Radioclare's 2017 log (Croatian/Russian)

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blaurebell
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Re: Radioclare's 2017 log (Croatian/Russian)

Postby blaurebell » Sun Mar 19, 2017 8:17 pm

Congratulations on finishing the Duolingo! I guess only those who know what the final stretch of the Russian tree is like will appreciate what achievement this is! :D
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Radioclare
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Re: Radioclare's 2017 log (Croatian/Russian)

Postby Radioclare » Sun Mar 19, 2017 9:23 pm

blaurebell wrote:Congratulations on finishing the Duolingo! I guess only those who know what the final stretch of the Russian tree is like will appreciate what achievement this is! :D


Thanks :) The "nothing" lesson turned out to be the most useful one in those final few, as it practised sentences like "They have nothing to do" or "I don't have anyone to go to the cinema with". The "colloquial" lesson also had some useful bits in. Most of the rest of it wasn't worth doing, though. And the "science" section was the absolute worst; it was trying to teach sentences about hydrogen which I wouldn't even have understood properly in English :D
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Re: Radioclare's 2017 log (Croatian/Russian)

Postby blaurebell » Sun Mar 19, 2017 10:23 pm

Oh boy! Doesn't sound like I will enjoy the Science section. I guess I'll just do 5min a day and see how far I get. Can't face more of it!
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: 20 / 100 Дэвид Эддингс - В поисках камня
: 14325 / 35000 LWT Known

: 17 / 55 FSI Spanish Basic
: 100 / 116 GdUdE B
: 8 / 72 Duolingo reverse Spanish -> German

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Re: Radioclare's 2017 log (Croatian/Russian)

Postby IronMike » Mon Mar 20, 2017 11:19 am

Radioclare wrote:Croatian
It's been quite a positive week. I've got through 13 lessons of Glossika already, mostly in the mornings and evenings when walking between the station and my office. I really do find Glossika much more enjoyable than any other audio course I've tried, and I think it's really valuable for trying to imitate pronunciation, especially the correct intonation. I'm hoping to keep this progress up and get further through the files than I have previously :)

Isn't it great?! I love Glossika!

I really wish they'd do an Esperanto one. A bunch of us brought it up to the founder/owner on the Glossika FB group, and he mentioned that he is always on the look-out for native speakers to help develop courses, but when we asked for a one-pager describing what he's looking for and the time commitment for something like this, he never answered, bedauxrinde. ;)
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Re: Radioclare's 2017 log (Croatian/Russian)

Postby Radioclare » Sun Mar 26, 2017 7:54 pm

IronMike wrote:Isn't it great?! I love Glossika!

I really wish they'd do an Esperanto one. A bunch of us brought it up to the founder/owner on the Glossika FB group, and he mentioned that he is always on the look-out for native speakers to help develop courses, but when we asked for a one-pager describing what he's looking for and the time commitment for something like this, he never answered, bedauxrinde. ;)


It's really brilliant :) Normally when I'm doing an audio course I really have to force myself to select it on my iPod in the morning, rather than taking the easy option and just listening to some music instead, but I actually find I'm looking forward to Glossika every day :) I think there's something slightly addictive about it!

It would be really cool to have one in Esperanto and I can imagine there would be a good market for it now so many people have tried Esperanto Duolingo, so it's a shame nothing has come of it so far :(

*******
I've mainly been focusing on Croatian this week, although I don't feel like it's been a week where I've got loads done.

  • I'm on lesson 21 of Glossika, so have managed at least one a day, which is a success by my standards.
  • I rearranged my "to-read" pile of Croatian books and decided I needed to focus on reading the hardback ones first, because I won't want to carry them with me when I'm on my various travels over the summer. The one I've selected to read this week is called "Slušaj i gledaj, Latice" and it's like a family history of a successful Zagreb family during the twentieth century. It's a memoir rather than fiction, so it includes real letters and photographs, which is quite interesting. I've only read about 70 pages so far, so I'm not having a very successful Tadoku this time around.
  • I've watched five episodes of 'Larin izbor' this week. They're still in Morocco. I'm getting a bit tired of hearing the Croatian characters speak bad English to the 'Moroccan' characters (who I suspect for the most part are Croatian actors pretending to be Moroccan!). There's a new baddie called Leon though, who is played by the Croatian actor Marko Cindrić, and when I first heard him speak English I nearly fell off my chair. This guy speaks impeccable English, with the most beautiful British accent you ever heard in your life. I'm so sad I can't find any clips of him speaking English on Youtube because his accent is a thing of beauty; you could easily believe he was a distant relative of the Queen :lol: I spent a while googling him and eventually found out that he studied drama in Oxford.

I wondered whether anyone could recommend me a good news website from Serbia? I follow various Croatian newspapers on Twitter and my general impression is that they spend more time reporting the antics of minor celebrities than they do the politics of any other countries in the region. Most of what I read about Serbian politics at the moment is in English on websites like Balkan Insight (which is a good website, but I'd like to read something in Serbian too).
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Re: Radioclare's 2017 log (Croatian/Russian)

Postby DaveBee » Mon Mar 27, 2017 9:30 am

Radioclare wrote:There's a new baddie called Leon though, who is played by the Croatian actor Marko Cindrić, and when I first heard him speak English I nearly fell off my chair. This guy speaks impeccable English, with the most beautiful British accent you ever heard in your life. I'm so sad I can't find any clips of him speaking English on Youtube because his accent is a thing of beauty; you could easily believe he was a distant relative of the Queen :lol: I spent a while googling him and eventually found out that he studied drama in Oxford.
I forget the programme, but I once saw an interview with the patriarch of the Italian family that owns/owned Fiat. Perfect English with an upper class British accent. :shock:
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Re: Radioclare's 2017 log (Croatian/Russian)

Postby Radioclare » Sat Apr 01, 2017 2:44 pm

Can't believe that March is over and it's time for another goals update.

Goal 1 - Read 10 books in German
I read one German novel this month - 'Blinde Vögel' by Ursula Poznanski. It was very good :) That takes my German reading to three books so far this year, so definitely on track.

Goal 2 - Try not to forget any more Esperanto
My lack of enthusiasm for Esperanto remains strong (if that makes sense!), though this month has been less stressful for me personally than January or February were.

Goal 3 - Increase my Croatian vocabulary
March hasn't been a strong month for Memrise usage; my stats tell me that I've used in on only 11 of the past 31 days. Must do better. I've done quite well with restarting Glossika though, which is admittedly Serbian and not really a way of learning vocabulary, but it's quite a good way of refreshing vocabulary you already know and being able to recall it more automatically.

Goal 4 - Read at least 4,200 pages in Croatian
This month I've finally made some progress with reading original Croatian literature :) Firstly I read 'Beara' by Ivica Đikić (a documentary novel about Srebenica) and then I started 'Slušaj i gledaj, Latice', a family memoir by Latica Ivanišević. Both are interesting for different reasons and - somewhat unexpectedly - I'm having less trouble with unknown vocabulary than I often do when reading translations from English.

The first book had 246 pages and I was 115 pages into the second book as of last night. 361 pages isn't a huge total for the month, but added to my 696 pages from January and 1,077 pages from February, that gives me 2,134 for the year to date, so I'm not at all worried about meeting this goal.

Goal 5 - Listen to/watch at least 9,990 minutes of Croatian TV/films/audiobooks.
I've racked up 1,350 minutes this month, which includes one film, four documentaries and 28 episodes of 'Larin izbor'. I've been feeling tired with a cold for the past few days, so have watched quite a few episodes in the evenings in the absence of enthusiasm for doing anything more useful. This makes March my most successful month for audio so far and added to my total of 85 minutes from January and 798 minutes from February, I'm now on 2,233 minutes for the year (which is almost on track).

Goal 6 - Do better than last year at Croatian output
Erm, it looks like I've written 637 words this month so that's 1,846 for the year so far :oops: I'm contemplating challenging myself to write 100 words of Croatian every day in April because it seems like I can only write consistently when I force myself to do it.

Goal 7 - Learn enough Russian to feel confident enough to take my Mom to St Petersburg.
The main success of this month was finishing Russian Duolingo - that's an achievement I'm proud of, mainly because of the sheer willpower required to get through the latter part of the course. As I've said previously, I'm putting Russian on hold until the summer now so that I can focus on improving my Croatian prior to taking my parents to Croatia in June.
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Re: Radioclare's 2017 log (Croatian/Russian)

Postby Radioclare » Sun Apr 02, 2017 8:55 pm

It's been quite a productive weekend for Croatian :)

I'm on page 264 of "Slušaj i gledaj, Latice", so that's 149 pages read since Friday.

I've dusted off my copy of "Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian: A Grammar with Sociolinguistic Commentary" and am doing some serious grammar revision. I'm aiming to reread the entire textbook from cover to cover before I go to Croatia. I want to read it slowly, and make notes of anything interesting that stands out to me. I'm only three chapters in at the moment, but already remembering why I love this textbook so much and how much of an impact it's had on my ability to speak Croatian :)

I got through two lessons of Glossika while out for a walk today, which makes up for a slightly miserable performance during the week (as a result of three days when I wasn't commuting by public transport).

The best news is that I've written 302 words of Croatian in the past two days :) Obviously that's not earth-shattering progress, but it's better than I've done for quite some time!
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Re: Radioclare's 2017 log (Croatian/Russian)

Postby IronMike » Mon Apr 03, 2017 6:11 pm

Radioclare wrote:I've dusted off my copy of "Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian: A Grammar with Sociolinguistic Commentary" and am doing some serious grammar revision. I'm aiming to reread the entire textbook from cover to cover before I go to Croatia. I want to read it slowly, and make notes of anything interesting that stands out to me. I'm only three chapters in at the moment, but already remembering why I love this textbook so much and how much of an impact it's had on my ability to speak Croatian :)

I love those books. I've got the red ones and the blue ones. Well, they're in storage right now, so I don't have access to them, but will in a short two years!

I do have the audio, however, in my computer.
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You're not a C1 (or B1 or whatever) if you haven't tested.
CEFR --> ILR/DLPT equivalencies
My swimming life.
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Radioclare
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Re: Radioclare's 2017 log (Croatian/Russian)

Postby Radioclare » Tue Apr 04, 2017 8:34 pm

Inspired by the technological abilities of Brun Ugle, I decided to try and install LWT. I wish I could report that I got stuck on step 9... but I actually got stuck on step 5 when I couldn't find the directory data\localweb :oops: Eventually realised that I'd installed the wrong version of the Easy PHP thing and had to start all over again.

I got it working the second time, except that I just kept getting a nasty error message where the Glosbe dictionary thing was meant to be. If anyone else has an issue with this, I eventually found the solution in this thread (the post about extension=php_openssl.dll, whatever that is).

Now that I've got it working, I'm not entirely sure what to do with it. I guess it's going to take a while to get used to how it works and some time investment up front to mark all the words I already know perfectly well so that I can concentrate on the ones I don't. Ideally I want to use it to read news articles from websites like Deutsche Welle and expand my vocabulary by learning lots of clever words I don't know yet. But I'm not sure how good the Glosbe dictionary is going to be for truly difficult Croatian words so any other recommendations of a good online Croatian-English dictionary are welcomed!
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