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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 4364 days ago 689 posts - 1119 votes  Speaks: English*, German, Esperanto Studies: Croatian, Serbian, Macedonian | Message 73 of 292 04 March 2015 at 10:35pm | IP Logged | |||||
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A nice person at Lang-8 corrected my text for me. There weren't too many errors
actually. The main points were... - "Dok sam bila dijete" is a better translation of "When I was a child" then "Kada sam bila dijete". - I am utterly confused about whether grapes are singular "grožđe" or plural "grožđa" in Croatian. I realised this halfway through writing the paragraphs of grapes and couldn't figure it out. I'm still not sure what the answer is so I'm just not going to write about grapes again :D Corrected version below. I forgot to say yesterday that it was 480 words, so not quite a page.
1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Radioclare Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom timeofftakeoff.com Joined 4364 days ago 689 posts - 1119 votes Speaks: English*, German, Esperanto Studies: Croatian, Serbian, Macedonian | Message 74 of 292 04 March 2015 at 10:38pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Today I was in the unusual position of working in the town I live in, which meant I had a the joy of a mere 30-minute
commute (walking!) into work. I was home before 6pm which is an unheard of occurrence, so I've had a really long evening with lots of time to write in Croatian. I tackled rdearman's second writing prompt: What's the #1 most played song on your music player? When did you discover it? Why do you like it?
Translation: I didn't know which song was the most listened to on my ipod, so I checked at lastfm and that website told me that my most listened to song was "Zimmer Frei" by Hladno Pivo. Hladno Pivo (in English "Cold Beer") are a Croatian rock band from Zagreb. "Zimmer Frei" is the first song which I ever bought in Croatian, so I think that it's my most listened to song because I've listened to it a hundred times to understand the words. "Zimmer Frei", of course, isn't a Croatian expression. It's a German expression which means that a guesthouse isn't full and has vacant rooms. When I've been travelling in Croatian I have often seen those sorts of signs outside houses, particularly at the coast. I think that those signs are most often in German (and not in English) because Germans have historically been the most frequent visitors to Croatia. The song is about tourism and how wonderful it will be one day when tourism in Croatia has taken off: "That will be the day! Hang up "Zimmer Frei", lie down under a palm and enjoy!". The line I like the most is "Slavonia will be a golf course". Slavonia is the part of Croatia which doesn't have a lot of tourists because it isn't by the sea, so that line is funny because it implies that the only attractive characteristic of Slavonia is that the ground is quite flat and therefore it would be a good place for a golf course. Like all songs of Hladno Pivo, I think that this one is a bit ironic. In the second verse you can hear the line "Fat Germans will fight for visas in order to come to us and spend foreign currency". I'm not sure but I think that the word "švaba" used here is a derogatory word for Germans. I know that the singer isn't racist though, because he was born in Germany and used to be a German language teacher. I really like the music video for this song, because I can't watch it without laughing and the music reminds me of summer. Hladno Pivo are without doubt my favourite Croatian band. My most listened to song this week, however, is not a song by Hladno Pivo but a song by Brkovi. Brkovi are a Croatian turbofolk-punkrock band from Zagreb. Don't ask me what turbofolk- punkrock is, because I don't know how to explain it. But I like this kind of music nevertheless and my favourite song by Brkovi at the moment is "Nisam ja za tebe" (I'm not the one for you). I love this song because it's really funny. The singer is trying to explain to a girl why he wouldn't make a good boyfriend for her. He says, for example, "You have long hair and you're really young, but I'm an old bald idiot". I really like this sort of humour, but I don't know what it's called in Croatian. In English we call it "self-deprecating humour". 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Radioclare Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom timeofftakeoff.com Joined 4364 days ago 689 posts - 1119 votes Speaks: English*, German, Esperanto Studies: Croatian, Serbian, Macedonian | Message 75 of 292 04 March 2015 at 10:40pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Yesterday I mainly just posted an updated version of my second text, which was
corrected by two nice people at lang-8. Whatever else I've said was so profound that I've forgotten it already :D
Those two corrected texts take me to 911 words. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| nikolic993 Diglot Senior Member Yugoslavia Joined 3561 days ago 106 posts - 205 votes Speaks: Serbian*, English Studies: Italian, Mandarin, Romanian, Persian | Message 76 of 292 04 March 2015 at 11:51pm | IP Logged | |||||
"grozd" is singular, "grožđe" is plural. :) -Pojeo sam jedan grozd. = I ate one grape. -Jeo sam grožđe. = I ate grapes. -Najeo sam se grožđa. = (I'm full because of all the grapes I ate.(*not the most accurate translation)) I wish I could tell you what case this is, but I honestly don't know. 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Radioclare Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom timeofftakeoff.com Joined 4364 days ago 689 posts - 1119 votes Speaks: English*, German, Esperanto Studies: Croatian, Serbian, Macedonian | Message 77 of 292 05 March 2015 at 8:00pm | IP Logged | |||||
THANK YOU :) :) :) I understand it now! I was assuming that "grozđe" was singular and therefore that the plural was "grozđa", which is why I had so many errors with it in my text. I may now have the confidence to write about grapes again :) 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Radioclare Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom timeofftakeoff.com Joined 4364 days ago 689 posts - 1119 votes Speaks: English*, German, Esperanto Studies: Croatian, Serbian, Macedonian | Message 78 of 292 08 March 2015 at 11:17am | IP Logged | |||||
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The most exciting thing this week has been that my favourite Croatian band have a new
single :) Vjeruj u mene Last night I had a marathon Budva-watching session and got through the first three episodes of series three. (Serpent - don't read the rest of the post as it may spoil some storylines!) Series three picks up six months after where series two left off. I thought we were going to have an eternal summer in Budva but now it is actually winter. Everywhere still looks amazingly sunny and there hasn't been any rain, but some of the characters are wearing jackets and one of the girls even had a woolly hat, which seemed a little bit excessive as it looked like it might still be about 15 degrees :D The mood seems to have darkened too and things aren't going as well for some of the characters as they were during the summer. The main storyline is that one of the unmarried female characters has realised that she's pregnant and the reactions to this have been amazing. First of all she announced it to her best female friend, and she started dancing around the room singing "There's going to be a wedding!". Perhaps not quite the same reaction we would have in the UK :) The girl herself seemed to think this would be the natural course of events and went off to tell her boyfriend. He wasn't quite so thrilled and - I think - suggested that she have an abortion. I had learned the verb 'abortirati' but he kept using a verb which sounded like 'očistiti'. Anyway, she burst into tears and he went home to tell his family about the situation. Interestingly, no one seemed to be annoyed with him and they all naturally assumed that he was indeed going to get married. The boy spent an episode or two moping around in a moody fashion because he didn't want to get married. Eventually his family held a vote(!) and decided that he had to get married because this was the only option that wouldn't bring shame on the family. They also decided that he, his new wife and the baby would come and live in their family home. This would be the tiny family home in which we already have living the boy's grandad, his dad, his aunt and his aunt's boyfriend. The boy eventually became reconciled to the idea of getting married, but in the meantime the girl had decided to get an abortion after all. I'm assuming by the speed at which she was able to arrange this that abortion is legal in Montenegro and pretty easily obtainable. Her father managed to stop her going out of the door and eventually we were treated to a bizarre scene where the two families sat down together to discuss the details of the marriage. It was interesting(?) that despite the fact that the main plot of the series is built around the fact that these two families are feuding, there was one thing that they did agree on: that the baby was going to be a boy. Whenever the girl who is pregnant tried to suggest that there was a chance that it might actually be a girl, everyone's reaction was pretty much to laugh and brush the idea off. The idea of having a male successor seemed to very important to both sides. I'm really hoping it will be born a girl to spite them all :D Anyway, the marriage negotiations were quite fraught. I missed a few sentences and then next thing I knew, the girl's father had gone to a drawer and pulled out a handgun. I thought he was so pissed off that he was going to shoot the boy's father and grandfather. But instead, the boy's grandfather produced a similar weapon from his trousers (seriously!) and then they both ran outside onto a balcony and started shooting into the air!!!! As far as I can tell, this was some sort of celebratory gunfire and signalled that the discussions had been concluded and the engagement was official. I am trying and failing to imagine my dad doing this when I got engaged :D I had a hilarious evening watching this anyway and I am loving the insights into Montenegrin culture. In some ways I can see a lot of similarities between the Balkans and Ireland (at least, what Ireland was like when I was a child) but what I find particularly interesting is that the resolution to situations like the one I have just described with the pregnancy seems to be driven not by the influence of religion (as it might have been in Ireland) but by the idea of family honour and the understanding that all family members will work together to avoid one family member doing something that will bring disgrace on their (sur)name. In case you hadn't guessed, I'm completely hooked on this soap now :) 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Radioclare Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom timeofftakeoff.com Joined 4364 days ago 689 posts - 1119 votes Speaks: English*, German, Esperanto Studies: Croatian, Serbian, Macedonian | Message 79 of 292 08 March 2015 at 9:27pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Time for an update on the Output Challenge :) First thoughts are that this challenge is HARD! But I am trying to console myself
with the thought that I felt the same way about the listening part of the Super Challenge a few months ago and now I am happily laughing at Montenegrin soap operas :) This weekend I decided that I needed to start the speaking element. I mentioned in the Output Challenge discussion thread that I was going to start with reading aloud, as I have had so little practise at physically speaking Croatian that I just want to focus on practising the sounds for the time being rather than trying to think of something grammatical to say at the same time. As threatened, I have started by reading 'Twilight'. Sorry! There are several reasons for this, the first of which is that I have it as a pdf so it's easy to read on screen while recording my voice on the computer. The second is that out of all the books I have, it's probably the one in which I understand the largest percentage of the vocabulary due to the vocabulary being so simple, so theoretically it should be the easiest to get my tongue around. I was looking to see whether I could get an audiobook of 'Twilight' in Croatian, as I thought it might be useful to read a page aloud and then listen to the same page read by a native speaker to identify where I was making mistakes, particularly with stress and emphasis. Unfortunately I can't find an audiobook anywhere on the internet (either to buy or as a torrent) so I'm assuming that one doesn't actually exist. I do have an audiobook and a pdf of 'Fifty Shades Darker' which I could theoretically do this exercise with, but I'm struggling to work up enough enthusiasm for it. Anyway, yesterday I read the first chapter of Twilight aloud (77 minutes) and this morning I read the second chapter aloud (63 minutes). So in total I have 2 hours 20 minutes spoken time now. Oh my goodness, I had forgotten how slow reading aloud is! To start with it was pretty painful and I had that nasty feeling like during sight-reading in a music exam when you're never quite sure if you're going to cope with what jumps out at you from the next line. But over the course of all that time I think it got a little bit easier. I listened to a tiny bit of it back to check it had recorded and it sounded truly dreadful, partly because I've had a weird cold/cough this week and so sound quite breathless on the recording. This afternoon it was time for some writing. I went with rdearman's next writing prompt: What is one of your favourite quotes?
Translation: I'm not sure whether I have a favourite quote. Quotes are like jokes for me: I can listen to them, laugh and then completely forget them. However, about ten years ago I had a quote at the end of my emails. I don't know why it was, but at that time it was fashionable to do that. My quote was in English "Not everything that can be counted counts. Not everything that counts can be counted". I don't know how to say that in Croatian. Perhaps "Ne sve što je prebrojivo vrijedi. Ne sve što vrijedi je prebrojivo“. I thought that that was a quote from Albert Einstein, although when I googled it now I read that that perhaps isn't true. It doesn't matter. I like the quote nevertheless, because professionally I am an auditor and when I was a trainee I often had to attend stock takes and count countless little objects. Once I counted screws, one time elastic bands, and I still remember one rainy New Year's Eve when I had to stand outside all day in order to count cars. I still don't enjoy my job but at that time I really hated it, so it cheered me up a little bit that I could think of that quote and remember that those things which I was counting were not the most important things in the world. As you can see, I quickly hit a mental block with this topic and managed a mere 205 words. Oops. I decided that was a poor effort for one week so I moved onto the next prompt: What's your favourite indoor/outdoor activity?
Translation: My favourite indoor activity is reading. Since I was five years old and learned to read, that has been my favourite way of spending time. When I was a child, my mother always used to try and make me go outside and play in the garden, but I always preferred to sit alone in a room with a good book. As a child and as a teenager I mainly read the classics of English literature. I loved books like "Anne of Green Gables", "Pride and Prejudice" and "Vanity Fair". I didn't have enough money to buy new books, so every month I went to the local library with my dad. The library only allowed people to borrow four books at the same time. I've always read quickly, so it didn't take long until I'd read each new book. I got into the habit of reading each book at least three times. When I was 11 years old I had already succeeded in reading all the books in the children's section of the library, but it wasn't permitted to borrow adult books until you were 14. My dad had to steal my mother's library card to borrow new books for me. I read lots of interesting books, but I think that I sometimes understood the words but not the meaning of them. I remember that I once read the book "Jane Eyre" and afterwards wrote an essay about it at school. I wrote that I didn't understand why everyone said that that was a romantic book, because at the end the young woman marries an old blind man. Of course, since then I have read the book again many times and as an adult I no longer share the same opinion! When I was 18 years old, I started to learn the German language and for my nineteenth birthday a friend sent me a book in German. It sounds a bit strange now, but that was not only the first time that I saw a book which was written in a foreign language, but also the first time that I realised that there exist in the world books which are not written in English. The book was "The Reader" by Bernhard Schlink, which is a very good book, although I think it's not the easiest when you have never read anything in a foreign language before. It took almost three months for me to read it. Reading was painful, but now I think that that book changed my life. I discovered a new world. I don't go in for sport, but my favourite outdoor activity has always been hiking. These days I unfortunately no longer have much chance to do it, but when I was a child I always spent at least two weeks each year in the mountains, particularly in the Alps. Switzerland was the first foreign country which I ever visited, and I immediately fell in love with it. I love the clean mountain air, I love the beautiful alpine flowers and I love the views of the glaciers. I don't think I've ever felt so alive and healthy than when I've been there. I'm looking forward to the fact that this year I'll have the opportunity to go to Switzerland again. That won't be a hiking holiday, but I'm nevertheless happy that I'll see such a beautiful landscape again. That one was 487 words, so a better effort. In total by my calculations that brings me to 1603 words. Edited by Radioclare on 08 March 2015 at 9:38pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| rdearman Senior Member United Kingdom rdearman.orgRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5017 days ago 881 posts - 1812 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian, French, Mandarin | Message 80 of 292 08 March 2015 at 9:46pm | IP Logged | |||||
If it was easy, it wouldn't be a challenge!!!! Still you're doing better than me, and you're an inspiration for me to get back to work! 1 person has voted this message useful |
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