk the plank, I'd recommend having someone as replacement at the helm before you actually do so -- we're all on the same boat and, in space, no one can hear *us* scream ;)

Solfrid Cristin wrote:
[...]The main idea seemed to be the folly of man destroying the planet. I am not totally sure that this subject automatically makes a good film though, but I may have gotten more out of it if I had understood more. Looking at Russian without subtitles can be really, really puzzling.

About the subject, I'd be inclined to think the opposite. Thinly veiled 'political' pamphlets can have an entertaining side as well, but they should never be aimed for children's consumption. Anyway, do you mean without English or Russian subtitles?

Edit: and Kerrie's right -- you'll probably want to be paid in a more convenient way and you'll probably get a better price a bit later -- can't you wait? ;)

Edited by mrwarper on 06 January 2013 at 11:53pm

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Solfrid Cristin
Heptaglot
Winner TAC 2011 & 2012
Senior Member
Norway
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4143 posts - 8864 votes 
Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian
Studies: Russian

 
 Message 59 of 248
07 January 2013 at 12:31am | IP Logged 
@ Kerrie: I would not sell her for all the camels in the world, but apparently the going rate is between 200-500
camels, so I figured a million camels would be too steep a prize for anyone. I strongly suspect that the offers
are more to give the tourists a thrill than actually a serious bid anyway.

@mrwarper: I am reconsidering the plank thing :-)

I mean without any subtitles of any kind. 99% of the films I have do not have any subtitles, so I just watch
them and try to understand from them what I can.
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tastyonions
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Speaks: English*, French, Spanish
Studies: Italian

 
 Message 60 of 248
07 January 2013 at 12:39am | IP Logged 
Solfrid Cristin wrote:
I FINISHED MAMDAME BOVARY THIS WEEK! Did I mention that I finished reading Madame Bovary this week? Oh, and by the way, I finished reading Madame Bovary this week:-)

By now most of you are probably wondering whether I have completely lost my marbles. The thing is that this book by Gustave Flaubert has been the impassable mountain of French literature for me. I have started reading that book a number of times, but it bored me so much, that I was never able to get beyond page 50. Then due to the Super Challenge, where I have entered with an Advanced Super Challenge in French, I have to read 200 books – or at least 2000 pages of French. And since Kanewai recommended it, I decided that I was at a phase of my life where I would not let myself be daunted by a book, so in June I went for it again and read the first 160 pages. Then I went on a vacation, and things have not really calmed down until now, but on January 1st. in the afternoon I swore to myself that I would not eat or drink until I had finished the cursed book, so most of the evening and until 11.45 next morning was spent reading it. All 312 pages that was left of it. And I have finished it. I waited 50 years to read it, I will wait at the very least another 50 years before I read it again, but it is done, finished, fertig, fini, hecho, ferdig.

Did I mention that I hated it? Or actually, I did not hate it, a part of it was quite good, I just thoroughly hated the end of it. In case someone is planning to read it, I won’t give any details, I’ll just point out that I am a big fan of the American tradition of happy endings. Flaubert was not.

It's really great that you could finish that book, even if you didn't like it. That's impressive. :-)

I liked Flaubert in translation years ago, so maybe I will give him a try in French now. And I have an English translation of Madame Bovary (which I have never read), so I could always use that if I got stuck. Still probably too advanced for me yet, though.

Edited by tastyonions on 07 January 2013 at 12:40am

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mrwarper
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Spain
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Studies: German, Russian, Japanese

 
 Message 61 of 248
07 January 2013 at 12:55am | IP Logged 
Solfrid Cristin wrote:
I mean without any subtitles of any kind. 99% of the films I have do not have any subtitles, so I just watch them and try to understand from them what I can.

I asked it the wrong way. When you say 'doing it without subtitles can be puzzling' I immediately think it's less puzzling for you with subtitles on. And then the question is, when you do use them subs, is it Russian or English? I was wondering because you've said plenty of times reading Russian isn't very easy for you but I'm not sure how well I'd do watching a film in foreign language A with subtitles in foreign language B.
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Solfrid Cristin
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Norway
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Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian
Studies: Russian

 
 Message 62 of 248
07 January 2013 at 2:57pm | IP Logged 
mrwarper wrote:
Solfrid Cristin wrote:
I mean without any subtitles of any kind. 99% of the films I have do not have any subtitles, so I just watch them and try to understand from them what I can.

I asked it the wrong way. When you say 'doing it without subtitles can be puzzling' I immediately think it's less puzzling for you with subtitles on. And then the question is, when you do use them subs, is it Russian or English? I was wondering because you've said plenty of times reading Russian isn't very easy for you but I'm not sure how well I'd do watching a film in foreign language A with subtitles in foreign language B.


Obviously I prefer it with subtitles in a language I actually understand, but given the choice between no subtitles and Russian subtitles, I would take the Russian subtitles.

Yesterday I tried watching 21 Jump Street in English with French subtitles. It pysically hurt. Not to mention the fact that my daughter called me a pedophile for saying Johnny Depp was hot. "How can that be, I protested, he is 49 years old!" "Yes", she said, but he was young in the film". "So was I at the time", said I. "Yes, but you are old now". Grumph... That's what I get for trying to show them some of the series from my youth. I should have know that this was an unwinnable one.

@tastyonions: Yes, I was quite happy with myself for finishing that book. I can not count how many times I have tried to read it, and just not been able too. If you liked it in Englsih I would have a go at it in French as well - it is not difficult as such, it is just full of superflous words.


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Solfrid Cristin
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Winner TAC 2011 & 2012
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Norway
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Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian
Studies: Russian

 
 Message 63 of 248
14 January 2013 at 4:23pm | IP Logged 
JANUARY 7TH TO JANUARY 14TH

This has been - a weird week. I have done lots of Russian lessons, lots of talking Spanish, lots of French series and lots of listening to Greek - but very little in the way of formal studies.

RUSSIAN

This has been "Russian class week". I have a very erratic Russian class schedule. I can do 5 classes one week, then go 18 months without any classes at all and then do 20 classes in one month and 4 the next. It is usually connected to my work, which also tends to be a bit chaotic, so it is very difficult to be consistent with a couple of classes a week. This week I have however done 13 classes, with two different teachers, so I have almost had an overdose. You may wonder why two different teachers - well that is partly because I am getting a little bored having the same one for so long, and also in order to get the repetition I need. I can then do some of the same material with both, and appear just a tad less stupid to at least one of them :-)

I have also worked a lot on LanguageSponge's challenges. They may not seem all that challenging in the beginning, but when you cannot write Russian at all, it takes quite some time to do them. I have found them intensely motivating, and I feel like I learn more by doing them than almost any other activity I can do. I am definitely going for the title of Tsarina here - one baby step at the time :-).

I had a massive disappointment on Saturday, because I had planned to see "War and Peace" with my sister - the 7 hour Soviet version which is supposed to be the supreme one- that they were showing at a film club in Oslo. We wanted to make sure that we would get tickets, so we went the day before the showing, only to be told that all tickets had been sold out two days before. Whoever would have thought that there were that many people in Oslo who would be willing to sit through a 7-hour film in Russian?

GREEK

In Greek I am mostly listening to Pimsleur again and again, not getting over the total beauty of this language. I am on lesson 5 now. I like Pimsleur because it makes you speak - and gives you the feeling of actually getting somewhere. I have also done a little Michel Thomas - currently still at lesson 4, and I have started looking at lesson 3 of Assimil. I also discovered to my delight that I could easily write Greek into Anki on my PC. I thought that this would not be possible, because I do not have an external keyboard in Greek, but it turned out that writing Greek is a piece of cake, since almost all the letters correspond to ours on the keyboard, (same sound / same letter) and the few which do not are easy to remember.

I was also delighted to get "Teach yourself to read and write in Greek" this week, so I am diving into it with all my enthusiasm - I think I have read about 20 pages by now. I like it, but one of the things it said puzzled me. It said that the reason why there were so many letters and combinations of letters which were pronounced the same, was that many Greek words sounded the same but had different meanings, and you needed different spellings to keep them apart. That sounds totally illogical to me.

I would think it made more sense that what is today the same sounds (the many ways of spelling e and i for instance) was once upon a time different sounds in previous versions of Greek, and the words have simply kept their old spelling. So we do not have different spellings for the same sounds in order to keep the words apart, but we have the same spelling for different sounds because the pronunciation has changed/been simplified. Am I totally wrong here?

FRENCH

I am still making my daughters watch a variety of French series - so I have also watched 2 episodes of "How I met your Mother" and 6 episodes of "Castle". Not intellectual, but the masses of input I am getting did wonders for my French last year, so I go on. As long as I do it as a family activity I have to watch something the girls want to see, and that rules out most original French material. Either the content is of no interest to them, or I can't get it with English subtitles.

ITALIAN/GERMAN

All is quiet on the Eastern front :-)

SPANISH

Since I did not get to see War and Peace I decided to accept an invitation from my Peruvian friend to bring a Romanian friend over for coffe. When we got there she had a Cuban friend there, and they had prepared dinner, so the afternoon visit which started at 4.30, ended up being a full evening thing which went on until 1.30 in the morning. We laughed and we shared stories of all possible sorts. With Norwegian friends there are som subject matters you simply do not touch, but before the evening was over we had touched, discussed and analyzed most topics relevant to 4 women between 40 and 50.

I could not help thinking how strange it was to sit there, one Romanian who had grown up under Ceaucesco, with lack of food and commodities, and always scared of the Securitate, one Peruvian who had grown up in a wealthy family in Lima, I who grew up in the 60ies, when Norway had still not become a rich country, and where most of my nice dresses came in a package from my cousin in America, but who had always had enough food on the table and who have never experienced any political unrest and one who had grown up under Castro eating only one proper meal a day, had suffered persecution and had ultimately had to flee her home country.

We heard stories of the practise of Santoria from Cuba including leaving dead hens at the graveyeard at midnight and laughed so much that I do not know how we did not choke.

It is hard to imagine 4 more different backgrounds, and I was the only one who knew all of them when the evening started, and yet because we are all fluent in Spanish, we could talk like we had known each other all our lives, and we had a fantastic time. And whenever someone start saying that all we need is English, then evenings like this are what tells me that learning other languages is important too. These women all speak English to some degree, and a bit of Norwegian, but we would never ever had had that kind of connection if we were to use English only. With some other conversations I had in Spanish during the week, it was quite satisfactory linguistically. As well:-)

We even did a bit of Norwegian, because they are all struggling with the pronunciation. It is tough to go from Spanish to Norwegian, particularly when languages is not exactly your hobby. At the same time it is so important to them, that I am considering to give them some tutoring. They all struggle either in their professional life or to get into professional life because of their problems with the pronunciation.



Language     This week      
Russian      13 hours 30 min
Greek        5 hours 20 minutes
French       3 hours 20 minutes
German       -
Italian      -
Spanish      10 hours 40 minutes
Arabic       -
Norwegian    -

Language     Total    ;  
Russian      17 hours
Greek        17 h 20 m
French       15 h 50 m
German       0
Italian      0.30  & nbsp; 
Spanish      22.10        
Arabic       1.10 &n bsp;  
Norwegian    0.30

I have no idea how much I will get done this coming week, since I am on holiday in Egypt - it could go both ways. I am obviously bringing a ton of study material, but since I am going alone with my daughter I do not know how much I will actually get done. I have bought both her and me a portable DVD player on the January sales for 70 dollars for the two of them, so I am trusting that I will get to see some Russian films.

Good luck to everyone in their studies this week!


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modus.irrealis
Bilingual Triglot
Newbie
Canada
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 Message 64 of 248
14 January 2013 at 4:43pm | IP Logged 
Solfrid Cristin wrote:

I was also delighted to get "Teach yourself to read and write in Greek" this week, so I
am diving into it with all my enthusiasm - I think I have read about 20 pages by now. I
like it, but one of the things it said puzzled me. It said that the reason why there
were so many letters and combinations of letters which were pronounced the same, was
that many Greek words sounded the same but had different meanings, and you needed
different spellings to keep them apart. That sounds totally illogical to me.

I would think it made more sense that what is today the same sounds (the many ways of
spelling e and i for instance) was once upon a time different sounds in previous
versions of Greek, and the words have simply kept their old spelling. So we do not have
different spellings for the same sounds in order to keep the words apart, but we have
the same spelling for different sounds because the pronunciation has changed/been
simplified. Am I totally wrong here?

No, you are right. Ancient Greek was extremely rich in vowels and diphthongs and the
modern spelling still reflects that. If you're interested, a good book is Vox Graeca,
which gives the reconstructed pronunciation of Classical Greek, but importantly also
explains the evidence for it.

But for some reason, there has traditionally been quite a bit of resistance among Greek
speakers to the idea that Greek pronunciation has changed. Maybe it's just because you
have an unbroken tradition of reading ancient Greek that has changed along with the
changes in pronunciation of the spoken language, but it's weird that even some scholars
continue to insist that the pronunciation has not really changed at all.


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