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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 4584 days ago 689 posts - 1119 votes  Speaks: English*, German, Esperanto Studies: Croatian, Serbian, Macedonian | Message 281 of 292 15 July 2015 at 10:15pm | IP Logged | ||
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Which language are you struggling to get corrected on lang-8, Expug? I do seem to be
extraordinarily lucky in that I often get my texts corrected within a few hours and it's unusual for it to take longer than a day for someone to respond. I think I am benefiting from the fact that there are far more Croatians learning languages on the website than people from other countries trying to learn Croatian. Basica seems to get pretty rapid corrections for Serbian too, although it is irritating that you have to specify whether a text is in Croatian or Serbian, so I generally I only get Croatians correcting my stuff despite the fact that Serbians could doubtless correct it equally well. I can't even use commas accurately in English :D If my only mistakes were in punctuation I would be ecstatic :) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 5167 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 282 of 292 15 July 2015 at 10:42pm | IP Logged | ||
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Any of my languages I try there: French, Norwegian and Georgian. It used to be better with French, but lately no luck. As for Norwegian I haven't got any corrections at all. With Georgian I used to get instant corrections too, but somehow it faded. I posted there yesterday and someone 'tried' to correct it, but seemed to have some problems.
I usually cross-post at italki, where I used to have more lucky for Norwegian, but I don't have that luch anymore. I cross-posted my Georgian text in the hope that either one of the communities correct it. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Radioclare Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom timeofftakeoff.com Joined 4584 days ago 689 posts - 1119 votes Speaks: English*, German, Esperanto Studies: Croatian, Serbian, Macedonian | Message 283 of 292 16 July 2015 at 10:27am | IP Logged | ||
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That's frustrating :( My theory was that it would be harder to get corrections for French as there are more people learning that and needing corrections than with Georgian, but sounds like that isn't the case! I will make the most of getting Croatian corrections while I can.
Yesterday's words...
There are definitely going to be Budva spoilers in the rest of this post because I watched the penultimate episode last night. OMG. Where to start?! Well, it was very exciting and one scene even made me cry. Have I achieved B1 listening if Montenegrin dialogue makes me cry?! Who knows :) The main story line of the series came to a head when Savo finally discovered the background of the mysterious woman he is on the verge of marrying. This was thanks to the efforts of his daughter Bojana and her journalist friend with the uncle who speaks Esperanto. They had tracked the woman, Mila, down to the home which she shares with her disabled father and scary psycho brother and Bojana passed the address on to Savo, who decided to do the completely logical thing and break into it with a crowbar. The psycho brother luckily wasn't there, as conveniently he was sitting on a beach trying to convince Mila that she needed to go ahead with their plan to murder Savo. Mila was waivering, because her father had miraculously regained the ability to speak in a previous episode and told her that she needed to stop what she was doing. Savo was therefore confronted with the father, who instantly recognised him, although Savo had no idea who he was. It turned out that Mila's father had been an important colonel during the Yugoslavian years and very close to Tito. He had obviously been very upset by the breakdown of Yugoslavia, and we had a flashback to a scene when he was in the grounds of a beautiful villa (it wasn't clear whether it belonged to him or to Tito) and a younger version of Savo turned up with boxes of American cigarettes, which he proceeded to hand out to other people who looked like military officials. I think basically Savo was buying the villa off them at a knock-down price. The father came running up shouting that they were traitors and he was so upset about it that he had a stroke, which is the source of his present incapacity. Mila, who was a small girl at the time, was there and saw what happened. So ever since, she and her brother have been intent on destroying Savo and the other people involved. Savo eventually realised who the father was and made the quite reasonable points that a) he wasn't responsible for the guy having had a stroke and b) he wasn't responsible for the fall of Yugoslavia either, but the father seemed to see him as a symbol of the type of person who was responsible for these things. The father asked Savo to kill him, which seemed rather unreasonable, and Savo refused and left. Shortly afterwards the scary brother returned and freaked out when he saw someone had broken into the house. The father repeated what Mila had been saying to him; that they needed to stop pursuing Savo, stop trying to get revenge and move on with their lives. The father repeated this over and over again but the brother couldn't process it, I guess because he'd spent his entire life trying to get revenge on these people. He was shouting at the father to stop saying that but the father kept saying it over and over again until the son lost it. Then we had possibly the most disturbing scene in the entire history of Budva, when the son picked up a ceramic plant pot and hit his father with it repeatedly until he went quiet. You didn't see the father, just the son wielding the pot and each time he raised it, it was covered in blood... Meanwhile a few minor storylines came to a conclusion and Savo was back with Mila. Rather than confronting her about her father he proceeded to have a completely normal conversation with her. Not sure whether he was biding his time to mention it or whether it hadn't occurred to him that maybe her intentions towards him were less than honourable. Either way, it turned out to be a bad decision as her scary brother called her and told him that Savo had broken into the house while they were out and killed their father. Mila tricks Savo into driving her to a remote location, whereupon her brother hits him over the head with a crowbar and she holds him at gunpoint... and that's where the episode ended! Definitely going to watch the final episode this evening :) 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Radioclare Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom timeofftakeoff.com Joined 4584 days ago 689 posts - 1119 votes Speaks: English*, German, Esperanto Studies: Croatian, Serbian, Macedonian | Message 284 of 292 16 July 2015 at 2:59pm | IP Logged | ||
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Serpent made me aware that Serbian/Croatian has been added to the list of languages you can test yourself on at the Online Diagnostic Assessment website. This is very exciting; you can only test reading for the time being, but hopefully listening might be added soon too.
I have tried the reading test and it is HARD! I guess partly because it is showing you questions above the level where it thinks you are to check you're not at the level above yet. It's basically a reading comprehension test (you type answers to questions on Serbian/Croatian texts in English) but I found the themes of the texts were quite challenging, being mainly political or economic themes (for example I had one text about the economic consequences of the sale of a Serbian oil company). What also made it difficult for me is that the texts roughly alternated between the Latin alphabet and Serbian Cyrillic. Luckily it wasn't a timed test, because my Cyrillic reading speed is still slow. I found reading comprehension a lot more difficult for the Cyrillic texts because I couldn't just glance at a paragraph and pick out the key words as I could in Croatian; I had to read each word in the paragraph one by word to puzzle out what it was about. My results are here. If the link doesn't work, I came out as level 2+. I scored 77.78% on content questions at that level (only 55.56% at the next level 3) and 92.59% on linguistic questions at that level (74.07% at the next level). Interestingly, it gives you the marks for "Croatian only" separately to "All Serbian/Croatian", which I guess makes it possible to judge how much reading Cyrillic impacted your scores. It doesn't look like it made a huge impact in my case. The big question is - what does level 2+ actually mean?! It's an American scoring system and according to Wikipedia it equates to B2. So I'm extremely happy with that result :) :) :) Edited by Radioclare on 16 July 2015 at 3:00pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 5167 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 285 of 292 16 July 2015 at 4:07pm | IP Logged | ||
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Told you so! =D It was only a matter of getting yourself tested to confirm what everyone already knew.
I try not to make a big deal of it, because I'm the one who chose to learn 10 languages at once, after all. Had I been learning one or two and writing regularly, perhaps I'd have enough friends on lang-8 to constantly correct me. In the case of French and German, at least for shorter paragraphs, I can always contact friends at a webchat. So I really shouldn't make a big deal out of it, not let it discourage me from practicing. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Radioclare Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom timeofftakeoff.com Joined 4584 days ago 689 posts - 1119 votes Speaks: English*, German, Esperanto Studies: Croatian, Serbian, Macedonian | Message 286 of 292 16 July 2015 at 11:43pm | IP Logged | ||
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Okay, okay, perhaps you are all better at determining my level than I am ;) Perhaps at the end of the year I need to
organise a poll on my log so you can vote for whether I reached B2 or not :D Today's words...
There were more (silly!) mistakes in that text than I would have liked, but never mind. I was a bit over-excited because I finally watched the last episode of 'Budva na pjenu od mora'. Wow. There was a lot of suspense! In the final episode we had a death (though not necessarily of the person I was expecting), an engagement and a birth, so pretty much all storylines were resolved. It was really, really good. I cried again! And now I feel like I have been orphaned by a series again - not sure what I am going to watch to take it's place. I ideally want to watch something Croatian (for cultural reasons really, because I feel like I've spent too long absorbing weird Montenegrin accents, and when I watched a Croatian series before I learned a lot of Zagreb slang from it). But I want something that I can watch without a lot of hassle; the best thing about the two series I have watched so far have been freely available on Youtube, which makes life a lot easier. I have heard that one of the biggest Croatian TV series ever is "Larin Izbor" so I would quite like to try that, but it seems virtually impossible to find all the episodes online (there are a lot of episodes!) so not sure that is going to work :( 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| basica Senior Member Australia Joined 3537 days ago 157 posts - 269 votes Studies: Serbian | Message 287 of 292 17 July 2015 at 1:36am | IP Logged | ||
I think it's got to do with one's personality. Those who tend to be perfectionists (like myself) will look at a list of criteria and go "Hmm, I only meet 97 out of the 100 key proficiencies - obviously I haven't met the requirements yet!" while others tend to go "Hmm, I've met 35 out of 100, 35 is nearly 50, 50 is a pass on an exam so therefore I must have met the requirements!". People tend to be more on one extreme or the other and much more rarely in the middle. U svakom slučaju ( :P ), you have made excellent progress! I also hope you do find a TV show replacement :) 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6598 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 288 of 292 17 July 2015 at 6:14am | IP Logged | ||
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Awww, but I think it's pretty clear that you're B2 in reading at least. I mean level 2 is already B2, and you got 2+.
In terms of for example basic fluency, the real issue is whether you feel comfortable saying "I speak Croatian" and in general if you can speak it with some fluency (in the technical sense) and even confidence. If you lack these, you probably need to accept that there *will* be moments when you lack accuracy. Just speak and don't worry, and I know it's easier said than done. I think glossika can help a lot with that, and of course your next trip to Croatia. Edited by Serpent on 17 July 2015 at 6:15am 4 persons have voted this message useful |
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