Mork's Log 2017

[MorkTheFiddle]

Allied (French version) is in Anki via Subs2srs. The same drawback from Volver recurs: hard to hear some of the dialogue. Pressing on anyway.
The first episode of Body of Proof has been watched. By the numbers, but barring the implausibility of the medical examiner attending detectives' interrogations (doesn't happen in these parts, anyway), competently enough done.
How can I do something similar to Subs2srs with an audiobook (Contemplations)? Can I somehow fit it into an mkv file? How will "subtitles" be done?
I finished Henri de Régnier's Médailles d'argile, a bit more than 3 dozen poems. An interesting statement of purpose in a kind of preface in the opening poem:

J'ai feint que les Dieux m'aient parlé ;
...Je t'ai gravée en médailles
Dárgent doux comme l'aube pale,
D'or ardent comme le soleil,
D'airaine sombre comme la nuit;

Régnier is a 'symbolist' poet, but at least in his case 'symbolist' does not mean 'impenetrable.' The following is a clear and representative example of how Régnier writes:

ÉCHO

L'eau de la mer a fait la couleur de mes yeux
Comme la rose a mis de la sienne à ta bouche.
Et, sur le sable blond où ton doux corps se couche,
L'or de l'algue est pareil à l'or de tes cheveux.

J'aime en toi le reflet des heures et des lieux
Et je suis, tour à tour, somnolent ou farouche.
Selon que l'Été las ou l'âpre Hiver embouche
Ses clairons durs ou ses roseaux mélodieux.

L'oiseau qui vole d'arbre en arbre est mon espoir ;
Mon songe se regarde en la face du soir.
Et mon rire est le vent dans les feuilles, là-bas !

Je pense la saison et Je pleure la pluie ;
Le fleuve sait ma route et j'ai suivi mes pas
Dans l'écho qui marchait au-devant de ma Vie.

*

*Oeuvres, Henri de Régnier, Mercure de France, Paris, 1930.
Régnier died in 1936.

Many of the poems have this sonnet form, but many of the poems do not.

For language-learning purposes (part of the reason for all this), it's easier for me to remember the meaning of a word like algue (line 4) if it's wrapped up in a line or two of poetry this way.

[MorkTheFiddle]

Subs2str / Anki versions of Volver (Spanish) and Allied (French) have worked their way into my morning routine.

Cuarteles de invierno by Osvaldo Soriano arrived at the library. Two chapters so far make it look like it's going to be fun. Nothing complicated about his style, but some of the words are unfamiliar, regionalisms, I think.

Working from Hamilton's interlinear, parts of Caesar's De bello gallico have been going into LWT. That is going to stop. Deka Glossai's advice makes more sense. His recommendations of Beeson's Primer of Medieval Latin and Harrington's Medieval Latin are on the mark. Both readable, Harrington slightly more difficult. But the piecemeal aspect of reading a bit of one author and then onto a bit by another author reproduces the major fault of other readers for Latin or Greek. A couple of writers they excerpted wrote more extended works that seem worth a shot, but the internet has no copes of them. Matthew Paris and Geoffrey of Monmouth. The only thing Google Books / Archive.org had of Monmouth was a German translation of the Latin. Nothing of Matthew Paris.

Discouraging, but moving on, I'll try the next step up the ladder, bilingual books in the versions of Loebs. Not Matthew Paris or Geoffrey of Monmouth, but Sallust, Tacitus and Suetonius.

There's an online French, English and Latin dictionary source at http://www.micmap.org/dicfro/: a number of French and Old French resources, and 4 Latin dictionaries: Du Cange (lemmas only), Gaffiot and Jeanneau (all with definitions given in French) and tried-and-true Whitaker (English). All more practical than Lewis and Short IMHO.

[klvik]

Subs2str / Anki versions of Volver (Spanish) and Allied (French) have worked their way into my morning routine.

Where you able to identify an accurate Spanish subtitle file for Volver? I would like to make a Subs2SRS deck from this movie but my DVD does not have Spanish subtitles.

[MorkTheFiddle]

Acting on a prompt and advice about a sync program by Zenmonkey, I put together a couple of videos whose texts were the first two poems from Contemplations by Victor Hugo: "Un jour je vis" et "À ma fille." The texts come from Gutenberg and the audio from a commercial vendor. The steps are straightforward enough:

1. Create an mp4 video with sound.
2. Create subtitles.
3. Combine mp4 video and subtitles into an mkv.

With Audacity, the audio of the poem can be extracted from the full mp3 file to a wav file.
With Video Win Movie maker, the wav file can be combined with a copyright-free photo (one of my own) into an mp4 file.
With Aegisub, the text of the poem can be converted to subtitles synced to the mp4 file.
With MKVToolMix GUI, the mp4 and the subtitles can be mixed into a MKV file.

The resulting subtitles are soft-coded and can't be displayed by every play, but VLC displays them just fine. This frees me from the awkward business of juggling an audio player with a reader. So I can conveniently watch the videos away from a desktop or a laptop. The daunting thing is, the total audio runs to more than 10 hours.

IN other news
I'm on page 114 (out of 191) of Cuarteles de invierno by Osvaldo Soriano (Barcelona, Bruguera, 1982). Blaurabell mentioned the novel in one of her log posts. Totalitarian dictatorship meets farce is one way to describe it.

After a few days of "watching" Volver and Allied with Anki, I'm settling into a rhythm. Thanks to emk and rdearman, the trick of suspending troublesome cards is now a habit. Neither set of subtitles is perfect, but overall satisfactory.

I not going to reveal any spoilers about Allied. The script is a gem, but I didn't know that until I began watching it again with Anki. The script even works Brad Pitt's inability to act seamlessly into the story. And well, no spoilers about Volver either, but it's been several years since I saw it, so nothing to spoil anyway.

[MorkTheFiddle]

Yesterday I finished reading Cuarteles de invierno by Osvaldo Soriano. A bit like a novel by Malraux or Hemingway, if you remember those guys. But also in the tradition of Alexander Solzhenitsyn or Darkness at Noon. There are farcical elements to the novel, but overall it is certainly not a comic novel.

Le Père Goriot is now on my reading list. For grins I uploaded Chapter 1 to LWT. The chapter is too long to upload as one segment, so the end result was 24 segments. I looked at the known vs unknown words of a couple of segments. One came out to just under 95% known, the other to just over 95%. The source for this version is a new site, Tailored Texts, http://www.tailoredtexts.com/read/le-pere-goriot-balzac-honore-de/#!/10877/en/e/0/0/0/
The connection right now is very slow. It is the site or the internet?
The texts there are annotated, meaning the meanings of some of the words and phrases are available. That might be causing the slowdown.

[MorkTheFiddle]

Sctroyenne discussed using the Maximes of François de la Rochefoucauld as writing prompts. Do other languages have collections of pithy sayings from one author?
The other day I discovered something a bit different, The Anchor Book of French Quotations With English Translations by Norbert Guterman (New York, Anchor Books, 1990 (originally published in 1963)). This broadens the base for writing prompts. I suppose such collections of quotations exist for many languages.

Here's a sample from Guterman:

Je suis l'homme du rétablissement de l'ordre, et non d'un rétablissement de l'ancien ordre.

Guterman 230, from Mirabeau, Lettre au Comte de la Marck, 22 octobre 1790

Anogher example demonstrates the economy possible in languages that can distinguish female from male.

Oui, morte !

requires nothing more to tell us the dead is female. There is also the Spanish version of the title of a novel called in English The Lost Girl in English: Perdida.

[MorkTheFiddle]

Yesterday I bought the complete Mémoires of Saint-Simon for Kindle for $2.99. The layout is good, and there are notes. I just began reading them this morning. Saint-Simon's Mémoires are famous and long (10 volumes) and give Saint-Simon's detailed picture of the reign of Louis XIV and the personalities of his court. Saint-Simon's writing itself comes with high praise.

Yesterday also Michel Vuillermoz's reading of Balzac's Père Goriot arrived in the mail. It is an mp3 recording lasting 6h20. Complete, I assume (and hope).

The site, https://www.editionstheleme.com/s/25038_de-grands-auteurs-a-ecouter-en-livre-audio, has dozens of interesting authors, past and present, French and foreign (in French translation). John Irving, Gogol, Stephen King, Eliette Abécassis, Françoise Bourdin, etc. I will be needing a memory purge of this information, else I could see my French audiobook bill running into the $1000s. Perhaps if I can limit myself to strictly French authors...

[MorkTheFiddle]

Some catching up.
Since my last post I finished listening to La Peste, began reading Mémoires by Saint-Simon, began listening to a free reading of Père Goriot but gave that up and began listening to a commercial reading of it. I have listened to a few episodes of the French-dubbed Eureka, but have postponed that in order to listen to Hélène et les garçons, the French sit-com from the 90's. I tried listening to a free reading of La Chica del Tren but opted for a commercial version instead. Based on a recommendation by Iguanamon, I began La Última Página by Laura Martínez-Belli.

La Peste: while sitting and concentrating on listening, I could understand 50-70 % of the audio. While out walking, I could understand 0 - 10%. I am not ready to listen unaided to audiobooks in French just yet.
Hélène et les garçons: several members of the forum have attested to listening to an L2 TV series beginning with 0 comprehension and ending with full or nearly full comprehension at the end of the series. If that turns out to be true, then I have hit the mother lode of sit-coms. From 1992 to 1994 there were 280 episodes. The show spun off with many of the same characters and actors into Le Miracle de l'amour, with 159 episodes in 1995 and 1996. Then a few of the characters went on to another spin-off, Les Vacances de l'amour, 1996-2007. There were only 160 episodes, but they were longer (52 minutes vs 26 minutes for the previous episodes). Finally, with still some of the same characters, now in their forties, there came Le Miracle de l'amour, starting in 2011. I've lost count of the total number of episodes, but if this method of learning to listen can work for me, there is plenty of material.
But not to get ahead of myself, I have watched the first six episodes. My understanding has gone already from about 10% to about 40%. I don't expect that sort of swift progress to continue, but the stories are simple, the characters and the dialogue are uncomplicated, and the tribulations of young people in love are ageless. This probably persists for the first series. I have peeked at some of the later series. Some of the stories are a bit more sophisticated, some not.
Père Goriot gets better as the story goes along. Balzac has taken some criticism for cadging King Lear, but Balzac tells the story in a much different (and better, IMHO) way than Shakespeare. Narrated by the voice of Éric Herson-Macarel, it is easier for me to listen to in a sustained way than the free version I had, though the free version is not bad. I have also heard him narrate Ágota Kristóf's Le Grand Cahier.
The free recording of La Chica del Tren was not too bad, either. It even has the advantage of the reader's blurring the words ever so slightly, but after just a short while I opted for the commercial version read in separate parts by Ines Oviedo, Natalia Helo, Diana Angel.
La Última Página The book cover suggested to me this would be light and breezy with more than a whiff of romance. That did not quite seem to be something Iguanamon would read, so I dove in to my library copy. Without giving too much away, this book turns into an investigation of the past, a study of appearance versus reality and a reflection on human affection. The book has a lot of substance. Maybe Martínez-Belli tells too much of the story when she should be letting the story dramatize itself, but her work has the power to sustain interest. My interest, anyway.

[iguanamon]

That's a nice compliment, Mork, thanks, , but I do indeed read light and breezy books sometimes with more than a touch of romance on occasion. I really enjoy good writing. After you finish the book, you might enjoy listening to this long interview with Laura about the book on Mexican Radio where she talks in depth about the writing process and the characters.

I also read a written interview with her where she says she thinks it's her best book, because she felt like she knew more about what she was doing. I wasn't expecting much at all and came away pleasantly surprised with the novel's depth. This is one of the reasons why I like learning a language. Without Spanish, we couldn't read it!

[MorkTheFiddle]

Last night I watched S01E09 and S01E10 of Hélène et les Garçons. At the end of the second episode, it occurred to me that I had understood at least 80% and had got and laughed at most of the jokes. It is easy now to believe if and when I get to the end of the 280th episode, I will understand everything. Getting there is not too very far-fetched. The series compares well to its American clone Friends, which I kept up with for 2 or 3 years before it jumped the shark (for me, at any rate=when Phoebe had triplets). As a bit of a test, I listened to a bit of an episode from each of the three spinoffs. They were not so easy to understand, especially the last spinoff. Next I watched an unseen episode of Eureka. Well beyond my expectations, I understood about 90% of it.

Getting a low score on the Spanish vocabulary test that a number of folks here took and did better than my paltry 24% sticks in my craw a bit. Even granting the test is not perhaps very reliable or valid, by now I should definitely know them all. I searched for sites listing the 1,000 most frequently used Spanish vocabulary, this site, http://www.englishnspanish.com/learn/words, lists them in 20-word bites and provides for quizzing them. Quizzing myself on 80 of the words, I missed 4, or out of 1000, 6.3%. Not very good. I'm going to drop my gambit of studying poetry for precision and go back to reading lots of prose. I uploaded Los Hermanos Karamazov into LWT, which has got lots and lots of words and which I've been meaning to re-read anyway.

Somewhere on the net there is probably a similar quiz on the 1000 most frequent French words. I want to find it because my French might be in a similar boat.

My Ancient Greek definitely is in a similar boat.