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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 |  | |
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6378 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 185 of 292 28 May 2015 at 1:26am | IP Logged | ||
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Yeah, the Latin name was cepa and later cepulla, the Italian is cipolla. Also seems like Belarusian and Ukrainian got it from Polish (cebula), which turned p into b independently of Portuguese :)))
In the USSR Cipollino was an extremely popular story, perhaps because the author was an Italian communist and one of the few "approved" modern Western writers. Edited by Serpent on 28 May 2015 at 1:51am 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 186 of 292 30 May 2015 at 12:00am | IP Logged | ||
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This week since I got back from Sweden has been madness. It's sort of my own fault because tomorrow I am going on
holiday (again!) - this time for a two week trip through Italy and Switzerland. So I have had an enormous list of stuff to get done in the four days I've been at work before I can go off again. I think I'm just about sorted now, though I have to get up in three hours to go to the airport, so it's getting to the stage where going to bed hardly seems worth it. Obviously the best use of time in this circumstance is to update my log :D Actually there isn't much to update. I'm still reading 'Izgubljeni Simbol' and about 318 pages into it now. I'm also still reading 'Die Zeit, die Zeit' in German. Reading more in German is at least one goal I am achieving this year, although given that I read zero books in German last year that hasn't been a hard record to beat. I saw tarvos mention reading 'Die Verwandlung' in his log and I am also thinking of buying a copy. I'd like to think I'm fairly well read in German classics but Kafka is a big gaping hole in my education and I feel like I should remedy that. Not least because my sister has recently completed her doctoral thesis which is partly about 'Die Verwandlung' :D Perhaps I will try to read it when I go to Prague in August. I was hoping to refresh my German a bit before going to Switzerland but I have completely failed. Never mind, it's mostly Italian-speaking Switzerland I'm going to anyway! Last night Tim and I went to a meeting of the local Esperanto club. Not the way either of us would normally choose to spend an evening, but it was actually pretty cool and the people were really friendly. They only meet once every two months, so it's not a big commitment if we decide to try and attend more regularly. Finally the big news from yesterday is that the (beta) version of the Esperanto Duolingo course is now available here. I'm really excited to try it out :) 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4488 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 187 of 292 30 May 2015 at 2:41am | IP Logged | ||
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Actually I might use that beta over the summer when I go to Hungary for a one-week
Esperanto festival :) 2 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 188 of 292 01 June 2015 at 11:01pm | IP Logged | ||
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Italy is beautiful, though I find Italian a very confusing language and I don't
understand why it has to be spoken so loudly :D Had a lot of travelling on trains today, so I managed to get to the end of 'Izgubljeni Simbol'. There was one really exciting twist in the plot, but a lot of the subplots about ancient wisdom and Masonic secrets went completely over my head. A lot of it seemed to assume a knowledge of the history and geography of Washington DC which I just didn't possess. I did learn a new word, though: vosak = wax I've also finished reading the Martin Suter novel I was reading in German. That had a stunning plot twist which I definitely didn't see coming - thoroughly recommend it :) 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 189 of 292 10 June 2015 at 7:39pm | IP Logged | ||
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I've been having an amazing holiday in Italy and Switzerland. We flew to Turin last
week, before travelling to Domodossola and then onwards to Locarno and Lugano in Italian-speaking Switzerland. That was my first time in Ticino and I found in fascinating; it was like a cleaner, more efficient and massively more expensive version of Italy ;) From Lugano we travelled to Tirano, a small town on the Italian side of the Swiss/Italian border, and from there had what may be the most spectacular journey I have ever experienced, taking a train through the mountains with the ultimate destination of Zernez, a small town in the Engadine. From there we travelled onwards by bus into the South Tyrol region of Italy, where we have been staying for the past few days in Bolzano/Bozen. We'll be flying home from Trieste on Sunday, and possibly manage to fit in a quick trip across the Slovenian border before then :) The result of having an amazing time is that I haven't had time to do anything in Croatian at all. Oops. I thought the new challenge for the Output Challenge was a great idea when I saw it but unfortunately I haven't written anything at all yet. I may try to write about my travels in retrospect (though I appreciate that's not quite the same as writing a daily journal) or I may try to do a daily journal for July, depending on how busy I am with work once I get home. Having registered for Tadoku with Croatian and German, I haven't read anything in German yet either. But, I do have two German novels with me and today I finished the last English novel in my suitcase, so tomorrow I will definitely start making progress. One novel is by Martin Suter ("Allmen und der rosa Diamant") and the other is Patrick Süskind's "Das Parfum" which I am working myself up to reading. I'm hoping it's not going to be too gory! Perversely, the language which I have practised most on this holiday is Esperanto, despite the fact that I haven't met up with any Esperantists. My other half and I never normally speak Esperanto to each other at home, but when we're travelling the language comes into its own, both as a secret method of communication and as a useful common language if we don't want to be identified as English. We generally start speaking it as soon as we spot any other English tourists in the vicinity, either because we don't want to get dragged into conversation with them or because we don't want to be associated with whatever embarrassing English behaviour they are exhibiting :D Once we start speaking in Esperanto, we sometimes then forget to switch back to English and talk in it for ages. This has actually been quite useful for me to refresh my Esperanto; sometimes I still have to hesitate because a Croatian word comes into my head before the Esperanto one, but mostly I have been getting on okay :) I have also had a small amount of German practice, when we were in Zernez in Switzerland and now we are here in the South Tyrol region of Italy. Extracting the correct German word from my brain at the correct time has been a bit more of a challenge. I was filling in a registration form in the hotel in Zernez which asked for my profession and I think I stood there for a full minute with a blank mind, thinking "Accountant... kontistino... računovođa..." before eventually the correct "Wirtschaftsprüferin" came to mind. This is hardly surprising, however, given my shameful neglect of German over the past few years. This is the first time I have been to South Tyrol and I have found it a surreal experience to be in Italy and able to communicate in German. I think this would be a cool place to come if you speak German and want to learn Italian, because the entire region is like a living parallel text. All the street signs, all the menus, all the advertisements etc are written in both languages and it has been fascinating for me (who doesn't speak any Italian at all) to see translations of all the Italian phrases which have been puzzling me elsewhere as I walk through the streets :) It's a beautiful place too - would definitely like to come back one day. 6 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| basica Senior Member Australia Joined 3317 days ago 157 posts - 269 votes Studies: Serbian | Message 190 of 292 14 June 2015 at 2:12pm | IP Logged | ||
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That's rather cool that you have your partner to speak Esperanto with. That's another language I'd like to
eventually bring up to a high intermediate level. I'm trying to contain my wanderlust at the moment by avoiding even thinking about it, or duolingo where the new course came out recently :) 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 191 of 292 16 June 2015 at 2:12pm | IP Logged | ||
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Back home now unfortunately, but the day before we left we managed to fit in a quick trip across the border to Slovenia.
It's hard not to go to Slovenia when you're in Trieste :) I love the bus station there because there seem to be more buses to Slovenia and Croatia then there are to other parts of Italy, and in fact when I first went to Trieste in 2011 and saw all those buses, that inspired me to plan my first trip to Croatia in 2012. The bus we took to Koper in Slovenia had come from Zagreb and was terminating in Pula. I would have been very tempted to stay on it, were it not for the fact that I already have my first trip to Pula booked for September this year :) But actually catching the bus was not such a pleasant experience as it should have been, because of the complete disregard for seat reservations. I'm about to have a rant now because this is one thing about the Balkans which I seriously don't understand - what is the problem with respecting seat reservations?! I have travelled on buses all over Europe and the only countries where I have had a problem with this are the former Yugoslavian ones (with the exception of Bosnia, because I haven't been to Bosnia yet!). In every other country I've been to, whether in eastern or western Europe, if I buy a public transport ticket where I am charged extra for a seat reservation and then issued with a ticket that has a seat number on it, I expect to spend my entire journey sitting in that seat number. If I get on the bus and someone is already sitting in my seat, I expect to show them my ticket with the reserved number on it and then I expect them to apologise and move. In the exceptional circumstance where they didn't, I would expect to tell the train or bus conductor, who would then make them move. These are basic principles of seat reservations :D In the Balkans, I don't even understand why they sell tickets with reservations; they seriously aren't worth the paper they are written on. At best, they seem to be an aspiration that people might sit in those seats. Otherwise I'm not sure what they are... a joke? a scam to charge a little bit extra for tickets? Certainly, no one seems to regard them as entitling a person to sit in a certain place. Everyone seems to routinely disregard them, sitting wherever they like and not even contemplating moving when presented with evidence of someone else's reservation for their chosen seat. If it's just a short journey like the one from Trieste to Koper, then it doesn't matter (too much... I suppose...!) if I have to stand while someone else sits in the seat I paid for, but on a long-distance journey it can be seriously frustrating. For example last summer I reserved seats on a bus from Montenegro to Belgrade, a journey of around 12 hours. Two other people then sat in those seats and, when I explained I had a reservation and asked them to move, they pretty much laughed in my face. When I went to speak to the driver, he said that the seat reservations were meaningless and I just had to find a free space... But in that case, why does the bus company sell seat reservations in the first place?!!! Okay, rant over :D I feel like there is perhaps some cultural point I am missing here but I have no idea what it is. Towards the end of the holiday I had plenty of time for reading. I finished "Allmen und der rosa Diamant" by Martin Suter (definitely not his best novel, I found it very difficult to like the main character) and "Das Parfum" by Patrick Süskind, which I enjoyed way more than I expected. I knew the storyline in advance and thought it might be really gruesome, but it was actually beautifully written :) Those have given me about 500 pages of German to count towards Tadoku. In Croatian, I've just started reading a translation of "The Hobbit" and I'm about 125 pages in. I haven't read this book in English since I was about 11, so I only have a very vague recollection of what the storyline is. So far I'm finding the language quite difficult because it's using a tense I haven't learned, but I'm persevering with it as best I can. 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 192 of 292 16 June 2015 at 2:15pm | IP Logged | ||
Yes and it's fun to have a secret language together :) I haven't tried the Esperanto Duolingo course yet but it looks like lots of people have signed up for it already, so hoping it is good. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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