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Radioclare’s TAC log 2014 (*jäŋe/*ledús) | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Radioclare Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom timeofftakeoff.com Joined 4378 days ago 689 posts - 1119 votes  Speaks: English*, German, Esperanto Studies: Croatian, Serbian, Macedonian | Message 449 of 522 27 November 2014 at 12:15pm | IP Logged |
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I finished 'Srebrni Stolac' this morning - only 26 pages before breakfast today ;)
I watched two episodes of 'Bitange i Princeze' last night, which takes me up to episode 13 of series 5, which is just over halfway through the final series. Next week should be slightly easier for me work-wise, so hoping that I might manage to finish the series by next weekend. We shall see. I'm going to read 'The Last Battle' next, which is the final Narnia book. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Radioclare Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom timeofftakeoff.com Joined 4378 days ago 689 posts - 1119 votes Speaks: English*, German, Esperanto Studies: Croatian, Serbian, Macedonian | Message 450 of 522 27 November 2014 at 2:23pm | IP Logged |
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What I forgot to say was that I decided to try and broaden my music horizons last night and listen to a few different bands. For two years I've been somewhat obsessively listening to Hladno Pivo, and the only other Croatian music I really tried was Severina (who really isn't my cup of tea at all).
I had various playlists on in the background while I was working last night. The first one I listened to was 'Postolar Tripper', a band from Zadar whose music is kinda... weird. Some of it sounded like hip hop, some of it sounded more like reggae. Some of the songs I really didn't like (again, not the type of music I normally listen to) but a couple were quite catchy and some of their music videos were quite fun. I then listened to about half of a very long playlist for Crvena Jabuka. who are an ex-yu band I've heard referred to lots of times and so assumed must be pretty good. Erm, no. I was expecting a rock band but all their songs turned out to be quite slow ballads which sounded extremely similar. I felt like it would be great music to listen to if you wanted to sleep or meditate or something like that, but it was definitely not the best music for doing late-night overtime when you really need something to pick you up. I had to give up and drink a cup of coffee instead :D I'm going to try experimenting a bit more when I have time to see whether I can find something else I like :) 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Radioclare Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom timeofftakeoff.com Joined 4378 days ago 689 posts - 1119 votes Speaks: English*, German, Esperanto Studies: Croatian, Serbian, Macedonian | Message 451 of 522 28 November 2014 at 2:20pm | IP Logged |
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I flew home from Scotland last night and used the time on the plane to start reading the final Narnia book: "Posljednji Bitka". I had an hour to read on the plane and another hour on my commute to a different client this morning, so I've already read 120 pages which is probably more than halfway through.
I didn't get home until about 9pm last night so haven't watched any more TV. I'll calculate my SC stats for November at the weekend but first impressions are that it feels like it has been quite a productive month; I'm now on 172 books and 84 films :) 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Radioclare Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom timeofftakeoff.com Joined 4378 days ago 689 posts - 1119 votes Speaks: English*, German, Esperanto Studies: Croatian, Serbian, Macedonian | Message 452 of 522 29 November 2014 at 9:39pm | IP Logged |
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I have done absolutely nothing on languages today, but I have a good excuse because
it's been my birthday. And I have had some really cool language-learning presents :) In addition to two novels in Serbian, I had these two amazing presents from my boyfriend: 
(A children's book in Serbian Cyrillic for me to practise my reading) 
(This one will definitely help me when I come to learn Russian) I got a fantastic present from my parents too, which pretty much confirms my decision to study Macedonian more seriously next year: 
To say I'm excited would be an understatement :) 3 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Radioclare Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom timeofftakeoff.com Joined 4378 days ago 689 posts - 1119 votes Speaks: English*, German, Esperanto Studies: Croatian, Serbian, Macedonian | Message 453 of 522 30 November 2014 at 10:16pm | IP Logged |
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It's the end of November already, so this is my monthly Super Challenge summary.
This month I have read: 20. Sanjao sam slonove 21. Raskol 22. Plovidba Broda Zorogaza 23. Srebrni Stolac 24. Posljednja Bitka It looks like quite a lot of books, but the last three were books for children (Narnia). I have now read 24 physical books and 172.7 "books". My monthly reading stats are: May 2014 - 1 808 pages June 2014 - 1,441 pages July 2014 - 872 pages August 2014 - 1,462 pages September 2014 - 414 pages October 2014 - 1,342 pages November 2014 - 1,273 pages November's total doesn't look as good as I was expecting. I think it's because I spent a lot of the month bogged down in reading 'Raskol'. I've decided to have a break before tackling any more of the Sansom series. I may even cheat and read the books in English first. I feel like I've made a major effort with the films this month. Looking at my log, I have watched 33 episodes of 'Bitange i Princeze' and three different programmes on Deutsche Welle Hrvatski. My monthly film stats are: May 2014 - 941 minutes June 2014 - 713 minutes July 2014 - 1,081 minutes August 2014 - 827 minutes September 2014 - 1,856 minutes October 2014 - 971 minutes November 2014 - 1,200 minutes So November was actually my best month except for September (where I spent several days listening to audio books while travelling). I guess I can say that November was my best normal month. I'm on 84.3 "films" now. I had a vague goal of getting to 100 films and 200 books by the end of December. In order to achieve that now I would have to read 44 pages every day and watch 45 minutes of tv every day, so I don't think it is likely to happen. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Radioclare Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom timeofftakeoff.com Joined 4378 days ago 689 posts - 1119 votes Speaks: English*, German, Esperanto Studies: Croatian, Serbian, Macedonian | Message 454 of 522 01 December 2014 at 10:01am | IP Logged |
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Yesterday was a fun day language-wise :)
I got my chores out of the way first, which mainly involved working on the year-end accounts for the Esperanto Association. We have made a small surplus for the year, which sounds good but on balance I think it is bad because it has mainly happened due to us not achieving the things we were supposed to be achieving. Then I was able to start reading my children's book 'Три Мускетари', which is a highly abridged version of the 'Three Musketeers' written for children, in which all the characters are mice. I read two (short) chapters but I'm not counting it towards the Super Challenge because there is a lot of spacing and only about 100 words to a page. It's a really nice book which uses a variety of different fonts. That initially makes it more difficult to read some of the words, but overall I'm sure it will be helpful for me. I had to get Serpent's help to translate a few words in a swirly italic font at the start of the book, where some of the letters just looked like squiggles to me :D I spent the afternoon reading the opening chapters of my new Macedonian textbook. There is a CD with some accompanying audio but I'm not sure whether it's worth purchasing because the book says it works with Windows 95 and ME. I'd forgotten that ME was even a thing! The book itself seems really good, although I think it would be a struggle to use as your only resource if you were a completely new beginner. It made me realise that I need to refresh my memory of the order of the alphabet. And that I finally need to get my head around voicing/devoicing. I think one of the best things about Croatian is that you can really ignore this because the spelling changes every time the pronunciation needs to change. This is one of the reasons I've found Croatian easier than any of the other Slavic languages I have failed to learn. But there is no point telling myself that I just have a mental block with this (which is how I feel!); I just need to dedicate some time to mastering it. Perhaps over Christmas, when I plan to work on my Cyrillic reading and writing anyway. This evening I experienced some Super Challenge guilt after I'd written my monthly log entry and decided I better watch some more TV. I watched episodes 14, 15 and 16 of series 5 of 'Bitange i Princeze'. The first two episodes went really well but by the third one I was losing concentration. It's officially Advent now so I can start listening to Christmas carols in Croatian on my commute. I purchased an entire album of these a couple of years ago. But I am sad that I am not able to go to the Christmas markets in Zagreb (or anywhere else) this Christmas. I think it's the first Christmas for about 10 years that I've not been to either Germany or Croatia before Christmas. They changed the overtime policy at work so that we have to have our extra hours paid now rather than taking them as time off in lieu. This morning I have started reading one of my birthday presents - 'Nespokoj' - which is a translation of the William Boyd novel 'Restless'. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6392 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 455 of 522 01 December 2014 at 9:37pm | IP Logged |
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For children's books, I believe the rule was that 5 pages count as one regular page, assuming large font and pictures. If there's really 100 words per page that's actually quite a lot.
And um, German has devoicing too. Anyway, of course it simply takes time to get used to. If you don't find that confusing, I think much of the time you can think of the corresponding Croatian word and see if there are any changes. At least I feel like Croatian and Russian would look much more similar if Russian had a more phonetic spelling. Edited by Serpent on 01 December 2014 at 10:10pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 6951 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 456 of 522 01 December 2014 at 10:05pm | IP Logged |
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I never found Slavonic (de)voicing to be a huge deal after some practice. In BCMS/SC and for the most part in Ukrainian, final devoicing doesn't occur while in the other Slavonic languages it does. (De)voicing that's not marked in spelling also occur elsewhere in those other Slavonic languages.
If I were you, I'd try to get the Macedonian CD at some point just so that I could get even more use out of the book (I got a used copy of the textbook and if I ever embark on Macedonian, I'll have to hunt for the CD too). I see on Amazon.co.uk that a used copy of the CD for the 3rd edition (I see that you have the 2nd edition of the book) is going for £17.25. That price isn't too high although I'd make sure with the seller that he/she is indeed selling the audio. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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