Mork the Fiddle's 2019 Log

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MorkTheFiddle
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Languages: English (N). Read (only) French and Spanish. Studying Ancient Greek. Studying a bit of Latin. Once studied Old Norse. Dabbled in Catalan, Provençal and Italian.
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Re: Mork the Fiddle's 2019 Log

Postby MorkTheFiddle » Sat Sep 11, 2021 5:46 pm

French
Finished Vol 1 and part of vol 2 of Histoire de France by Jules Michelet.
Listened to first lesson of French by the Nature Method. This is stress-free enough that I hope to finish the series. There are 50 sessions in all. Thanks to Daegga for this reference.

iPod treadmill listening to DLI French 40 minutes

French Movies watched
Rider on the Rain (1970) starring Charles Bronson and Marlène Jobert. Engaging psychological drama.
La belle noiseuse, first half only: I would rather watch paint dry than the rest of this movie, except, in this movie, one of the things you do is watch paint drying. If you ever plan to watch this with your kids, note that there is female nudity (the male lead paints nudes for a living). With Michel Piccoli, Jane Birkin, Emmanuelle Béart, Marianne Denicourt.

Spanish
LUPA Parts 1 and 2 of No abras la puerta, 28.7 minutes.
Read a little bit of Historia de España by Lafuente, but I am still struggling to find a way to read this comfortably away from the desktop.

Latin
Reading Ad Alpes in LWT. H. C. Nutting wrote this "made-up" Latin for students. So far, though after only a few pages, I like it.
Also read a bit of Ora Maritima, a similar work, but stopped to read Ad Alpes.

Ancient Greek
Read The Greek War of Independence in Ancient Greek by Charles Douglas Chambers. This is "made-up" Ancient Greek for students. Using vocabulary relying a lot on Thucydides, Chambers wrote an account of the Greek War of Independence (1820-1829) running about 50 pages. Interesting story, helpful for tracking and nailing down some of the verbs I still struggle with from the DCC Greek Core Vocabulary.
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MorkTheFiddle
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Languages: English (N). Read (only) French and Spanish. Studying Ancient Greek. Studying a bit of Latin. Once studied Old Norse. Dabbled in Catalan, Provençal and Italian.
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... 11#p133911
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Re: Mork the Fiddle's 2019 Log

Postby MorkTheFiddle » Sat Sep 25, 2021 2:51 pm

Latin
Ad Alpes through Caput 14, still rather easy going, uses lots of cognates.
Greek
Thucydides Book 6 The Plague, concentrating on learning vocabulary, primarily using the games and exercises of the learning tool StudyStack

French
Jules Michelet Histoire de France Vol 2, read to chapitre v, the 2nd Crusade and other contemporary events (Becket, for example)
Also

Alimentation ultra transformée : péril dans l’assiette !


Spanish
Modesto Lafuente, Historia General De España. I finished reading through the Arab defeat of the Visigoths.

also

¿Cómo ocurrieron las extinciones globales?


7 DULCES mexicanos que NO conoces - Learn with How to Spanish Podcast


Thanks to Luke.

And from the library, Los perros duros no bailan, by Arturo Pérez-Reverte, a tongue-in-cheek work I've just started, but it looks like fun.
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MorkTheFiddle
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Re: Mork the Fiddle's 2019 Log

Postby MorkTheFiddle » Mon Nov 01, 2021 8:41 pm

Spanish and French

Hoopla offers the movies Amores Perros and Memoir of War. Amores Perros in Spanish from Mexico of 2000 translates I guess as Dog Lovers though the (bad) official translation is Love's a Bitch. Three stories of a young dog fighter, a high-class model and a former guerrilla fighter come together with a car crash in Mexico City, with an underlying motif of Cain vs Abel. Memoir of War translates as Memoir of War ;) . Based on a French story based on true life by Marguerite Duras, a splendid French writer who flies under the radar much of the time. She writes about the time late in WW2 when her husband is arrested by the Germans and sent to a death camp. She is hoping at war's end he will come home, but she doesn't know if he even survived. Although the heroine is a member of a resistance cell, the movie avoids all the bs hoopla that the resistance can entail in the movies. One fine brief scene expresses her and her friends' utter contempt for DeGaulle and the Gaullists, but too intricate to describe. I won't give away anything about either movie, only say that on IMDB I rated both of them 10/10. Both came with good if not perfect English subtitles.

Without the subtitles I would have understood almost nothing of Amores Perros and probably not even half of Memoir of War.

Other Hoopla movies I watched over the past couple weeks: Two Nights till Morning (mostly English but some French and Lithuanian)--good; Emperor of Paris (French)--so awful it was good; Little Murders of Agatha Christie Season 01 Episode 01 (French) good; and Un Traductor (Spanish)--good. All with English subs which in every case I needed.

Ancient Greek
Finished with the "highlights" of Herodotus, I turned to the "highlights" of Thucydides, to wit, his account of the siege of Plataea that just preceeded the Peloponnesian war (to be followed by his account of the plague, which I took a crack at earlier). There is a tricky part of the siege when the Spartans build up a mound against the wall of the city, hoping to rise above the wall and attack that way. I don't 100% understand what the Spartans are doing nor what the Plataeans are doing to counter them. As I noted in another thread, I relied on three translations and two commentaries, as well as a "juxtaposed" translation in French, in which the order is changed from Greek to "western European" and then translated as well.

At least in the process I am beginning to appreciate the way and the effect of how Thucydides writes. Here is one example.
Attempting to sneak into Plataea, some enemies from Thebes end up trapped in the city in the night.

[2] καὶ δὶς μὲν ἢ τρὶς ἀπεκρούσαντο, ἔπειτα πολλῷ θορύβῳ αὐτῶν τε προσβαλόντων καὶ τῶν γυναικῶν καὶ τῶν οἰκετῶν ἅμα ἀπὸ τῶν οἰκιῶν κραυγῇ τε καὶ ὀλολυγῇ χρωμένων λίθοις τε καὶ κεράμῳ βαλλόντων, καὶ ὑετοῦ ἅμα διὰ νυκτὸς πολλοῦ ἐπιγενομένου, ἐφοβήθησαν καὶ τραπόμενοι ἔφευγον διὰ τῆς πόλεως, ἄπειροι μὲν ὄντες οἱ πλείους ἐν σκότῳ καὶ πηλῷ τῶν διόδων ᾗ χρὴ σωθῆναι (καὶ γὰρ 3 τελευτῶντος τοῦ μηνὸς τὰ γιγνόμενα ἦν), ἐμπείρους δὲ ἔχοντες τοὺς διώκοντας τοῦ μὴ ἐκφεύγειν, ὥστε διεφθείροντο οἱ πολλοί.

And two or three times they fended off the attacks, and then the large roar of their attackers and of the women and domestics at the same time from the houses with screaming and howling throwing stones and roof tiles, and the drenching from the night before, and finally they became frightened and fled running through the city, being helpless most of them in the darkness and the mud in the streets and of which exit they needed to save themselves (for it was now dark because of the moon being new) and the pursuers having familiarity with how to block the ways out, so that most of them were killed.


Thucydides 2.4.2 (Plataea)

Here that slow deliberate build up of the desperate situation and the obstacles painted step by step by Thucydides, ending with that final swift terse four-word finale. Marvelous. The translaion is mine, though I threw a glance at Rex Warner's translation for Penguin, 1988.

Also, I enjoy this example in English for understanding and appreciating of Thucydidean syntax, made up in the 19th century, I suppose:

An awkward thing to drive is pigs many by one man very.


This is from page 54 of Thucydides: The Fall of Plataea and The Plague at Athens by W. T. Sutthery and A. S. Graves, Macmillan 1894.
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MorkTheFiddle
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Re: Mork the Fiddle's 2019 Log

Postby MorkTheFiddle » Sun Nov 07, 2021 8:01 pm

French and Spanish
Movies on Hoopla
Camus. A lackluster TV biopic based on a long but equally lackluster biography about the French philosopher, playwright and fiction writer Albert Camus. Mostly a waste of time. In French with English subtitles. 4/10
Kamchatka. A joint Spanish-Argentine production about the times following the military coup of 1976 in Argentina. Takes a low-key approach but makes its frightening point. In Spanish with English subtitles. 8/10. (The title is taken from the board game Risk.

Also read only a bit of Jules Michelet's well-written History of France Vol 2 and the Spanish translation of the ever-fascinating Tale of the Genji, written in the 11th century by the Japanese, and perhaps first, novelist, Murasaki Shikibu.

Ancient Greek
Read the account by Thucydides about the plague in Athens in 430 BC, Book 2, chapters 34 and 47-54.
In addition to aides listed before, I consulted the bilingual edition Thucydide, Guerre du Péloponèse, Deuxiéme Livre, Paris, Librairie Hachette, 1894. I give its naked url address because the brackets in it foil (I guess) the BBCode:
https://archive.org/search.php?query=th ... %221894%22
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Carmody
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Re: Mork the Fiddle's 2019 Log

Postby Carmody » Mon Nov 08, 2021 2:14 am

Thanks so much for keeping us updated on your reading.

Can you tell me a good edition of Jules Michelet's History of France that you would suggest? They seem to come in many different editions. Thanks so much.

Do you own all the volumes? Looks lengthy?

Sounds a bit like another Marcel Proust effort...
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MorkTheFiddle
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Re: Mork the Fiddle's 2019 Log

Postby MorkTheFiddle » Mon Nov 08, 2021 2:57 pm

Carmody wrote:Thanks so much for keeping us updated on your reading.

Can you tell me a good edition of Jules Michelet's History of France that you would suggest? They seem to come in many different editions. Thanks so much.

Do you own all the volumes? Looks lengthy?

Sounds a bit like another Marcel Proust effort...

Michelet is indeed rather a big bite. :D
Michelet's History comes in 19 volumes. The downloads I have seem to come from 1876, but no specific edition is given.
The work is longer by far than Proust's, but Michelet writes clear prose and his sentences don't require 15 minutes to read. To take a sentence sort of at random, here is one I'm reading right now.
Enguerrand de Coucy, ayant fait pendre trois jeunes gens qui chassaient dans ses bois, le roi le fit prendre et juger; tous les grands vassaux réclamèrent et appyuyèrent la demande qu'il faisait du combat.

The year is around 1257, the king is I think Saint Louis (Louis IX), who is, like King John in England, trying to rein in his nobility.
Some sentences are longer, of course, but none or at least few of them throw the reader a curve.
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Re: Mork the Fiddle's 2019 Log

Postby Carmody » Mon Nov 08, 2021 4:18 pm

Thanks as always for your answers.

It looks like I am out of the running on this since I really just read hard/softcover books rather than downloads.

Thanks very much anyways.

Yo!
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MorkTheFiddle
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Re: Mork the Fiddle's 2019 Log

Postby MorkTheFiddle » Sun Nov 21, 2021 5:04 pm

French
Irreversible. With English subtitles. Sex, drugs and rock-and-roll. I do not recommend it.
"Dou-Douce," French translation of another powerful story by Anton Chekhov. I don't know the English title, or Russian, for that matter.
Read a few more pages of Jules Michelet's Histoire de France vol 2.

Spanish
A few more pages of La Novela de Genji, a Spanish translation of the 10th century masterpiece by Murasaki Shikibu. Maybe I should add that Murasaki lived before the concept and advent of samurai in Japanese society, so there is none of the blood and guts one might expect. Although her characters occupy the very highest levels of Japanese sociey, her perception and subject matter are Jane Austen in flavor.

Ancient Greek
Plodding along in The Histories of Thucydides. Basing my reading on the selections of E. M. Moore's Easy Selections from Thucydides, I finished the bit about the revolt of Lesbos. The description of the battle at Pylos comes in Book 4, and I am using the helpful commentary of C. E. Graves.
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MorkTheFiddle
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Re: Mork the Fiddle's 2019 Log

Postby MorkTheFiddle » Thu Dec 02, 2021 1:58 pm

Spanish
Bad Day To Go Fishing, Spanish title, Mal Día para Pescar, English subtitles,
2009. Director Álvaro Brechner, starring Gary Piquer, Jouko Ahola, Antonella Costa.
Former German strongman and his seedy manager con their way through South American and Central American backwater towns staging wrestling challenges with a local contender, offering a $1000 purse if the local can last three minutes with the champ. I rated it 9/10.
Continuing with the Spanish translation of The Tale of Genji.

French
Promise at Dawn, via Hoopla. Dir Eric Barbier. With Charlotte Gainsbourg and Pierre Niney. French with English subs, which I used. Bio of Romain Gary (1914-1980), French writer, combat pilot and diplomat. Some think Gainsborough overdid it as Gary’s domineering mother, but I thought she caught the woman’s character well. Solid performances by all, clearly told story. Gary was a prolific and highly-decorated writer whom I know only by reputation. I gave the movie 10/10.

Finished Vol 2 of Histoire de France by Jules Michelet. Began Vol 3.

Reading French translation via Kindle of Anton Chekhov’s “Le Professeur de Belles-Lettres.”

Ancient Greek
Inching further through The History of the Poloponnesian War by Thucydides. Currently reading about the Thracian campaigns led by the Spartan commander Brasidas, including his capture of Amphipolis. The commentary of C. E. Graves and the translation by Rex Warner help a lot.
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Re: Mork the Fiddle's 2019 Log

Postby rdearman » Thu Dec 02, 2021 3:17 pm

MorkTheFiddle wrote:Spanish
Ancient Greek
Inching further through The History of the Poloponnesian War by Thucydides. Currently reading about the Thracian campaigns led by the Spartan commander Brasidas, including his capture of Amphipolis. The commentary of C. E. Graves and the translation by Rex Warner help a lot.

This book came up yesterday when I was searching for books on strategic warfare. I downloaded the English translation. :)
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