Mork the Fiddle's 2019 Log

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DaveAgain
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Re: Mork the Fiddle's 2019 Log

Postby DaveAgain » Sat Mar 20, 2021 11:11 pm

MorkTheFiddle wrote:
French
Listening to and reading Proust's Le temps retrouvé. I began with the litteratureaudio audio and then switched to the Audible version. The Audible version uses three different voices, Michaël Lonsdale, Denis Podalydès, and André Dussollier, which I like.
I saw that recording recommended on twitter the other day, it was made by Editions Theleme.
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MorkTheFiddle
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Re: Mork the Fiddle's 2019 Log

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

DaveAgain wrote:I saw that recording recommended on twitter the other day, it was made by Editions Theleme.
Her comments are apropos. Indeed Proust can be quite funny, and as the other tweet notes, books about Proust rarely if ever talk about his humor.
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MorkTheFiddle
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Re: Mork the Fiddle's 2019 Log

Postby MorkTheFiddle » Sat Mar 27, 2021 7:54 pm

Progress for the week.
Ancient Greek
More Herodotus Book 1 and Plutarch's Lycurgus.
Rereading Justin Slocum Bailey's Driving With Dido: How I Came To Read Latin Extensively got me to thinking how to read Ancient Greek extensively, so I am going to rearrange my agenda to do more re-reading. This morning I selected a handful of favorite texts from Herodotus, Thucydides and Plato to concentrate on, and we'll see how that works.

Spanish
Reading/Listening to Julio Cortázar's Rayuela, 31 minutes, and to Pío Baroja's El Apprendiz de Conspirador, 2h 14m.

French
Listening to Proust, Le Temps retrouvé, 3h 48m.
Watched Le Temps d'une Guerre, Premier épisode 1935 – 1942, 51 minutes, de la série de trois documentaires tournés en hommage aux hommes et aux femmes d'ici [Canada], enrôlés dès le déclenchement de la Seconde Guerre mondiale dans la lutte contre le fascisme.
Unfortunately, most of the French was over my head, perhaps because it is Canadian French, perhaps not.
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Beli Tsar
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Re: Mork the Fiddle's 2019 Log

Postby Beli Tsar » Sun Mar 28, 2021 12:58 pm

MorkTheFiddle wrote:Progress for the week.
Ancient Greek
More Herodotus Book 1 and Plutarch's Lycurgus.
Rereading Justin Slocum Bailey's Driving With Dido: How I Came To Read Latin Extensively got me to thinking how to read Ancient Greek extensively, so I am going to rearrange my agenda to do more re-reading. This morning I selected a handful of favorite texts from Herodotus, Thucydides and Plato to concentrate on, and we'll see how that work.

Will follow with interest! Looking forward to seeing what results you get and how you weigh intensive reading Vs extensive re-reading afterwards. I've read the article multiple times, but haven't really put it into practice with Greek yet.
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MorkTheFiddle
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Re: Mork the Fiddle's 2019 Log

Postby MorkTheFiddle » Sat Apr 03, 2021 4:06 pm

Spanish
Pío Baroja, El Apprendiz de Conspirador, 4h 33m. Finished. The first half of the novel seemed to have a purpose, the last half mostly dull references to heroes of the French Revolution. Perhaps it gives a sense of the impact of that revolution on the neighbors, but I was glad to hear the end of it and don't want to read any of the other 21! novels in the series.
Next up for Spanish listening/reading is something contemporary, La Casa de los Espíritus by Isabel Allende, text from Kindle audio from Audible.
Also a useful video for several languages thanks to Kraut, 8 Maneras de mejorar tu espanol con Google traductor | Learn Spanish, 10:55 min.

French
Marcel Proust, listening, Le temps retrouvé, 4h22m. 4h44m to go. I want my next French listening project to be something contemporary as well and maybe light. Maybe Central Park by Guillaume Musso? I hope I can read Musso without looking at text as I am dong with Proust. Even though my listening is not quite perfect. I like this quote from Caromarlyse's Log about her German listening:
German got a lot of love with almost 56 hours in total, mainly podcasts plus some television news and one book. I’ve listened to over 100 hours of German this year now. I can’t say I’ve felt any break-through moment yet as such (though nor was I expecting one), but I definitely feel at ease listening to German now. I’m enjoying picking out the odd bits of unknown vocabulary from what I hear; because it is always only one or two (or so) words each day, it keeps things interesting and ensures it doesn’t feel overwhelming (I have learnt I hate consciously trying to learn words!). What I notice I can’t do is absorb the content as well as I would when listening to something in English. If I am listening to someone put forward a complex argument, I understand it in the moment, but I don’t take in the information and store it in my short-term memory as I would do when listening to something similar in English. I suppose I *could* take notes and then recount the argument, to myself or another, but I can confidently say that, realistically, that is not going to happen!

Paying close attention, I understand most everything I hear, but I could not 30 seconds later tell anyone else what I heard. Nevertheless, understanding without reading = Progress.

Also, I read the first 20 pages of Le sang des autres by Simone de Beauvoir from my local library. No impressions of the book yet, except it seems a bit somber.
From the library as well D'un château l'autre by Louis-Ferdinand Céline. So much of it is printed using a pseudo-experimental grammar/typography that after looking at a few pages I set it aside for a return to the library. "grammar/typography" doesn't quite fit, but I'm not going to be bothered thinking of a better description.

Ancient Greek
My “extended reading” project has begun. Already some adjustments. Here is the original list:
Plato
Ion
Herodotus
1. Arion 1.23-24
2. Salamis 8.84 8.87-88
. Marathon 6.94-140
. Thermopylae 7.138-239
. Plataea 9.25-89

Thucydides
3. Plague 2.47-49
. Sicily VI.i-VII.87

Herodotus’s stories about Arion and Salamis and worked well, and I have this week read them several times. But then I shifted to Thucydides, as was my plan, but his knotty syntax proved too time-consuming for extened reading, even in the limited sense I am using it. So I decided to switch to the accounts of Diodorus Siculus on the same topics, the plague at Athens and the Sicilian expedition. The Sicilian expedition always entails the story of the desecration of the Hermes statues at Athens just before the start of the expedtion, and the implication of Alcibiades, one of the leaders of the expedition, in the revelation of the “mysteries” to non-initiates (too much to go in to here). A good account of the trial of the accused is told by the orator Andocides, and so I jumped to that. Have been reading his account much of the morning, and want to finish it. So it will go on my list of extended reading. A good thing, really. I had read a bit of this Andocides trial before, and forgot how interesting the story is.
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DaveAgain
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Re: Mork the Fiddle's 2019 Log

Postby DaveAgain » Sun Apr 04, 2021 5:19 am

MorkTheFiddle wrote:French
Marcel Proust, listening, Le temps retrouvé, 4h22m. 4h44m to go. I want my next French listening project to be something contemporary as well and maybe light. Maybe Central Park by Guillaume Musso? I hope I can read Musso without looking at text as I am dong with Proust. Even though my listening is not quite perfect. I like this quote from Caromarlyse's Log about her German listening:
German got a lot of love with almost 56 hours in total, mainly podcasts plus some television news and one book. I’ve listened to over 100 hours of German this year now. I can’t say I’ve felt any break-through moment yet as such (though nor was I expecting one), but I definitely feel at ease listening to German now. I’m enjoying picking out the odd bits of unknown vocabulary from what I hear; because it is always only one or two (or so) words each day, it keeps things interesting and ensures it doesn’t feel overwhelming (I have learnt I hate consciously trying to learn words!). What I notice I can’t do is absorb the content as well as I would when listening to something in English. If I am listening to someone put forward a complex argument, I understand it in the moment, but I don’t take in the information and store it in my short-term memory as I would do when listening to something similar in English. I suppose I *could* take notes and then recount the argument, to myself or another, but I can confidently say that, realistically, that is not going to happen!

Paying close attention, I understand most everything I hear, but I could not 30 seconds later tell anyone else what I heard. Nevertheless, understanding without reading = Progress.

Also, I read the first 20 pages of Le sang des autres by Simone de Beauvoir from my local library. No impressions of the book yet, except it seems a bit somber.
From the library as well D'un château l'autre by Louis-Ferdinand Céline. So much of it is printed using a pseudo-experimental grammar/typography that after looking at a few pages I set it aside for a return to the library. "grammar/typography" doesn't quite fit, but I'm not going to be bothered thinking of a better description.
France Culture have a one hour programme about Herodotus that might interest you: Toute une vie, Hérodote.
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MorkTheFiddle
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Re: Mork the Fiddle's 2019 Log

Postby MorkTheFiddle » Sat Apr 10, 2021 6:42 pm

Spanish
Isabel Allende, La casa de las espíritus, 3h 59m listening and reading (51 pages). This is a splendid book, a well-imagined and well-conceived take on magical realism.

French
Marcel Proust, Le temps retrouvé, 3h 48m listening. Only 52 minutes left.

Ancient Greek
Working through my extended reading list, I can do Herodotus' brief accounts of Arion and Salamis, the brief account in Aeschylus' Persians about Salamis, Sections 11-18 of Andocides' On the Mysteries, and sections 530β and 530ξ of Ion by Plato.

Yesterday I re-read Driving with Dido: How I Came To Read Latin Extensively by Justin Slocum Bailey and focused on his Key Points, especially 2.4, 2.5 and 4.6.
2.4 Read the passages in different textbook series (e.g., Wheelock’s Latin, Lingua Latina Per Se Illustrata, Cambridge Latin Course, Oxford Latin Course, Latin for Americans, Ecce Romani, Latin for the New Millennium); different series focus on different words and structures, and starting at the beginning of each series will make the readings easy enough that you can read a higher volume at a sitting.

2.5. Be willing to change your approach.

4.6. Renaissance versions of Aesop’s Fables, e.g., those collected by Laura Gibbs in Mille Fabulae et Una (of which recordings are available here at Indwelling Language!)


Stored on my desktop are copies of dozens of textbooks and readers that I have been looking through for reading material of the kind Slocum prescribes. I am still trying to describe their contents to myself and put them into some kind of reading order, then slide them into my extensive reading list. More on this later, perhaps.

Obviously Mille Fabulae et Una won't do for Ancient Greek, but Laura Gibbs (whom Slocum very fittingly describes as "indefatigable") did post the Ancient Greek texts of Aesop's Fables on the web.
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MorkTheFiddle
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Re: Mork the Fiddle's 2019 Log

Postby MorkTheFiddle » Sat Apr 17, 2021 7:22 pm

Spanish
21 minutes of “Origen de la Tierra—Documental Completo 2016” [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Loq6OnPWWU&t=1260s] I stopped listening because it was to hard for me to follow.
Isabel Allende, La Casa de los Espíritus, (Kindle) pages 51-94, Cap 4-6 (Audible): 201 min
Uploaded into ANKI some Spanish terms, meanings and example sentences taken from LWT. Not a work of art, but usable.

French
"Gigi," a novella by Colette: sharply observed irony of a young woman being raised by rather disreputable aunts. Somewhere a blurb suggested this is a rare Colette love story that turns out well. I am not so sure.
"Le Passe-muraille," a short story in the vein of Edgar Allen Poe by Marcel Aymé.
Finished Marcel Proust, Le temps retrouvé, 52:06. Now read and listened to all of À la Recherche except volume 4, Sodome et Gomorrhe. Looking for an appealing audiobook.
Guillaume Musso, Central Park, Audible chapitres 1-18: 199 minutes. Good signs: testing understanding the narration both walking on a trail (nearly 100%) and on a treadmill at the gym (not 100%, more like 60%, but promising).
Uploaded into ANKI some French terms, meanings and example sentences taken from LWT. Also not a work of art, but also usable.
Watched "Toute une vie, Hérodote, l'enquêteur d'Halicarnasse," 58 min. Thank you, DaveAgain.

Ancient Greek
Polybius, The Histories, Book I:1-2
Animal Story 1 – 16
W. H. D. Rouse, A Greek Boy at Home: 1-13
Diodorus Siculus, The Library, Book XII, 41.

I am still feeling my way around this Greek variation of Slocum's extensive reading of Latin project. Animal Story and A Greek Boy at Home are among the easiest "made-up" Ancient Greek that I have read. I have been reading some of them each day, plus a little Diodorus Siculus, who is not easy but is hardly difficult. Once done with Animal Story and A Greek Boy at Home, the next easy text will be Evelyn Abbott's Easy Greek Reader.

Reading easier texts over and over again reinforces understanding the meanings of words and flow of sentence structures, giving the occasional "aha" moment.

Edit 1 time to add "Toute une vie, Hérodote, l'enquêteur d'Halicarnasse," 58 min. Thank you, DaveAgain.
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Carmody
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Re: Mork the Fiddle's 2019 Log

Postby Carmody » Sun Apr 18, 2021 12:35 am

As always, you are incredibly productive.

Finished Marcel Proust, Le temps retrouvé, 52:06. Now read and listened to all of À la Recherche except volume 4, Sodome et Gomorrhe. Looking for an appealing audiobook.


Would you care to comment further on Proust?
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MorkTheFiddle
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Re: Mork the Fiddle's 2019 Log

Postby MorkTheFiddle » Sun Apr 18, 2021 5:24 pm

Carmody wrote:As always, you are incredibly productive.

Finished Marcel Proust, Le temps retrouvé, 52:06. Now read and listened to all of À la Recherche except volume 4, Sodome et Gomorrhe. Looking for an appealing audiobook.


Would you care to comment further on Proust?

Sure, though I'll need a couple of days to gather my thoughts. Thanks for the interest.
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