Radioclare's 2024 log (Turkish, Croatian, Russian)

[Caromarlyse]

I enjoy Ursula Poznanski too; in fact, I think you may have set me onto her. I've recently got engrossed in a four-book series by Andreas Gruber, though, so I won't be back to her for a little while at least. There are just too many Krimis and not enough time!

[Radioclare]

I enjoy Ursula Poznanski too; in fact, I think you may have set me onto her. I've recently got engrossed in a four-book series by Andreas Gruber, though, so I won't be back to her for a little while at least. There are just too many Krimis and not enough time!

I'm glad someone else appreciates Ursula Poznanski. I think I have only read one book by Andreas Gruber. I was about to say I should read more of him and then I thought no, I should really finish the huge pile of unread German novels I already have before committing to another author

1 - 5 February
Starting to feel a bit better now and had a weekend at home, so have managed to make some progress with a few things.

Turkish
Despite saying I was giving up on Duolingo, I keep coming back to give it another try. I've just finished the first unit this evening, which is probably rather slow progress. The one thing I do like is the fact that you get audio for every phrase.

I made another attempt at the official Memrise course, but the new format is just terrible. It still keeps pushing me to have conversations with an AI bot every day which I just don't have the vocabulary to do at the moment. All I want to do is log in and see how many words I have outstanding for review, but that is surprisingly difficult to achieve now.

I revised the first chapter of Get started in Turkish at the weekend because it was a while since I'd picked it up. I've also been experimenting with the website learnturkish.com which has a really cool course. I've been doing the first lesson on the alphabet and some of the exercises have been so useful. It plays you a sound, for example, and you have to type in what letter it is; quite useful to get practice at distinguishing all the different vowels. And it also has pronunciation exercises, where it plays you a word and asks you to record yourself saying it. From this I have learned how terrible my Turkish pronunciation abilities currently are The only problem? The site keeps crashing. Or, more accurately, completely freezing. I have tried every single browser I have and it doesn't seem to make any difference; sooner or later I get stuck in the same part of the lesson and can't figure out how to proceed. So ultimately I'm not sure this is going to be a resource I use.

Esperanto
So much to do, so little time! I've officially signed myself up to sit the C1 exam in August, which will go ahead if enough other people sign up wanting to sit the same level in Tanzania. So I have until August to prepare myself, which mainly means I need to improve my active vocabulary and brush up on the bits of grammar I know I'm weak on.

I need to translate something in advance for a translation workshop I'm doing in March, so I identified a few possible texts at the weekend. This week I plan to read over them to choose the one that looks most doable and try not to have a crisis of confidence that I'm not good enough to translate any of them

I haven't got anywhere with reading Manlibro pri instruado de Esperanto but I did do my homework for the teaching course I'm attending next weekend. There were two really cool exercises in this which essentially involved doing dictation; listening to a list of words and writing them down. The first exercise involved actual Esperanto words, which was fairly straightforward. The second exercise involved gibberish words, so essentially it was testing whether you correctly recognised the Esperanto sounds without the help of being able to guess what a word might be.

I'm slowly reading Detala gramatiko de Esperanto. At the weekend I worked through the chapter about difiniloj (definite articles). This isn't too hard in Esperanto if you already speak a language which has articles, but there were a few interesting nuances in there.

I'm thinking I might make some flashcards in Deckademy to improve my vocab. It will be quicker than Turkish because I don't need to add audio for Esperanto.

Croatian
Really enjoying getting back into my telenovela and I'm averaging an episode every day now. With telenovelas you tend to get dozens of episodes where not very much happens followed by a "wow" episode where everything happens, and I just had one of the latter. Not only was there a disastrous wedding where the groom finds out he has an illegitimate daughter he hasn't known about for 40 years (causing the wedding to fall through, obviously), but there was also a fatal car crash in the same episode. And - best of all - the entire crisis re the illegitimate daughter at the wedding has actually come about as a result of an audit. As an auditor I find this very exciting; it's not very often that audits place a crucial role in a TV drama

Russian
I watched a short Russian with Max video on YouTube about second-hand clothing. I'm also partway through watching a Варламов
episode about Mumbai. In principle it's interesting but in reality it's a bit depressing; so much dire poverty. Not necessarily sure I'm going to make it to the end. What else? I'm still reading Смерть на ниле; 214 pages into it atm.

[Radioclare]

End of Feb 24 update
Oops I haven't updated for a while! February turned out to be a busy month. I was away from home for four weekends in a row which is a lot, even when some of the reasons you're away are fun ones. Last weekend I went to Paris, for example, with my other half, niece and sister-in-law. It was a lot of fun, but not very conducive to language-learning. So I feel like I haven't done very much at all. I did sign up to the 6-week challenge but I gave up recording after multiple days went by without me managing anything in any language. Work has been busy too, my voluntary responsibilities have taken up a bit more time than expected... the list of excuses goes on!

Esperanto
Starting here because - oddly - this is the language where I racked up most time in February.

Still working my way through Detala gramatiko de Esperanto. I'm not really a person who is very good at grammar books so I keep putting it off. I'm probably about a third of the way through it now. I would recommend it though; much more concise than PMEG and takes up less space on the shelf.

A few weeks back I came to the realisation that I'd be better off reading about the bits of grammar I'm really weak at (participles!) in English rather than Esperanto, so I'm re-reading Teach Yourself Esperanto. Maybe a bit disloyal since my other half co-wrote the newer version, but I really like this old-style TY book I think once I've refreshed my memory on the things I struggle with in basic English, I'll be in a better position to read the more complicated explanations in Detala gramatiko. Overall I don't think my grammar is too bad but I don't think you can pass C1 without using participles so I do genuinely need to work on that. And refreshing my memory about the transitivity of certain verbs would also be useful.

I've filled out a form to apply to sit a mock exam for the C1. No idea if/when that will be happening but I guess it will be useful because I don't actually know what the format of the exam is like. I have had it suggested to me that it's a bad idea to have signed up for an in-person exam session in Tanzania, because the C1 written exam is 4 hours long and that is a LOT of writing by hand. If you do one of the online sessions, you can obviously type your answers which is easier. The person who made this point is probably right but my main motivation for signing up was to fill time in Tanzania, so I haven't changed my mind yet.

The other thing I think I need to do before sitting C1 is improving my vocabulary. On the one hand, my vocabulary is fine; last time I read a book in Esperanto I was only looking up things like the names of plants. But on the other hand, when I speak Esperanto I often lose confidence about whether I'm about to use the right word. Because I haven't used Esperanto much in recent years, I feel like the words are all in my head but behind the Croatian words (and sometimes the Russian words too). I'll get halfway through a sentence and only be able to remember the Croatian word for what I want to say So I want to improve my active vocabulary; effectively, just bring back to the front of my mind the words I should already know.

In order to do this, I've taken a drastic step and installed Anki I have made no secret of the fact that I hate Anki in the past and being honest, I still absolutely hate it now. I'll try not to repeat everything I've already moaned about a hundred times over the years, but I don't want to use a piece of software that appears to require a degree in computer science to navigate. What I want to use is Memrise, which in my mind is absolutely perfect. It decides when I need to see the words (without me having to develop a system to classify what I consider easy, hard etc and then be consistent at sticking to it) and it tells me whether I have typed the words correctly. Also, it's not a horrible shade of grey. But, the Memrise situation is an absolute mess at the moment. I've lost the will to follow it; one minute they're deleting community courses, the next minute they're moving them somewhere else (which they've already done before, with the ill-fated Decks experiment a few years back). One minute I can't access my courses at all, the next minute I can access them (but only if I go to a special new URL and seemingly not in my app). I wouldn't care so much if I didn't have a lifetime membership which I paid for in the hope of getting a lifetime of value

Anyway, I've experimented with making an Esperanto deck in Anki. I chose Esperanto because it's easier to add cards than any of my other languages; I don't need to switch keyboards to type Esperanto and I also don't need to add audio because it's self-evident how the words are pronounced. I have managed to create a deck with a couple of thousand words but God, it's been painful. Maybe I should have dedicated a week of my life to studying Anki instructions before I started, but on my first attempt I got confused about what was the front of a card vs the back and entered all my vocabulary the wrong way round Then it took me ages to work out how to get cards where I could type answers. I am definitely not a lover of Anki, but I am going to see how this goes and if I manage to get the hang of it I'm going to try creating a deck for Turkish too.

What else? I spent the second weekend of February at a teaching training course in Esperanto. That was pretty intense and I learned a lot. Plus I got more speaking practice the third weekend of February, when I met up with an Esperanto-speaker in Chester. So in total about 28 hours of Esperanto in February, which is a lot by my standards.

Russian
I've been reflecting on whether giving up 30 minutes of Russian a day was a good thing. I mean, I think it was a good thing not to be obsessed with the streak. But since giving it up, I've re-realised something that I already knew; if I don't make a rule to say I "have to" do something, I probably won't bother doing it at all, even if it's a thing I enjoy. I quite like listening to the Russian with Max podcasts, for example, to the point where before Christmas I was listening to them just because I found them interesting rather than explicitly because I was trying to improve my Russian listening. But during the month of February, I did not listen to a single Russian with Max podcast at all, because it was no longer a thing that I "had to" do. It's perhaps not helped by the fact that I technically don't need to leave the house very often these days - and the weather was horribly wet in February, reducing my motivation to go for a walk - so I didn't naturally find myself in tonnes of situations where listening to a podcast would have been a natural use of time. But still, a disappointing performance. I need to figure out how to do better in March.

What did I do in Russian? Mainly reading. I finished the Agatha Christie novel Смерть на ниле (Death on the Nile) which I really enjoyed. That was 317 pages and my first/only novel read in Russian so far this year. I started another Agatha Christie - Убить легко (Murder is Easy) - but I haven't got very far into it yet.

Otherwise I've watched a few Варламов episodes on Youtube. I gave up on the one about Mumbai, then watched one about Somalia and part of an episode about Paris. That was prior to my trip to Paris but it became a bit too boring (all about town-planning) so I gave that up too and started one about Albania, which I haven't quite finished yet but I'm really enjoying. Albania is one of my cancelled-during-the-pandemic trips that I still haven't managed to re-book. I also listened to some shorter topical episodes he put out about the death of Navalny.

Probably the strangest thing I've done this week is buy Moldovan train tickets online in Russian, ahead of a trip to Moldova next weekend I thought the bank might block my card, something they have a habit of doing when I go anywhere slightly unusual, but I seem to have got away with it. Will be interesting to see to what extent - if at all - Russian is a useful second language to have in Chișinău.

German
I watched 30 minutes of a Euromaxx programme on Deutsche Welle.

Croatian
Slightly better than German! I managed 10 episodes of the telenovela Kumovi, which I'm still really enjoying when I remember to watch it. And I'm still slowly progressing through the BCMS grammar book which I've been allegedly reading for over a year now.

Turkish
So little progress you really wouldn't believe. I thought I'd find the 6WC motivating but then I didn't really, despite the fact that the new tracking website is really cool. I've done a bit of Duolingo, a bit of Memrise, experimented with using Drops.... really I just need to settle down and get to grips with my textbook.

Total February time
Turkish - 3.4 hours
German - 0.5 hours
Esperanto - 28.2 hours
Croatian - 9.7 hours
Russian - 7.5 hours
Total - 49.3 hours

Total YTD time
Turkish - 11.00 hours
German - 6.6 hours
Esperanto - 32.5 hours
Croatian - 16.1 hours
Russian - 19.8 hours
Total - 86.0 hours

[rdearman]

If your cards look ugly, anki supports CSS style sheets. Here is a good YouTube video explaining how to make your cards pretty.

[Radioclare]

End of March update
It seems like I've given up on updating my log. March was another busy month! The most exciting thing that happened was my trip to Moldova, which was definitely one of the highlights of my year so far

Esperanto
Esperanto continues to be the language that dominates at the moment. I'm still sporadically working my way through Detala gramatiko and TY Esperanto, attempting to improve my grammar before I sit my C1 exam in the summer. I've identified compound tenses with participles as being one of the areas I struggle with, so I've been writing out lots of sentences to practice them. I have continued to use Anki to practise my vocabulary, although I still hate it and I also missed a few days in a row which means I've now suddenly developed a backlog to clear

I spent a lot of time in March translating. I can't remember whether I explained this before but I'm taking part in a translation workshop at the moment. Everyone has to translate a text of around 8 - 10 pages in length to share with the group and then each week we attack (in a constructive way!) one person's translation, highlighting things which don't quite make sense or haven't translated well. At the end of each week there's then a Zoom session to talk through the comments. I'm the sort of person who absolutely hates other people reading something she's written - and, as I've been saying, I feel like my level of Esperanto could use some improvement - so I was really quite nervous about sharing a translation attempt with a group of people, many of whom are definitely stronger translators than me. That means I spent quite a lot of hours working on my translation, trying to iron out the most ridiculous errors myself before anyone else saw them I chose the first chapter of an Agatha Christie novel to translate, on the basis that we all know Agatha Christie is not exactly high literature, so I figured it wouldn't be the hardest thing in the world to tackle. I actually found it much harder in the end than I'd expected. It was a chapter from one of the older books, so approximately 100 years old now, and there was some dated language that I struggled to understand well enough to translate into Esperanto.

What else? In preparation for a study weekend I was attending in April I also spent some time doing homework. This involved reading approximately 50 pages of a classic of Esperanto literature and making notes on it in preparation for a literary analysis class. I thought the text was absolutely dire and made plenty of notes to that effect! There was also a translation exercise to do in advance - translating a few paragraphs from Mary Poppins - but that felt relatively straightforward compared to my battles with Agatha Christie

Russian
Honestly, quite minimal this month. Checking my notes, I can see that I've listened to five Russian with Max podcasts but, being honest, I don't remember what any of them were about.

I've also spent a bit of time watching Варламов videos on YouTube, but probably not as much time as in previous months. I definitely watched a long episode about Albania and some shorter ones about politics.

I'm theoretically reading an Agatha Christie - Убить легко - but I'm barely 100 pages into it at the moment.

I didn't speak Russian in Moldova - my other half was able to use his Romanian skills - but it turned out that there was loads of Russian being spoken in Chișinău and so I could have done if I wanted to. I was pleasantly surprised to find the book shops were approximately 50:50 split between books in Romanian and Russian so I was able to stock up on some Russian reading material. Moldova is one of the poorest countries in Europe and so by western standards, the books were ridiculously cheap too. Overall I really enjoyed Moldova; would totally go back If you like wine and wine-tasting you should definitely add it to your bucket list!

Croatian
I have been making a slight effort to get back into telenovela-watching and I managed 13 episodes during March, which I think is more than I've watched in a long time. Around Easter time I also watched an episode of the Dnevnik programme (it's like the daily news bulletin) and found it to be an interesting cultural experience. It started with an analysis of what the Pope had said in his Easter message (okay, fair enough, I think most news outlets pick this up). Then we moved on to what the bishop of Zagreb had said in his Easter message. We progressed to the bishop of Split and by the time we got to an analysis of the difference between what the bishop of Rijeka had said in his morning sermon vs his evening sermon, I had well and truly lost the will to live (despite the fact that I'm actually a Catholic myself ).

German
Nothing. Periodically I look at my to-read pile of German books and weep.

Turkish
Absolute complete and utter failure. When I said I was going to learn Turkish this year, I think I'd severely underestimated the amount of time I was going to devote to Esperanto

Total March time
Turkish - 0.0 hours
German - 0.0 hours
Esperanto - 15.1 hours
Croatian - 10.0 hours
Russian - 5.75 hours
Total - 30.85 hours

Total YTD time
Turkish - 11.00 hours
German - 6.6 hours
Esperanto - 47.7 hours
Croatian - 26.1 hours
Russian - 25.5 hours
Total - 116.9 hours

[Radioclare]

First two weeks of April
While I'm here I might as well update on the first couple of weeks of April too At least for my main focus, which continues to be...

Esperanto
1 April was a public holiday and I didn't have any exciting plans, so I used the time to sit my C1 mock exam. The mock was in three parts: listening, reading/comprehension and writing. There were two hours for each of the reading and writing parts, then about 30 minutes for the listening part. In the real exam there is a speaking exam too, but that isn't included in the mock.

I was allowed to sit the exam in any order and I started with the listening, mainly because it was shorter and so felt less daunting. This turned out to be a mistake! I hadn't fully got my head around how the online exam system worked and what the instructions for the exam were, with the result that I ended up misunderstanding what I was supposed to be doing

The listening exam had two separate texts. I listened to the first text, which was played twice, and then had some multiple choice questions to answer. It seemed pretty straightforward. Then I listened to the second text, also played twice, and realised it was significantly harder. I won't go into the details as don't want to spoil the mock for anyone else, but it was on an agricultural/scientific theme which I would have found quite difficult in any language. There were eight comprehension questions, where you had to respond in a full sentence based on what you'd understood from the audio. Some of them were pretty tough but I got through it and then in the final two minutes of the exam (which the software allocated me for a final check of my answers before pressing the final "submit" button), I realised that there were actually two sets of questions on this second text I'd totally missed a section of eight multiple choice questions at the top of the screen! I panicked, but luckily they were true/false questions so I was able to make my best guesses from what I remembered and at least quickly attempt all of them before my time ran out. I was pretty disappointed with myself for making such a ridiculous mistake and throwing away marks

Once I'd recovered from that, I attempted the reading part. I had two hours but I ended up only needing about 40 minutes. This bit was much easier than I expected for C1. There were some questions testing grammar, but the subject matter wasn't as advanced as I'd been expecting. The comprehension exercises didn't feel difficult at all; so much so that at times I was questioning whether I'd actually correctly understood the task.

There were another two hours allocated for the writing exam, of which I used about 70 minutes. I had to write two texts, each of 200 words. One was expressing an opinion on a particular topic and the other was writing a letter to a penfriend about another topic. Neither topic was too challenging and it was made easier by the fact that in this part of the exam I was allowed to consult an online Esperanto-only dictionary to check things like the transitivity of verbs. The bit that I found hardest was sticking to the word limits. I wrote way too much for each task originally and spent at least half my time trying to cut it down. Especially with the penfriend letter, there was a list of 5 bullet points which you had to cover, and it was difficult to address them all with such a limited number of words.

I was still upset about my failure with the listening by the time I finished, but it turned out I needn't have worried too much. I got my results back within a few days and the scores were way better than I expected: listening - 90%, reading - 97%, writing - 95%. What a shame this was only a mock I really didn't expect to do that well, so I'm now quite keen to go ahead and sit the real thing. I was intending to do that in Tanzania over the summer but it seems like there's a risk that not enough candidates will sign up to the exam session there, so I may end up having to sit the exam during an online session in June instead.

What else? I spent last weekend at an Esperanto study session, which was really positive. We had sessions on literary analysis and translation, as well as discussion groups and games. I also spent some time running a bookstall and selling Esperanto books to beginners.

The translation workshop is still ongoing. It's my turn to have my text analysed this week and let's just say it's a very humbling experience I'm not sure how much I am learning about translation - except that it's impossibly difficult - but I have certainly learned a lot about Esperanto grammar and mistakes I didn't even realise I was making.

I've racked up about 17 hours of Esperanto so far this month. I should probably try to give some attention to my other languages for the rest of the month!

[DaveAgain]

German
Nothing. Periodically I look at my to-read pile of German books and weep.

I listened to an interesting radio programme about Georges Simenon/Maigret yesterday.

EDIT
The same programme "Forum" also has an episode on Mrs Christie: Poirot und Co - Was macht Agatha Christie so erfolgreich?

[Radioclare]

End of April update
Life continues to be busy. Had a short trip to Menorca in the second half of April and that was fantastic; got to see a blue sky for the first time in ages

Esperanto
Started the month by sitting my C1 mock, as described above. I only signed up to this exam to give me something to do during the World Esperanto Congress in Tanzania this summer, but now it looks like the exam session in Tanzania will be cancelled due to low take-up, so I need to transfer to an online exam session instead. That means I'll probably be sitting my reading/writing/listening on 1 June and my oral on 17 June, which doesn't give me as much time to brush up on my vocabulary and grammar as I'd hoped. Oh well!

Still participating in the translation seminar, which is an hour of Zoom a week. I learned a lot from the corrections I got on my effort. Mainly that translation is really hard! Also I've never really thought before about how much you're "allowed" to change when you translate. I found in the text I was using that some of the sentences were just bad English - either grammatically or because of how they were punctuated - and so if you translate them faithfully, it reads awkwardly as if you've done a bad job. So in that instance it's probably better to correct things slightly, at least if you're translating detective fiction and something like the Bible where every comma can make a difference!

The Esperanto study weekend at the start of the month was good. And this weekend I'll be off to the British Esperanto Conference, so spent a bit of last weekend boxing and pricing up books for sale. I'll be spending most of the weekend running the book stall.

Russian
I have done so little Russian this month it's embarrassing. Essentially, I've spent an hour reading Agatha Christie I need to get a grip with this so that I don't end up losing too much progress. I've just signed up to the Super Challenge in Russian to try and give myself some motivation.

Croatian
Still watching the telenovela but that's about it. It's a ridiculously long time since I last read anything in Croatian, so have just signed up for a SC in that too.

German
Nothing

Turkish
Nothing, but I'm hoping to change that in May and have signed up to the 6WC!

Total April time
Turkish - 0.0 hours
German - 0.0 hours
Esperanto - 22.5 hours
Croatian - 7.7 hours
Russian - 1.0 hours
Total - 31.2 hours

Total YTD time
Turkish - 11.00 hours
German - 6.6 hours
Esperanto - 70.2 hours
Croatian - 33.9 hours
Russian - 26.5 hours
Total - 148.1 hours

[Le Baron]

Also I've never really thought before about how much you're "allowed" to change when you translate. I found in the text I was using that some of the sentences were just bad English - either grammatically or because of how they were punctuated - and so if you translate them faithfully, it reads awkwardly as if you've done a bad job. So in that instance it's probably better to correct things slightly, at least if you're translating detective fiction and something like the Bible where every comma can make a difference!

This is an interesting point. I'm about halfway through translating a book in French about a composer. Originally for about three chapters I was being more faithful to sentence constructions, but eventually decided to do more rearranging in terms of breaking up the sentences to create good English. It also means leaving out some things which become superfluous when moving from one language to another. I've worked in translation and also translated four economics monographs, but I still worry about changing too much.

Good luck on the Esperanto exam.

[Le Baron]

Now I think about it, you probably don't need to be wished good luck considering you're already an active Esperantist. But still...