Tim’s Catalan Book (Team Caesar)
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Forum Name: Language Learning Log
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Printed Date: 15 May 2021 at 6:16am
Posted By: Meddysong
Subject: Tim’s Catalan Book (Team Caesar)
Date Posted: 14 January 2015 at 11:55pm
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Hello!
I'm Tim, other half of Radioclare and new member of Team Caesar. My challenge is to learn Catalan. And the primary reason is to read a book that I asked Clare to buy me recently:  That is a huge book! It's nearly as thick as my tea mug!  It's colossal, one of the biggest books I own:  At nearly 1,300 pages in length it's not a project to be taken lightly. But I fully intend to read it. Unbelievably it was only £3.08 including postage. Out of all the world's language groups I'm most familiar with the Romance branch and I know from a trip to Andorra, where Catalan is the official language, that I'm in a reasonably strong position. I didn't happen to know at the time what language was written everywhere but I could understand it, including when conversing with our taxi driver. The same was true when we were in Barcelona and I had to ask for directions, only to get a reply in Catalan, which presented no problems. So my goal is an unusual one. I'm not learning in preparation for a holiday, and have no expectations of being able to write the language comfortably. And I certainly don't anticipate obtaining any sort of ability to speak it out loud. All I want to do is dip into the language and then in a few months' time, once I'm happy that I've absorbed the grammar, read my book. This thread will be where I keep track of what I'm doing. I've recently started (courtesy of Santa Claus) reading in French and Italian again, and so I'll be mentioning them too in this thread. At some point in the year I suspect I might try learning Romanian. Clare and I have visited most countries in Europe and, as much as is reasonable, try not to use English. If there's a language that belongs to a group that we know, then we sort of expect ourselves to be able to speak it. We haven't been to Bulgaria or Romania yet and I'm hoping to add those countries to our holiday plans for 2016. Clare's learning Macedonian this year, which will mean she's fine for Bulgaria. And since Romanian is a Romance language, that falls to me. I'm secretly really looking forward to it, in the hope that its Slavic features act as a gateway to that language family too. |
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As for Romanian the Slavic elements are mostly in the pronunciation and some of the
vocabulary (and some of the words are fairly literary - I got chastised for sounding Moldovan when I used them). However your French/Italian will come in very handy for Romanian, in my experience. Romania is loads of fun, enjoy it. tarvos on 15 January 2015 |
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My favourite Catalan anecdote in my limited experience of the language occurred a few months ago, when I saw something written on a Catalan friend's Facebook wall. I understood the sentiment perfectly, though wasn't sure of one particular word [potatoes? paws?], so accepted Bing's offer to translate it.
It didn't appear to think too highly of the smiley face:  Meddysong on 15 January 2015 |
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Hi, Tarvos -
The Slavic features that I was thinking about were the five cases that Romanian features, rather than the vocab. I understand what the cases are (I've dabbled with Russian, Croatian, German and a few other languages too) but was looking forward to some reinforcement in their use. That's a project for another day though :) Meddysong on 15 January 2015 |
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They officially have five cases but actually there are only three forms (nom/acc and
dat/gen are identical). And nobody in big cities uses the vocative very often, I think, but you may encounter it in villages. I heard the vocative very often, but I didn't stay in Bucharest. (I lived in Brasov). The cases actually have nothing to do with the Slavic languages either - they're a remnant of Latin. tarvos on 15 January 2015 |
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Oh sure, I get that - but since they've more or less disappeared from Latin's other descendants I've never had reason to work with them before. So theoretically good preparation for Slavic languages, as long as I accept that it's only with pronouns that there's a visible distinction :)
Meddysong on 15 January 2015 |
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M'alegro de veure que hi ha un altra persona aquí aprenent el català! És una llengua meravellosa, molt bonica, amb moltes coses divertides quant tant a la gramàtica com a la literatura. Et desitjo molt d'èxit!
Quant a la paraula "patades", la forma singular és "patada". No sé si saps el castellà, però vol dir "(a) kick". Obrir-la "a patades" vol dir que utilitzas una "patada" per obrir la porta (en lloc d'obrir-la amb la clau). Crush on 15 January 2015 |
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I dipped my toe into Catalan for the first time today. Well, I'd already read the first page of my book and the author's comments, just for curiosity's sake, so that's not exactly true. That was enough for me to identify something unexpected, unless I'm misunderstanding something. It seems that in Catalan the structure "go + infinitive", unlike in English and the other Romance languaages, forms a past tense. I find that sort of thing fascinating.
Anyway, back to the subject. I did my first bit of homework today, reading the first section of "http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=M39OjLITfp4C" - Catalan: A Comprehensive Grammar , which was about the gender of nouns. I find that a curious starting-point; I don't necessarily know how to pronounce the words that I'm reading so would've preferred to start with the alphabet. That said, the preface indicates an assumption that the reader already has some familiarity with the language, hence the omission. That's something I need to investigate, then! There wasn't much in the way of surprises for me with the chapter on gender. It follows the standard Romance model, with the same sort of exceptions from the broader rules. I did pick up, though, that the title of my book, Un món sense fi, could be interpreted a different way. It's a world without end but owing to the lack on an article at the end, we could assume that it's a masculine word fi rather than the feminine one that it actually is and translate it as a pointless world (=a world without an objective). So that's today's grammar-nerding :) That's chapter 1 of 37. This is the sort of thing I can see myself dipping into a fair bit. I might even do a bit later. But I'm feeling tempted to start a book in Italian. Hmm ... Meddysong on 17 January 2015 |
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Welcome to the Forum BTW. I have a couple of Italian books if you want.
:) rdearman on 18 January 2015 |
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Thank you! I have a stash of Italian books that I bought when on holiday in Sardinia last year with the intention of reading them in 2015. I've read a couple already but still have maybe six to go.
I suppose I should write something on the language-related books I've read this year, come to think of it. Some of it seems quite lowbrow, but I love Asterix and learned a tonne of Esperanto from them when I was a beginner, so I've continued to buy them in different languages (or have them bought for me, since it was Christmas recently). Two have bitten the dust so far this year, both in French: Asterix et le chaudron et Le devin. I loved them both, which doesn't surprise me at all. I can't say the same about the French translation of Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca, which I started at the end of last year. Goodness me - when will something happen? Why should I care about the protagonist? I've just got past the half-way mark and am a stubborn man, so I'll finish it, but probably at the pace of three of four chapters a week. It took me a while to get into Dieci piccoli indiani, an Italian translation of Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None, but things picked up and it became a page-turner towards the end. I'm toying with the idea of starting another Italian book today. At weekends I tend to prefer reading big, coffee-table style books. And since it was Christmas recently I have a new stock of them. So I might not. Plus I'm out this afternoon. Not a social thing as such (perish the thought!) but a meeting with a very nice fella who has declared an interest in becoming a trustee of the Esperanto Association of Britain, so I'll be sitting down with him to bring him up to speed. I expect we'll speak in English (this is business rather than pleasure and I keep the two separate) but maybe switch once the more formal stuff is out the way. Oh, with respect to Catalan - I should've noted yesterday a curious feature by which feminine names of towns, cities and countries are preceded with an invariable form tot [all] and mig [half] rather than the feminine forms tota and mitja. Noted. Aren't things like this strange? You just have to accept them, I suppose, much as with the French phenomenon of going from one preposition + article if it's a masculine country to changing the preposition and dropping the article if it's a feminine one: aller au Canada but en France. Meddysong on 18 January 2015 |
anar: vaig vas va anem aneu van formes del passat perifràstic: vaig vas va VAM VAU van There's also a simple past form, but similar to French it's mostly relegated to the literary language. Also, do you have any examples of preceding a feminine city with tot/mig? I'm curious what that could be. Crush on 18 January 2015 |
Only the direct quotation from the book: 1.2.1 NOUNS ENDING IN -a Most nouns ending in unstressed -a are feminine. As seen above, the affix -a is also the major one used to derive feminine nouns and adjectives from masculine ones. Thus: capsa (f.) little box França (f.) France història (f.) history, story Tarragona (f.) Tarragona cama (f.) leg Curiously, feminine names of towns, cities, and countries are preceded by invariant tot ‘all’, mig ‘half’ rather than the feminine forms tota, mitja: tot Catalunya ‘all Catalonia’, Mig Girona va quedar a les fosques ‘Half Girona was in darkness’. Meddysong on 18 January 2015 |
Hmm, i dunno if i ever really paid attention to that. I guess i'll have to watch out for that. Thanks! Btw, i just found an http://esadir.cat/gramatica/sintaxi/totimiggeogr - entry (in Catalan) about that at esadir.cat:
Crush on 19 January 2015 |
Most linguists agree that the auxiliary in this construction derives from "anar", but it has been "desemanticised", i.e. lost its original meaning as a verb of movement and functions only as a marker of the past tense in this particular construction. I have been quite interested in learning about the origins of this construction in Catalan, but I cannot say that I have found a 100% convincing explanation. However, this http://www.academia.edu/1147977/Present_and_historical_persp ectives_on_the_Catalan_GO-past - article puts forward some interesting views on the question, pointing to the fact that this construction also existed in Occitan and Old French. The author therefore thinks that it was introduced in Catalan by influence from Occitan. If true it explains how it came about, but not really why. Ogrim on 19 January 2015 |
Thank you - that's fascinating. I love that sort of quirk! It's maybe not the best thing when you're learning, but it all adds flavour to the language. I don't think it was an unreasonable conclusion, all said, to have drawn. The author notes on the back, for example, include: "Des que el 1989 vaig publicar Els pilars de la terra, milers de lectors m'han demanat que escrigués la segona part ... Al final, però, vaig decidir omplir-me de valor." And the biography starts: "Ken Follett va néixer a Cardiff, Gal·les. Després de llicenciar-se en filosofia al University College de Londres, va treballar de periodista per al ..." Thanks for pointing out the difference. It could've left me mightily confused later when I undoubtedly meet the forms that no longer match :) ****** On the language front: I downloaded a ten-minute or so podcast of The news in slow Italian and listened to it yesterday. That's such a good idea and I more or less followed it perfectly. Since I was driving at the time I didn't pay proper attention at certain points but when I was able to offer some degree of concentration, I was happy to be able to follow it. I also downloaded what I thought to be the first ten lessons (in reality, the whole course) of One-Minute Catalan. There wasn't much in the way of depth, but given that I didn't know the basic words (hello, goodbye etc) it served its purpose. It reinforced to me, however, that I'm a visual learner, because though I could hear the words and more or less repeat them, my brain was crying out to see them in printed form so that it could file them away. Consequently, I can't quite recall everything that I couldn't attempt to visualise, so although I'm fairly confident that there was a sentence along the lines of "parlo una mica catala", I can't recall "I don't understand" on the basis that it seemed to be no + entend- + some ending that I couldn't quite make out, but which sounded like it might be a g. Still, it was useful to get the reinforcement that it does - unsurprisingly - sound very similar in quality to Spanish, so I think I'll try to track down other such sources. My chat with a fellow Esperanto-speaker yesterday went really well. We chatted for three and a half hours without realising it - we could've gone on for much longer but it dawned on me that I'd have a very hungry and upset other half, since I wouldn't be home till nine and hadn't yet cooked dinner! Owing to the time I got home there was no scope to start another book, so in that respect I'm disappointed. It's been a book-free weekend (he says, forgetting until mid-sentence about the pages he's read of his PDF about Catalan). I hope to get something in tonight by way of compensation. Meddysong on 19 January 2015 |
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It likely won't be a problem since "anar" is rarely used the same way as Spanish's "ir" or French's "aller", it's pretty much restricted to movement (going from here to there). Sometimes you'll see it with an infinitive in the form "anar a ...", but it's got more emphasis on the action of GOING than on being a future action. Here's an explanation i just found online:
http://cv.uoc.edu/tren/trenacc/web/LLENGUA.GLOSSNOMEN/glossa ri_entrades.frame_detall?i_paraula=40 - http://cv.uoc.edu/tren/trenacc/web/LLENGUA.GLOSSNOMEN/glossa ri_entrades.frame_detall?i_paraula=40 It gives a couple examples on how "anar" should not be used to talk about future actions unless you literally have to move from one place to another to do it (for example, "vaig a obrir la porta"). Another thing you'll probably come across sooner or later is the controversy surrounding per and per a, it seems like there's no real "correct" (maybe "standard" would be a better word) way. Though i think the growing tendency (the simpler one) is to not use "per a + infinitive" and in all other situations distinguish them more or less like Spanish por and para. Crush on 19 January 2015 |
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I've read a further two chapters of my Comprehensive Grammar. Chapter 2 dealt with forming plurals, which seems reasonably predictable. Practice will make perfect there! I never like things such as augmentatives, diminutives and pejoratives. I know how they work but they always seem like a list of words to remember, so I didn't get much from that part of the chapter.
The third one introduced me to articles. Usage seems largely as Spanish (for example, the regular use of indefinite plurals) and I don't think I'll overly struggle. There were a few quirks I picked up. For instance, I earlier wrote about "the French phenomenon of going from one preposition + article if it's a masculine country to changing the preposition and dropping the article if it's a feminine one" and it transpires there's a similar gendered distinction fr places in Catalan too, with most names ending in -a (ie feminine ones) not taking an article whilst others (ie the masculine ones) do. Most unexpected was the existence of regional forms, the so-called article salat. Blimey. That's quite some jump from el and la to es and sa. Apparently these are localised to the Balearics, where I hope never to holiday, but I suppose I should be aware of them in the event I ever try Catalan literature. And finally was the concept of adding articles before people's names. It's not the concept itself that caught me out but the fact that there are new articles for it (which vary depending on the region). Again, it will be a case of bearing in mind that en is el and na is la. ****** As regards other languages ... well, really life gets in the way so I still haven't started anything in Italian. I've read a few chapters of the French version of Rebecca, though - I'll get there in the end! Meddysong on 21 January 2015 |
Hehe. Mallorca and Ibiza definitely don't seem to be your style, but Menorca actually seems pretty cool, based on my friend's experience. Serpent on 21 January 2015 |
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While it may seem like quite a jump, there are a few explanations for it though i think the generally accepted opinion is that they stem directly from the Latin articles ipse/ipsa/ipsos/ipsas.
http://www.gereon.es/catal%C3%A0/ling%C3%BC%C3%ADstica/ l-article-salat/ - http://www.gereon.es/catal%C3%A0/ling%C3%BC%C3%ADstica/l-art icle-salat/ Interestingly enough, Sardinian also shares this feature, having the articles su/sa/sos/sas. I don't know of any other Romance languages like that, though. Also, don't worry about the diminutives and all that, i think that stuff's best met in context. Crush on 22 January 2015 |
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Clare bought me a copy of Astèrix el Gal for our anniversary last week. I find Asterix to be a very useful way of getting my head around the grammar of a language. That might strike people as very odd, so I'll give some examples of what I think I've discovered about Catalan from the first ten pages or so.
- What I mentioned earlier about using articles in front of people's names is definitely true. It seems to be localised to third-person use, since every instance in which characters are addressing each other (what would be the vocative in Catalan's latinate predecessors) is just the natural form of the name, without an article or case ending. Every third-person case does have an article though: "Mentre en Panoramíx, el nostre druidà, ens preparí la poció, els Romans no poden fer-nos res." - The example above (el nostre druidà) indicates that possessive adjectives also take an article. - There seem to be two verbs for "to be", as in Spanish. The pattern seems to be the same, with states taking one form and permanent features, for want of a better expression, taking another. "Tota la Gaŀlia és occupada pels Romans", "Astèrix és l'heroic petit guerrer d'aquestes aventures", Obèlix es l'amic inseparable d'Astérix". I'm not sure why "Obelix està sempre preparat per deíxar-ho tot i seguir" takes one form whilst "és repectat dels seus homes i temut pels seus enemics", though. They both seem equivalent to me. Maybe that's something which will become apparent over time. - It seems to be that object pronouns appear in front of conjugated verbs and seem to be inverted: "Em senta una mica feble", "No et donaré la poció magica!" But if it the verb is in its infinitive form, then the pronoun is appended with a hyphen and the infinitive end (assuming there is one) removed: "Tot el que puc dir-te és ..." - This inversion before a verb seems not to take place when another pronoun is there: "Me 'n dones?" And that other pronoun seems to stand for partitives or phrases which begin with "de": "Si, en bieves", "Què en penses del meu pla?", "No en penso res." - I'm not yet sure on the placement of pronouns with imperatives. It strikes me that they come after ("Mireu-lo!") but I've found an example "L'agafarem!". Maybe the first-person plural behaves differently ... - There seems to be an equivalent to the French construction "ne ... pas", in this case "no ... res", as set out above and in "Mentre en Panoramix, el nostre druidà, ens preparí la poció, els Romans no poden fer-nos res." - The first-person future tense seems to follow the same pattern that Spanish does with "No et donaré la poció magica!" and "No aniré ambs els Gals". I presume the pattern will hold so that we see "donaràs", "donarà". - The construction for liking or enjoying something is indirect. The conditional mode seems to work the same way as Spanish: "M'agradaria una bona baralla." - There seems to be a single auxiliary word beginning with h-, which I've seen in several constructions ("Els nostres gals havien estat venguts pels romans", "Ja t'he dit mil vegades que hi haveis caigut a dins quan eres petit"). It doesn't correspond to the verb "have" because of examples such as "Tens raó", "Acqí tenim la poció" indicate that the verb "to hold" has taken on this meaning. It also seems to lend itself to obligation when expressed "h- + de", as in "Haig de entregar molts menhirs" and "No hem de comptar". I'm finding the book surprisingly easy to read. It certainly helps knowing Asterix very well, of course. I probably read the first 20 pages at the same speed as I would in Italian, but I'm deliberately going back to the beginning rather than aiming to finish because my aim isn't to speed through the book but to use it as a linguistic tool to become familiar with the language. I finally finished the French version of Rebecca. It was rubbish. The last quarter had the makings of something exciting but it was painful getting there. Meddysong on 26 January 2015 |
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Excellent summary of the grammar as used in Asterix.
Catalan "en" (or even rarer, feminine "na") before names may behave like an article, but according to www.diccionari.cat it is derived from Latin "domine", which also gave Spanish "Don". My explanation for the "estar" in "Obelix està sempre preparat per deíxar-ho tot i seguir" is that this is judged from the situation where Obelix actually has the opportunity to show that he is ready to follow along, and there he is deemed to be prepared to leave at a moment's notice. On the other hand the chieftain is permanently "repectat dels seus homes i temut pels seus enemics". Iversen on 26 January 2015 |
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Iversen is basically right. One of the pitfalls in Catalan when you already know Spanish is to use ser and estar the same way as in Spanish, I regularly make that kind of mistake myself. However, Ser and Estar are used differently in Catalan, both when used with an adverb to indicate position (being somewhere) and with adjectives. There is quite a good outline of the main differences at the blog http://elcatalacomcal.blogspot.fr/2008/01/els-verbs-ser-i-es tar.html - El català com cal . By the way, I recommend this site if you want to explore further the finer nuances of difference between Castilian and Catalan. The blog is primarily aimed at native Catalans who let Spanish influence the language, but also very useful for Spanish-speakers who want to learn correct Catalan.
Great log you have, by the way, interesting to read about how you explore grammar using Asterix (I am also a fan of le petit Gaulois). Ogrim on 26 January 2015 |
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Thank you for your words, gentlemen. It's nice to know that people are reading :)
Time for a quick update using Asterix. The format I used above takes a bit too much organizing, so instead I'll read from Asterix and quote what my brain is registering. - Magnífica victòria per a nosaltres A-ha. I'd picked up on per being used in the context of purpose (ie for) but also seen it used passively (ie by). It seems that the way to distinguish whether we mean "for us" or "by us" is to go from using "per" on its own to "per a". - Esperem que en Caligula Minus pugui tornar senceret a contar-nos el que haurà vist! That i-ending on pugui is interesting to me as is the stem change. I'm anticipating a subjunctive in this sort of structure and my brain believes this to be poder, so I'll be keeping my eyes open to see what that verb looks like in other forms. I've also noticed that the form of the h-verb (I don't know what the infinitive is but would guess haver) has swapped what was a v in other forms for a u in its future form here. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised, given that French does the same. - Hi estaràs segur, només hi ha Gals! I confess I had to look up the translation of només, since it's appeared a lot up to now. And now the pieces have fallen into place. I've received confirmation in this sentence of what I wrote earlier: 'I presume the pattern will hold so that we see "donaràs", "donarà"' Well, I saw "haurà" above and now have seen "estaràs", so the predicted pattern seems to be the actual one. It seems that the h-verb plays a "there is/are" role ("ha") and that there's a pronoun ("hi", reminding me of French "y") to indicate location. - Els hem avisat de la teva visita More confirmation that h-verb is an auxiliary and that possessive adjectives take an article. I've seen "meva" and now "teva", so the feminine forms have a v where the masculine took, I think, u. - Hi ha senglar! More confirmation on what I felt earlier about "hi" and "ha". I love the Gauls' obsession with boars - this one made me smile :) - Sí, però no el puc revelar - Per què no em pots revelar, el secret? A-ha! Two forms of poder. Puc (hence the stem pugui that I noticed earlier) and pots. I also get a reminder that pronouns before a verb appear to be inverted. - Podria [...] tornar al casa meva - Podriem menjar-nos el seu senglar! More of poder, this time in the conditional. At this rate, it'll be the first verb I learn to conjugate. There's a reminder here of that change from v to u in "meva". I love Obelix here! And I note the use of the reflexive -nos. I'm assuming that this is idiomatic and plays into Obelix being Obelix. He wants that boar! - Què vols de mi? - Jo, res. [...] El meu amic voldria coneixer el secret de la nostra força. Some conjugation of, I'm guessing, voler. At this point I'm having second thoughts about what I wrote earlier: 'There seems to be an equivalent to the French construction "ne ... pas", in this case "no ... res"' In this instance, res appears to mean "nothing". - És un secret que es menja? A reminder for me that pronouns are inverted before a verb. I've also picked up a construction that in English would be passive (or would use a construction with "people", the general "you", or "one") is a reflexive construction here as, say, in Italian: "Qui si parla Italiano". - Que comenci la festa! More reinforcement that (at least) the third-person singular ending in the subjunctive is -i. - Has estat tu qui ha insistit fins que li n'he donat! This was a really useful sentence. I know that the second-person singular pronoun is tu, that in these constructions we conjugate to the person (whereas in English we assume third-person, so "I'm the one who tells you ..." etc ), and that there is an indirect pronoun li. - Tinc el secret - No crec pas que siguis Gal! - Vinc a deslliurar en Panoramix Lots of verbs have a first-person conjugation ending in -c. I saw this with poder earlier too. I'm confused now seeing pas in "No crec pas". I'll be keeping my eye out for more examples of this. - Vaig a buscar - Haig de ... A reminder that other verbs take -ig in the 1ps. - Seria terrible per a nosaltres si et perdiem A-ha, a conditional construction! I can see that the if-clause is introduced by si, plus there are reminders that "for us" and "by us" are distinguished by the presence or absence of "a", and that pronoun inversion occurs. - a veure si puc trobar on tenen presoner el druida A nice sentence which introduces me to a new verb (veure). - Vejam per aqui ... Asterix is talking to himself here and I'm thinking that he's saying "let's look around here", so the 3p imperative of veure has a stem change. There's a reminder that per fulfills many roles in Catalan. - Faré que se'l mengin els lleons, a Roma! El Cèsar seré jo! More future tenses. Mengin is clearly a 3pp in the subjunctive and what was a j in other forms in now a g. I'm confused about the use of "se" before it. I'll have to monitor that. - No em diu on es troba el druida The usual reminders about pronouns, plus a new verb. ***** I still have another 18 pages of the book to go. Writing the notes and then typing them is taking far longer than reading. I'm not the most disciplined person but I shall try to keep it up. I've started reading La forma dell'acqua by Andrea Camilleri. That's brought me down to Earth with a bang. I don't normally have trouble reading Italian but I'm really struggling with this. At the point when I saw the following sequence: - Allura? - Allura nenti. instead of "Allora niente" I realised that lots of the book is written in nonstandard Italian but it's not just that. The poetic descriptions of the landscape and scenery use vocab that I don't know too. I'm fortunate that Clare has it in English, so I'm reading initially in Italian to see what I understand, then the same chapter in English to fill in the gaps, before re-reading in Italian. Fortunately the chapters are short, but it's not a fun way to read compared to the usual approach. Meddysong on 31 January 2015 |
IDK if I was even supposed to be included but http://imgur.com/gallery/ooAmykE - I am no man :) Serpent on 31 January 2015 |
Crush on 01 February 2015 |
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Lots for me to digest there, Crush. Thank you for taking the time to type it all up for me.
Before too long I'm going to start formally learning rather than just see what I can pick up from Asterix. So I'll soon know what the persons are, have an idea of verbal conjugations etc. I'm quite looking forward to it!
I thought adverb too but figured I'd better check or risk getting corrected. The Google hits for "french y" all mention "(adverbial) pronoun", however. I think I'll do some more Asterix later :) Edit: In one of those bizarre coincidences in life I've just opened my Comprehensive Grammar at a random page and the first thing that caught my eye was "12.7 THE ADVERBIAL PRONOUN hi". Wowzers! Meddysong on 01 February 2015 |
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Yay, Asterix is done! Here are my observations:
After Crush kindly explained to me above that "L'agafarem!" is the future rather than an imperative, what's the first thing on my page? "Agafeu-lo, covards!" It's followed by "O us faig devorar al circ, pels lleons!" So now I know what "or" is, I can see "do/make" in 1ps (faig) and can see that it's used in passive constructions of the form "I'll have you -ed", with the agent being introduced by "per". - Pietat! Pietat! No puc més! | No podria suportar aquests crits in un segon més! A-ha. "More" = "més". - Prepararé la pociò davant teu. There are stressed forms of pronouns then, with "teu" being used for "tu". - Començo a tenir-ne prou! | No puc més! Prou! "Prou" = "enough". - Però si no estic enfadat amb ningú 1ps of "estar" is "estic". We're using "estar" here because it refers to a temporary state rather than permanent characteristic of being an angry person. - Saps qué et dic ... demà m'afaitaràs Such a bizarre sentence out of context but I enjoy it. "You know what I'm telling you/you know what I'm saying." Now I know the word for tomorrow. I needed to check up on some other words too during the story,since they appeared on several occasions; potser = maybe; ara = now. - És que no tinc ganes de traballar! This may as well be Spanish :) It's nice to be able to register the existence of "tenir ganes" for future use. - Caldrà que vagi a buscar ingredients al bosc There were a few variations of "caldrà" and I took them to mean "you need/it's necessary" etc. It's clear as well that the subjunctive in -i that I mentioned earlier is also applying to the 1ps. - És que ... precisament, lluviàtem contra uns Gals ... - Uns Gals? Quants Gals ... ? - Dos ... Such a fabulous sequence! Grammatically, it's reinforcement for me of an indefinite plural and I now know how to say "how many?". - Vaja, vaja This seems to me "go on, continue", so I'll be keeping an eye out to see whether the subjunctive of "anar" is something along this form and whether the imperative is formed from it. Super fun! I'll have to get another Asterix soon :) Meddysong on 01 February 2015 |
Fun to see your grammar analysis of Asterix. I just wanted to chip in with one piece of information. You are right about "tenir ganes de" being the same as Spanish "tener ganas de". However, "gana" in singular means "hunger", "hambre". So if you say "tinc gana" it means "I am hungry". I mention this because when I first came across it I was confused about the use in singular. Ogrim on 02 February 2015 |
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Hello, again!
I've just finished a Catalan book ... albeit a children's one ... with only 14 pages in it. So it's not even as long as Asterix, which thrashes it handily at a colossal 48 pages. I must've bought it as a souvenir when Clare and I were in Barcelona for a weekend. I remembered I'd stored it away and decided to locate it and give it a try, which I found very rewarding. It's already pretty by the cover: 
But the best feature is the pop-outs on every page; I'd have loved this if I were a kid: 
I enjoyed reading it. The sentence structure was, of course, relatively simple, with lots of use of past forms. There were body parts mentioned (to explain the role of various bits of armour), plus some other basic words, the most of surprising of which to me was that "red" is "vermell". Now that I wouldn't have expected! I've been reading in a few other languages recently. Having finished the Catalan version of Asterix el Gal I decided to buy the Spanish one for £2 to compare them. I think it's genuinely the case that I find Catalan more intuitive; if there's a Spanish word that I don't know, there's a good likelihood that the Catalan one will be recognisable to me. I'm probably a little bit past the halfway mark, but these books are there to be enjoyed rather than rushed when I use them for learning languages. I'm probably about two thirds the way through La forma dell'acqua. That's sapping my confidence a little bit because of how impenetrable I find some of the vocab and dialogue. I've done better since deciding to stop reading one chapter in Italian and then read it again in English before repeating the Italian. I now do three chapters in a row in Italian, which takes me away from the stop-start. I feel I'm making progress that way. I started reading the French version of C.J. Sansom's Dissolution. I'm maybe 100 pages into it. I loved the first ever book that I read in the series (the third) and subsequently bought them all, but this one seems to be slow moving. Clare said the same when she read it in Serbian last year. (I have no idea how she managed to do it in Serbian - she'd only started Croatian about 2.5 years prior!) Still, I find French effortless (there's maybe one word per page that I don't know) and so I can easily dip in and read 40 or 50 pages. That's always good for my confidence. Meddysong on 10 February 2015 |
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That is one awesome pop-out book!
eyðimörk on 10 February 2015 |
Yep! I couldn't photograph it because the animation won't be captured, but there's a part where you can make a crusader and his counterpart kick each other! Oh, related to Catalan:
Nearly every past form on that page was of the GO - INFINTIVE variety. Does anybody have any insight as to why the first example takes haver? My thinking is that it's because it's talking about duration (so, imperfective) but then if that's what the author is trying to capture, why not use the -av- form? Meddysong on 10 February 2015 |
In Catalan, the present perfect (han viatjat) is used as the past tense while we're still in that time period, if that makes sense. So, for example, you always use it to refer to something happening "today." In this case, pilgrims traveled and are still traveling to Jerusalem, so since it's still happening we use haver. I hope that makes sense! anamsc2 on 10 February 2015 |
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Sorry, don't know why this became a double post instead of an edit!
anamsc2 on 10 February 2015 |
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Vermelho is the Portuguese for red btw :) roxo is purple. And it's related to the Catalan ros, which somehow appears to mean blond.
Serpent on 10 February 2015 |
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Thanks, anamsc2. It's what I would've thought of as an -av- use (ongoing in the past whilst other past actions start and finish). It'll take me a while to adjust to that but with a bit of practice I'll get there.
I don't know how I feel about this, Serpent. On the one hand, it means that the words aren't so easy to confuse between language ("Is it 'verde' in Spanish or Italian? Or is that Portuguese?") but on the other hand you lose the instant recognition. Hmm ... Meddysong on 10 February 2015 |
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Hmm but it should be obvious enough due to English vermillion? Producing is harder though :)
Serpent on 11 February 2015 |
If it were just ongoing in the past, it would be imperfect. However, since it continues to happen in the present, it's present perfect. It's the same as in American English (although I think we use present perfect a bit differently from other varieties, so that might not be helpful) -- For centuries, pilgrims have traveled to Jerusalem... anamsc2 on 11 February 2015 |
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Yes, you're quite right. I didn't even think to translate it into English as something which is still ongoing to this day.
I'm off to Google vermillion now ... Meddysong on 11 February 2015 |
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Valentine's Day has come and gone. That wouldn't normally mean much to me but it so happens that a) my anniversary present from Clare had arrived late and so she gave it to me over the weekend, and b) I needed to add something to my Amazon order for Clare in order to qualify for free delivery.
The happy result is that I received the item on the left from Clare and treated myself to the item on the right: 
I read through the first two chapters of TY Catalan on Saturday. I'm quite impressed with myself because I learned the numbers quite easily, which is normally quite challenging for me because it's rote-learning. I hate ordinal numbers at the best of time but seem to have added first-tenth to my vocab without too much bother too. I had tonnes of fun with the verb book too, as nerdy as that makes me sound. It was quite clear from the list at the back (which tells you which page's pattern the listed verbs correspond to) that the most popular form was number 17, so that's the first I tackled. This was cantar, which I suppose makes sense because I've seen that verb used in introductions in other languages too. The switch in tonal vowel from a to e in cantes is surprising to me, but I've absorbed it without a problem. I made a point of learning estar, esser (which I assumed would be ser and which does have an entry in the verb list though which points to esser), anar, fer, poter and a few others too. I would've loved to do some more work on Sunday, too, but Clare and I made holiday plans instead. We're off to northern Italy and southern Switzerland in June. Should be tonnes of fun! I found Asterix el Gal on YouTube, which I thought would be spectacularly useful, since I knew the story and so could concentrate on the sounds. I have a treadmill and TV in my garage, and I've recently set up a Raspberry Pi to act as a media server, and so I thought that this would make a good first outing for it. I love Asterix as reading material but if I never saw the cartoon again I'd be thrilled. Goodness me. I suppose it was from 1967 so I shouldn't be surprised by the poor production values but I hated it and had to switch it off after 30 minutes then come back the following day for the following half hour. I found myself understanding some of the dialogue but this was maybe too ambitious; the characters spoke at native speed, of course, and had silly cartoon voices. Still, it served to give me some confirmation on how the language sounds. On the theme of Asterix, I have another comic to read, courtesy of Clare: 
I can't wait to get stuck into it but I'm going to be disciplined and save it for another time. It can be a treat for me once I get past the halfway mark in TY Catalan. As for other languages ... well, I read a few more chapters of the French version of Dissolution. I wrote earlier that reading in French is effortless for me. I should've qualified that slightly; reading a book in which nothing seems to be happening isn't effortless in whatever language. It's strange, though, because I read this series in English years ago and loved it. I suppose it might be the case that back then I hadn't really ever read fiction, so what was revolutionary to me then has lost some of its shine now that I've read a lot more. I hope not, though, because I remember really loving the third in the series! Meddysong on 17 February 2015 |
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I was going to attempt to write a couple of sentences in Catalan but I haven't formally learnt how to do past forms yet :)
But I'm happy to say that I'm halfway through the TY book, which means I'm allowed to start reading Astèrix al País dels Helvecis tomorrow. I've really enjoyed working through TY. It's just a bit unfortunate that the only verbal forms that I've encountered at this stage are in the present tense, so I'm limited in what I can express, although I could always cheat and use my conjugations book. Everything's been really good so far, though, and I thoroughly understand why the book is set out as it is. Today is International Mother Language Day. Evidently mine doesn't need any publicity whatsoever, so I thought I'd comment on http://amara.org/de/videos/wDBdCoaBnyw4/info/esperanto-kiel- denaskulo/ - this video of native Esperanto-speakers, since I imagine most people would never have imagined them to exist. I know the people who produced the video plus four of the six people in it (the Brazilan siblings are a generation behind me and live too far away for our paths to have crossed), which gives me a small sense of pride. Anyway, it's sort of relevant to this thread because I've been reading http://amara.org/de/videos/wDBdCoaBnyw4/ca/915963/ - the Catalan transcript , which is, of course, full of "em dic X", "sóc la X", "tinc x anys", "visc a X" and so on, all the basics. Meddysong on 21 February 2015 |
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Past forms are really easy, just use va, vas, vaig, etc. plus the infinitive. In speech/informal writing, you will rarely see the simple past forms. The imperfect tense is pretty similar to Spanish (in use and form).
Also, thanks for the link to the Esperanto video :) Crush on 22 February 2015 |
Yep - that was the first thing about Catalan that I picked up, hence writing "haven't formally learnt". It was a convenient excuse for explaining why I didn't take the time to post in Catalan after all (the real reason being that I have no active knowledge of the language and a very limited vocab). I did notice in the verb book that the GO-past is called the periphrastic but that there's also the conventional HAVER+PP, so that's another reason. I've got a quiet day today. Clare's visiting her sister (although her Macedonian grammar book went with her, of course!), so I think I'll treat myself to Asterix. (I've just bought a bunch of the French ones cheaply too!) And do another chapter or two of TY. Meddysong on 22 February 2015 |
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Wowzers, Crush - I just noticed in your thread that you're learning Esperanto. Give it a year or so and I may be able to help you. I'm building a big web suite for the Esperanto Association in the UK, and one of the projects is using an adapted form of the engine that powers http://www.learnyu.com/ - this Chinese-learning site so that we have a course that dynamically adjusts to the learner's mistakes. If you get something wrong (a missed accusative, say), then it will give you a reminder of that lesson and throw in some questions where you have to get the accusative right, before reverting back to the original plan.
Work will be starting on that over the summer. A couple of colleagues and I will be sitting down to prepare the supporting course material, using video and audio etc. And the whole thing is supported by modern forum and blogging software, so the language logs look nicer and work better than do others: 
It's a huge project but there's clearly a massive gap for something like this and I'm looking forward to getting stuck into it. Meddysong on 22 February 2015 |
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I'm still enjoying my Catalan. That's a good sign. I've worked through 13 of the 16 chapters in TY, although I don't have the audio so it's not quite as thorough as it could be.
I've just finished Astèrix al país dels Helvecis too, which I've enjoyed, same as ever. There's something making me think that Asterix might even have been designed for language-learners - this story is packed full of subjunctives! - Val més que Obèlix et porti tot sol, cap - Hi vaig ... que portin les tripes de senglar - És clar, és clar ... au, amics, que els que puguin caminar s'enduguin els altres - Fes que m/acompanyin a les meves habitacions i que em serveixin un brou de llegums - No m'agrada que els romans es posin malalts - Amb una condició: que vinguis a casa nostra com a ostatge fins que tornin els meus amics - Cal que sapiguem on creix aquesta flor - Així que sigue bosc - Vull que totes les tropes disponibles vagin cap a l'indret de la festa! - Hem d'aprofitar que els romans no ens hagin trobat encara - Cal que vagi a buscar l'estel d'argent abans que arribin - Socorrem tots els combatents, tinguin la nacionalitat que tinguin - Quina mala sort que els teus homes no tornin I've also seen some use of the subjunctive which suggests to me that it's used sometimes to indicate a future: - Quan baixis, revisaré els teus comptes - El que perdi el seu trosset de pa dins el formatge fos, paga penyora! And there's been a verbal form with -ss- in it that I've noticed used where the subjunctive would be used if the situation were in the present indicative, so I'm going to hazard a guess that the language features an imperfect subjunctive: - Us aniria millor se caminéssiu pel pendent d'una muntanya - Només faltaria que ens rentéssim les mans - Jo els he demandat que vinguessin I've seen some nice phrases making use of haver in different moods and tenses to express different sentiments such as "should have", "having -ed": - No hauria hagut de manjar - Els hauríeu hagut de declarer - Gràcies per haver-nos tiret del llac! - Havent vist com mangeu, no penso pas que per beure necessiteu copa And there have been useful phrases such as: - Ens podríeu ajudar? - Deixa-ho aquí - Vés a buscar-lo - A mi no em cal beure'n There are some things I'm not happy with. For a start, I'm naturally reading the masculine personal article en as the preposition en every time I see it and am having to correct myself. The instinct isn't yet there to wait for context with that particular particle. I know I'm not absorbing it anyway; when I practice the exercises in TY I'm concentrating on what I'm supposed to be doing (verb form etc) and not even thinking about personal articles. I'm also not getting used to the pronouns inverting when they come before the verb. Yes, I know they do this but I'm constantly treating es as és and having to correct myself. On the positive side, when I write down my notes from Asterix, I'm not having to think about it. I read the sentence in the book, think "aha", and then write it in one go. When I first started doing this, I would have to do it one word at a time, check whether there was an accent or what the last letter was, and so. That I've absorbed enough of the language that I can now pretty much automatically recognise what Catalan is is definitely progress. I ordered a dictionary the other day, so even though my target was only passive knowledge, I might just try writing something anyway :) Meddysong on 07 March 2015 |
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I like the idea of writing out sentences from Asterix - I might have to try that too.
I'm naturally reading the masculine personal article en as the preposition en every time I see it and am having to correct myself. I have similar problems with the pronoun "ne" in Italian. My brain keeps insisting that it negates a sentence, even though consciously I know it doesn't. kanewai on 12 March 2015 |
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I'm enjoying reading your log as I'm also flirting with Catalan this year with scarce resources, including Routledge's A Comprehensive Grammar (digital version). I can devour sections of that book. I've picked up some useful tips from you here, and will soon go on the hunt for some comics. I admire how analytical you manage to be about the grammar.
My other sources of learning currently are chugging through Memrise's Catalan Vocab course, and the 4900 sentences which I extracted from Tatoeba. My goal is general written/oral comprehension before precision. I wish I had a better audio source because Catalan TV programmes are a bit too rapid-fire for me. Am also looking forward to being able to write something. chokofingrz on 12 March 2015 |
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Oh, hello both. Thank you for popping by :)
It's all a bit quiet on the Catalan front. I finished TY a while ago and have a reasonable passive knowledge. There's no way I could write anything though! I need to go back through the book and make sure I learn the days of the week and so on. I can recognise them but I couldn't come up with them blank. I'm fairly sure I found someone on Memrise who had all the TY material, so it would be wise to make use of it. And as for other vocab ... well, this arrived today: 
Likewise! It doesn't help that ne is no in Esperanto and it's rare for me to go a day without reading the language in my email or on Facebook.
Heh, thanks! I think it's probably a sign that there's something not quite right up top ;) I'm going to have to add some more language-related stuff later. The mini lion who shares our house has decided that my arm's for cradling her whilst she sleeps and so I'm resorting to typing with one finger and thumb. Meddysong on 12 March 2015 |
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Has it really been a month? Whoops.
I was holding off on writing something here because I intended to try writing in Catalan. I've been a bit busy though; next week is the annual Esperanto conference in Brighton, and since I'm organising it (fourth year in a row *shudders*) I've been tied up. Anyway, the big news is that I started reading my book and am now one quarter the way through. It doesn't sound like much but I'm trying to tell myself that 312 pages would probably be the whole of many normal books. I took vocab notes during the first fourteen chapters. What a drag that is - it takes all the fun out of reading. The list is standing at 641 words. I'm now pretty much capable of reading it without needing to resort to notes, and I'm now on chapter 21. I was saying to Clare whilst reading in bed that you know you're doing fairly well with a language when you can understand a sentence like "they knew to see whether she had the mark of the Devil - a third nipple". (The word nipple, for some reason has appeared a few times, so was already on my vocab list as early as chapter 10.) It was slow going at the start, particularly the frustrations involved in writing a vocab list when so many new words appear, especially when they turn out to be useless for anything other than this book (stonemason, rye, scaffold, wooden beam). I'm happy since deciding to simply read the book to find that I can do it largely as well as Italian, although my knowledge of Catalan is purely passive. I don't think I could write very much without a dictionary. Let's think what my language-related reading has been lately. Um ... I read Frederick Forsyth's The Afghan in both French and Italian. And William Boyd's L'attente de l'aube, which I presume is Waiting for Sunrise in English. Asterix got a quick read too in French in Astérix aux Jeux olympiques, there was a book called The Welsh Language, and an Esperanto graphic novel about the Decemberist Revolution of 1825. Meddysong on 12 April 2015 |
Also, that's really cool to hear about the Esperanto site. I dunno how useful it will be to me in a year, but there are still quite a few things i still haven't internalized, like the use of the -n marker when it's not a direct object (like with measurements of time/distance), more complicated uses of sia (Detala Gramatiko says "li estas pli saĝa ol lia frato", not "sia frato"), some affixes (a common one for me is not being sure whether to use -a or -eca), and especially clauses following a past tense statement (Mi pensis, ke tio estas bona ideo = I thought it was a good idea / Mi pensis, ke estis bona ideo = I thought it had been a good idea). I'm actually working on something similar right now for Basque, though i was also planning on including an Esperanto section. Out of curiosity, what will you be coding the site in? Crush on 13 April 2015 |
Yep, that is an unusual one that takes some getting used to.
Hmm ... I suppose if the understanding is that "he is taller than his brother is", then I can understand that logic because the "his" would be a subject (albeit with a verb that isn't actually present) and sia can't be. But I don't think anybody would ever pick up on that. I would naturally say lia amiko. I liken it to English "He is taller than I" because "I am" is understood, but realistically everybody is going to say "He is taller than me".
Basque?! Wowzers - you don't believe in staying in a comfort zone with you languages, do you?
The whole suite is built on "https://www.invisionpower.com/" - Invision Power Services' forthcoming version 4.0. That includes all the bits and pieces; forums, CMS, blog, store and so on. That's straight PHP, CSS and JS, which I'll then customise. I'm paying a developer to do a few custom alterations to it for other functionality, such as a pronunciation database. The best part of it from my perspective (hence my waiting two years for it to be developed) is that it's fully translatable (as long as you have the patience to do the translating), so mine is seemlessly bilingual. The machine intelligence which powers the learning component of it (adjusting course content according to the learners' weaknesses) is proprietary software written in Ruby on Rails for the developer's "http://www.learnyu.com/" - Chinese-learning site . Judith's an Esperanto-speaker who would love to see it put to use for Esperanto too, so signed exclusivity to the Esperanto version over to us because she trusts us to do a good job with it :) Meddysong on 13 April 2015 |
"Ŝi amas lin kiel sin mem" - kiel ŝi amas sin mem. "Ŝi estas tiel saĝa kiel ŝia fratino" - kiel ŝia fratino estas saĝa. On the surface, it seems like both have the same basic structure, but one uses "si" while the other uses "ŝi". It's definitely one of my weak points. I'm also really excited to see what you come up with for the Esperanto site. I've always thought some sort of word deconstructor/pop-up dictionary would be cool, it would've been especially helpful when i first started learning Esperanto for learning how to pick apart/analyze words. The lernu dictionary does it to some degree. And i really love the small regional languages of Europe, particularly in Spain/France. Most of those are Romance languages (Sardinian, Occitan; Catalan/Valencian, Galician), but Basque really stuck out for me and i'd love to be able to provide something to strengthen the language and help future learners (and myself!) learn it. A lot of Basque speakers also seem to be quite proud of their particular dialect, but i'm probably getting a bit ahead of myself now if i start trying to branch out into the major Basque dialects ;) Crush on 14 April 2015 |
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Just a quick note to say that I've reached page 416 of my book and Goodreads is suggesting that it's exactly one third through it. That came a lot quicker than I thought it would and means that my silly little project ought really to be doable before the year is out.
I'm going to do a little side project very shortly. At the end of May Clare and I are going to some lakes outside of Gothenburg, Sweden. I know people like to do these six-week challenges and since I happen to have a copy of Asterix in Swedish ... well, I think you can see where I'm going with this! I've acquired TY Complete Swedish (including CDs) for £5, have purchased a small dictionary, and yesterday picked up 201 Swedish Verbs for £0.50. Bargain. So I'll probably get stuck into this very soon, with the challenge being to read and understand my Asterix book before we go to Sweden. I haven't got a lot of reading done lately. Last weekend was the annual Esperanto conference (the fourth in a row that I've organised) and so I lost a lot of time to the last-minute preparation. It turned out well, though. Probably my favourite photo of the event is the following: 
These five fellas presented a comedy quiz, which had me laughing my head off. I love that it's possible to be witty and make people enjoy themselves using Esperanto; it really acts as an endorsement. I love this photo because it emphasises how chummy the whole thing was, despite the pretext of the quiz being competition. I wanted to get a photo where the text at the back is visible. It's from the "missing word" round, where the panel have to guess from the context what a word which was covered up is. (They have to make funny suggestions too, of course.) It was that first word, forfikuloj. If your Esperanto is absolutely fluent, then you might know that it refers to an insect, the earwig. Most people won't have that luxury though and will instead see it as something composed of smaller parts, namely for- (= away), fik- (= f-word), -ul- (= person who does x or is described by x), and -oj (= a marker for plural). In other words, people who should f-off. Fabulous! Meddysong on 22 April 2015 |
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I'm now at the half-way stage; page 625. I'm pleased that I'm reading at a reasonable pace and am not particularly struggling with the vocabulary. I suppose I must be making progress because it appears I only started the book six or seven weeks ago. Strange to think I could have a 1300-page book wrapped up in around three months, given that I didn't know the language when I bought it.
It strikes me as odd that I've only seen the name articles used maybe three or four times so far; I remember in my Asterix books that they were very consistently used. In this one, though, they've hardly ever appeared. I'm cutting things really fine with Swedish. We're away in two weeks' time and I've only dipped into chapter 1 of TY. I keep on putting it off because there are other things to do but the deadline is really imminent now. I expect I might just tackle Asterix with the aid of a dictionary and break the language down the way I did with Catalan before I started formally learning it. That seems like a good idea; that way I could buy a Swedish book when I'm over there and make it a post-Catalan project to read it. That seems much more sensible, considering I really need to be reading in Italian too; Clare and I are going to Italy (and Switzerland) for a two-week break in three weeks' time, so I need to try to squeeze in some Italian books in advance. Meddysong on 09 May 2015 |
This was kind of the way I started out in Swedish, too. I bought a book and then looked up every single word for the first twenty or so pages. I have been trying a similar method with German, with much less success, so I think that Swedish is probably suited to this kind of attack-plan in some way. Good luck! Elenia on 10 May 2015 |
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^^ Thank you for the reassuring words! http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?T ID=40426&PN=1&TPN=1 - I've decided I'm going to give it a go , then if I feel any affinity with the language, buy a book when we're in Sweden and set myself a challenge akin to this Catalan one.
Meddysong on 10 May 2015 |
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Hola!
Avui em sento una mica trist. No he llegit el meu llibre des de dues setmanes. El problema és que no tinc temps per llegir tants llibres, i va ser important preparar-me per anar al [runs to dictionary] Suècia. Així vaig decidir llegir Asterix en l'idioma [dictionary again] suec. Però aviat anem viatjar a Itàlia i Suïssa també, així estic llegint molts llibres en idioma italià. Back to English ... Frustratingly, I noticed on Goodreads the other day that I only started the book on March the 15th, meaning that I had got to the halfway stage within six weeks. That means I could've had the surprise result of wrapping this preposterous project up in only three months, but the presence of holidays means I'm going to have a six-week break in the middle. OK, "I read a 1,300-page book in Catalan in 4.5 months having not known Catalan when I bought it" still sounds good, but it's nowhere near as good as it could've been. I would love to take the book with me on our holidays, but since it's about the same size as my suitcase, that's not really a possibility. Meddysong on 21 May 2015 |
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One pays a price for the tactile "feel" and sensual pleasure of holding a book and turning its pages. In the old days, a couple of books and an extra pair of shoes took up a third of my bag. I used to want to be able to dehydrate them and shrink them to the size of peas and then rehydrate them to normal on arrival. Sadly, I never came up with a way to make dehydrated size 13 shoes, but I did manage to dehydrate my books with my kindle. That's why I like e-books, because I can take an entire library with me when I travel. Now if only the rules would be relaxed to let us buy whatever e-book in whatever language for a reasonable price. Probably not going to happen.
Well done, indeed, Tim! You went from not knowing the language at all a few weeks ago to be able to read a massive book. Considering that most books are around 300 pages, you've read the equivalent of two novels already. If you were doing the super challenge in Catalan you'd be at 10.5 "books" with just this one alone! It's been a pleasure reading your log. Hope you both enjoy Sweden! iguanamon on 21 May 2015 |
Your progress is really impressive, i don't think you've got anything to feel upset about! I've also enjoyed your log and hope you have a nice time in Sweden (and Italy and Switzerland). Catalan is a really fun language, maybe you can use it as an excuse to jump down to Catalunya :) Crush on 26 May 2015 |
Although this has often felt as though the title could be changed to Un llibre sense fi, the end is now in sight!
Meddysong on 18 July 2015 |
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Oh, crumbs, how undisciplined of me! I vanished without confirming that I'd finished
the book. (Actually, now I think back to it, I think there was some sort of database crash and the admin team had to revert to an earlier version. So maybe I'm not as ignorant as I thought!) I visited Catalonia for an Esperanto conference a few months after finishing the book. I barely spoke a word of Catalan whilst I was there (certainly not with the Espies). My knowledge was entirely passive and my interactions usually limited to apologising for not being able to speak Catalan and asking whether I could use Spanish instead. People seemed to appreciate at least knowing that Catalan is the language which they use. We did a holiday there in 2016 too. Lots of fun, although my Catalan hadn't magically moved on from passive. I much prefer it to Spanish but it's too easy just to switch to Spanish rather than struggle with Catalan, especially since I didn't actually ever formally learn it. (I've read a few books in it since finishing the one which led to this personal challenge.) Oh, we've recently been to Portugal, having booked our flights a few months before. Would anybody like to hazard a guess about how I prepared myself for it? 
Meddysong on 23 September 2017 |