Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

[Iversen]

Since I last checked my log it has passed a noteworthy treshold - 400107 views this morning! It would be so nice of I could celebrate this with a long list of things I have done since my latest post, but I spent most of yesterday touring around in the neighbourhood, and in the evening I watched flow TV and Youtube videos in the usual languages. OK, I did transcfribe about 20 lines of Georgian, studied a page in Greek about Thessaloniki in my old airline magazine Blue, watched a video named "Cum au apărut primii oameni?" in Romanian followed by one named "Cea Mai Ciudata Stea Din Univers" and three short Romanian videos about planets in our solar system (sorry, just two - Pluto ain't a planet anymore)- and now my Youtube recommandations have become a mixture of different Romance languages plus English - still a lot of Spanish, but the funny thing is that the thing recommends videos about psychology and giftedness in Spanish, about fringe psychology bordering on occultism in Portuguese and about astronomy in Romanian, sprinkled with references to music by the amazing Alan Hovhaness - all based on my recent choices. You could have expected it to come up with proposals that cross those strict borders - -but the only language that seems to cross them is English (because there are so terribly many videos in English that they can't be outcompeted in any search). I still find it irritating that Youtube doesn't have an optional language /area search limitation that the one in Google Search, and also that its searches don't respect minus signs.. and I could have subtitles based on speech recognition in English and in Spanish, but not in Catalan or Romanian. OK, maybe it's coming soon, but I would like to have that feature already now for my Slavic languages ... but despite these flaws (and the noxious advertisements) Youtube is still my best source for things to listen to, well .. sometimes the only one.

Today I intend to return to my collection of Slavic languages. I have planned to produce some new bilingual texts sets in them since I have done practically everything in the old ones. Albanian is also on the list, whereas my trusty Blue still has many unused articles in Greek waiting for me. And then I'll try to think about things to paint. Because I revised the old painting intitulated "Hin Danske Tekstileksport" a few days ago I know that my paint tubes now all can be opened (though a couple of them needed a dip in boiling water), and I have some empty canvases stashed from the 90s, and now I even have a room that can be sealed off from the rest so that the whole shack isnae gonna stink of mineral turpentine - and I might also touch my piano for a brief fleeting moment (as I did yesterday). So I have lots of things to do while I'm waiting for that damned electrician to come and do his magic.

Kunst099.JPG

[tastyonions]

Yeah, I would love it if there were a way to exclude videos in English from my YouTube searches and recommendations. Even setting my default language to French in my profile doesn’t do that much to hold back the flood of English!

[Iversen]

I have now spent half a day on making new bilingual printout sets for a selection of my target languages. SO far they contain the following texts (translation languages between parentheses, all unmarked texts borrowed from WIkipedia), and apart from the Bulgarian set they all consists of three pages - enough for maybe a month or so, definitely not more. But after I scanned the ones on the image below it occurred to me that I also needed a set for Indonesian and one for Irish (even though I don't study that language actively right now) plus a triple set with Georgian originals, transcription plus a translation into something less obscure. And I might also want to make some monolingual sheets with texts in Scots, Low German and some other Romance and Germanic languages/dialects and .. how could I forget it? mum Latin!

PLATT (LOW GERMAN) - monolingual
Bi de Fleegsuriers (Pterosauria) ...
Wat Kladen sünd un wat nich ...
Wo de Kladistik up af will

ALBANIAN:
Planetët s'i keni parë kurrë (DA, from Albanianpost.com)
Disa fakte interesante për ålanetet e sistemit diellor (RO, from astrolbastronomy.wordpress.com/2017..)
Hëna, eashtuquajtura satelite e Tokës, (GR, from insajerdi.com)
Aferdita ose sic quhet ndryske Venusi.. (Frisian, from informues.blogspot.com/2014/...)

BULGARIAN:
Осъзнат сън [lucid dream] е сън, при който цънувашият е наясно, (POR)
Осъзнаият сън - съшност, видове и техники (NO, spisania8.bg)
Въпреки че привлича обшественото винимание (LUX)

SERBIAN:
Хипрлексија или поремећај паметног (AF)
Аспергеров синдфром (...) један је од неколико поремећаја (GER)
(Lat.) Autizam je vrlo složeni poremećaj u razvoju mosga (DU)

CROATIAN:
Aspergerov sindrom (...) jedan je od nekoliko poremećaja (IT) - nb. sml.no 2 under SR!
Tourettov sindrom -Bitno obilježje Touretteova poremećaja (GAL)
Veta bloktori - Farmakologija - oni blokiraju učinak (POR)

SLOVAK:
Noradrenalin alebo norepinefrin je hormón (SW)
Dopamin alebo 4-(2-aminoetyl) benzén-1,2-diol (SW)
Parkinsonova choroba je pomaly progredujúce neurodegenerativne (IC)
Vedomé snivanie (lucidné, bdelé, jasné snívanie) (FR)

CZECH:
Historie Zoo Praha sahá až do roku 1881, (Cors., from Zoopraha.ca)
Archea (...) jednoté čislo archeon či v latinisované podobé archeum (IT)
Klasifikace archei je i dnes neustalé v pohybu, (DA)

POLISH:
Pierwsze śląskie ogrody zoologiczne (RO, from slaskiezoo.pl)
Początki nowego zoo (BU, from slaskiezoo.pl)
Śląsk (...) - kraina historyczna położona (GR)
Eukarionty (...) okre ślane też jako jądrowce, (EO)

UKRAINIAN:
Ціанобактерії (...) тіп бактерій, що отпримуют (SP)
Хонафлаґеляті, або комірцеві джгутіконосці (CAT)
Мікробіолоґія (від ґрецькоґо ....) (EO)

RUSSIAN:
Бред величния: мегаломания (...) (RU)
Вредители продовольственных запасов (Frisian, from pestcontrol.ru)
Голод в СССР (1932-1933) - массовый голод (EN)

10_printout-sets.jpg

.. and now I have added the missing sets - or at least some of the possible ones.

SCO: Ane o the things ah did (re)unkiver during my hunsle for Scots texts wis the massive ScottishCorpus, awbeit ah cannae lat be that mony o the texts are in Sassenach and anely discuss the Scots leid (and in some cases argie that it isnae possible tae revive it). Ah daenae care aboot that argie-bargie - ah ettled tae find same texts in Laeland Scots, and I fand thoosands o screives, frae wit ah selected four.

4_printout_sets.jpg

[Iversen]

It would be silly to make a lot of bilingual text sets without using them - but it will take some time before I'm through the whole collection which I made last week. So far I have worked my way through one text about cyanobacteria in Ukrainian and one about Praha Zoo in Czech, and I have made wordlists corresponding to both texts. But on top of that I have transferred a few unread texts from my current-projects-notestand to my goodnight-chair in my bedroom, and yesterday evening I read no less than three texts in Czech from WIkipedia: one about emperor Rudolph II (with a translation into Italian), on about his brother and enemy Mathias (with a translation into Esperanto) and one about his successor Ferdinand II from the Styrian branch of the Habsburgs, who promised to respect the liberty of religions and broke his promise, which ultimately led to the Thirty Years War that devasted much of Europe (translation into Dutch). I could not have read these texts without a translation, but now that I have done so I'm thinking about returning them to the active-projects-notestand and study them intensively.

Besides I finished most of a long Russian text about the Tunguska event which I have had at my goodnight-chair for a long time, but only read up to about a third (I was just too sleepy to read the last page). This is actually such an old bilingual text that it is 'interspersed' - i.e. each Russian sentence is followed by its translation into Danish. I found out how to do that by using a quirk of the insertion mechanisms in an extinct version of MS WOrd, but the layout was inspired by somebody with a Russian name who published some texts in this format, I have forgotten his name, and anyway I soon switched to a side-by-side layout which is much faster to set up (the problem being that all Danish sentences in the interspersed format had to be coloured manually to make them stand out from the original sentences - just having them in Cyrillic versus Latin was not enough, and having them all in Latin script would lead to chaos).

I have done one more thing more with Czech - and also with some other languages: I have recently watched Youtube videos in several Romance languages like French, Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan and Romanian. And yesterday I added Italian. Some of the videos I have watched recently in Spanish told about the plight of the "superdotados" - i.e. supersmart kids (and the same kids again as adults) who are bored to death in their class. So i found few videos about that topic by searching for "superdotati" in Italian, and once you find one video in a certain language it can lead to others - so soon after I ended up learning about schizophrenics and autism and Asperger and giftedness in Italian. And then videos about similar topics in languages I have used recently may pop up across the topic borders I have mentioned earlier - but apart from English videos you have to have been around both the languages AND the topics to see the magick happen. And for most of my languages the facility of ubiquitous machine made subtitles isn't available yet, but I expect this offer to arrive when I don't need it any more.

This morning I started out searching for "pražská zoologická zahrada" and watched a long video in Czech with a videocamera wielding mum with two kids walking through the Praha Zoo. Did I understand what they said? Of course not, but maybe the pronunciation of my internal homunculus may become somewhat closer to the real thing. And if I do return to the dastard gatherings I will definitely be visit this zoo again later this year (the jury is still out on that). But then a small accident happened : I saw a reference to a 40 minutes video in English about the history and current members of the mammalians, and from there I couldn't resist the temptation to continue to shorter videos about the Brontotheridae, the Sparassodonta, the Meridiungulata, the Desmostyliae and the predecessors and relatives af giraffes and rhinos - all in English (with names in Latin). So goodbye language learning - but later today I reckon that I will return back to the my languages, both as texts, wordlists and videos. But at the same time I'm beginning to plan a painting with extinct animals and some unfortunately not extinct politicians eating dung. And I'm also halfway through my music files - I got through six hours of Кабалевский and Калинников yesterday, and the next guys on the list will be Kalkbrenner and Kalliwoda.

P3201a03_Zoo-Praha-1990.jpg

[Iversen]

Yesterday evening's goodnight read amounted to just a few lines, but then I woke up around 6 o'clock and proceeded to read some of the items that had been waiting for me on the bedside chair (which i use instead of a small table like those in hotels). Most of the things I have written lately were in English, so today I'll I shall make amends for that by switching to the actual languages.

IND: Setiap kumpulan teks terdiri dari tiga halaman - dan seringkali juga tiga teks terpisah. Kumpulan bahasa Indonesia memiliki 1½ halaman tentang tapir Asia, yang berwarna hitam kecuali ujung telinga dan badannya berwarna putih. Dalam bahasa Denmark disebut "skaberaktapir" (“skaberak” = selimut). Ini adalah satu-satunya tapir di Asia, tetapi ia memiliki tiga kerabat berwarna coklat di Amerika Latin. Ketika saya pertama kali mengunjungi Kebun Binatang di Kuala Lumpur ("KL"), saya melihat seorang penjaga kebun binatang berjalan-jalan dengan kecil tapir berkeliling taman sementara kandangnya sedang dibersihkan. Namun ketika harus masuk kembali ke dalam kandang, ia tidak mau, sehingga salah satu penjaga mendorongnya ke belakang, sementara penjaga lainnya melambaikan wortel ke moncongnya. Dan proyek tersebut berhasil. Kumpulan teks juga berisi teks pendek tentang tapir coklat dan satu halaman penuh tentang Hindi Belanda.

F0614a04.jpg

BU: Комплектът български текст съдържа четири текста на четири страници, първата от които споменава ордовикския период, когато животинският свят процъфтява в морето. Имаше ок. 10% кислород във въздуха и озонов слой се образуваха и първите растения започнаха да пълзят нагоре по земята. Но имаше и колебания в климата и имаше големи ледени маси на полюсите. Периодът завършва с масова смърт. Следващият текст е за предишния период, камбрия, който започна с експлозия на нови форми на живот с черупки (палеонтолозите оценяват това!) - но също така, например, граптолити, които образуваха плаващи колонии. Най-изненадващото е, че текстът твърди, че първите земноводни са пълзяли по сушата през камбрия. В него не вярвам. Третият текст също се занимава с камбрия, с подробности за геологията. Интересна подробност е, че много ранни животни са имали черупки не от въглеродни съединения, а от фосфор - дори очите на трилобитите са направени от калциев фосфат. Четвъртата статия говори за произхода на живота (през докамбрия), но без много информация. Четвъртият текстов набор (на чешки език) започна със статия за неутронните звезди, но ми се приспа и не стигнах повече. Когато се събудих отново беше 10 сутринта.

CZ: A ano, předchozí věta by měla být napsána česky, ale je to pro mě jednoduší v bulharštiné. V češtiné je příliš mnoho diakritických znamének!

[M23]

Yeah, I would love it if there were a way to exclude videos in English from my YouTube searches and recommendations. Even setting my default language to French in my profile doesn’t do that much to hold back the flood of English!

Creating a different profile for French (a profile not linked to your English-speaking self), and only looking things up in French, would be my suggestion. Beyond that, it depends on how competent you are with your computer.

[Iversen]

I can't see that anything in my profile can influence the choice of languages in the suggestions Youtube comes up with. The only thing that really matters is what I have watched or searched for lately, and if i want to break a certain pattern I have to do a strategical search (or even a series of searches) and watch videos about specific topics in specific languages to get more of the same kind - and a few seconds is enough to tell the algorithms what I'm searching for (but avoid looking at ANYTHING in English!!! - especially snooker). If I have been totally logged out the first suggestions will be always random Anglophone junk (marked "for you"), which then becomes sprinkled with the exact same videos I just have watched. But it can also come up with things that from every possible angle are irrelevant and uncalled for.

So I have learnt to some degree to manipulate the algorithms with my searches and the things I watch, and in most cases I end up finding something relevant, but I have to sift through far too much irrelevant trash.

[Iversen]

GER: Heute habe ich mindestens drei Stunden damit verbracht, eine Live-Übertragung vom Braunschweiger Karnevalsumzug anzustarren und dabei das heitere quatschen zwei Kommentatoren zugehört. Dabei is Deutsch is nicht einer meiner meist bedürftigen Sprachen, aber trotzdem is es gut irgendwann ein Marathonlauschen durchzuführen. Ich weiß eigentlich nicht, warum gerade Braunschweig so eine enorme Faschingsprozession hat - etwa sechs km lang mit etwa 8000 Prozessionsteilnehmer (und hunderttausende von zuschauer, die mit tonnenweise Süßigkeiten aus den Wagen gefüttert werden). Das Wetter dort unten war grau und feucht und kühl (wie hier), aber es hätte noch schlimmer werden können: es hätte heftig regnen können oder ein Schneesturm geben. Ich verstehe nicht, wie die hohen Herren und Damen Veranstalter es gewagt haben, den Monat Februar für ihre große Feier zu wählen, aber letztendlich ist es wohl die Fastenzeit der katholischen Kirche, die den Zeitpunkt bestimmt. Und in Rom regnet es vielleicht nie?

In Dänemark wird Karneval kaum gefeiert. In meiner Kindheit gab es kostümierte Kinder, die herumliefen und Bestechungsgelder in Form von Süßigkeiten und Weizenbrötchen einsammelten – sonst würden sie das Lied unten singen. Doch dafür haben die Kinder von heute überhaupt keine Zeit – sie sind viel zu sehr damit beschäftigt, auf ihr Handy zu gucken.

DA: Fastelavn er mit navn, (fastelavn is my name)
boller vil jeg have. (buns I do want)
Hvis jeg ingen boller får, (if ah daenae get ony buns)
så laver jeg ballade. (then I'm shall be making trouble)

Boller op, boller ned, (buns up, buns down)
boller i min mave. (buns in my tummy)
Hvis jeg ingen boller får, (if I ain't gonna get no buns)
så laver jeg ballade. (then I'm dammit gonna make trouble! (got it?))

Karneval_Braunschweig_11-02-2014.jpg

EN: Apart from that: I have made a first sketch for my green grammar sheets for Czech (for its nouns and adjectives). I have a Routledge grammar, but to make order of what I can read there I have first set up a simple table based on the tables in Wikipedia. Did I write 'simple'? Haha, it looks like there is total chaos in the endings - sometimes with three competing endings for one form. But it seems there is the usual dichotomy of hard and soft roots, three genders, seven cases, and then some words have an infix -ov- (Routledge may have some rules of thumb to guess which ones have it), and as usual masculine nouns are divided into animate and dead as a dodo ones, and there are patterns that totally differ from the the regular ones, and some words that simply are irregular - and it seems there is separate wordclass with its own special tables for things belonging to mum and dad. But I'm not scared (just confused) - I have seen similar chaos in other languages before and survived.

EO: Krome mi legis tri Esperanto-revuojn de UEA kiel bona-nokta legadajo, ..

GR: .. και σήμερα μελέτησα ένα κείμενο στα ελληνικά για την πρώτη περίοδο της ιστορίας της Γης, το Αδαίο (που πήρε το όνομά του από τον ιδιωτικό θεό των Ελλήνων του υποκόσμου). Το άρθρο λέει ότι μπορείτε να χρονολογήσετε αυτήν την εποχή χρησιμοποιώντας κρυστάλλους ζιργκόνου σε άλλους τύπους βράχου. Το περίεργο είναι ότι η ζωή φαίνεται να προέκυψε μόλις η γη είχε κρυώσει και οι θάλασσες είχαν εμφανιστεί (ίσως με νερό που έφεραν μετεωρίτες ή κομήτες). Και τότε ουσιαστικά τίποτα δεν συνέβη μέχρι που κάποια ανεύθυνα φύκια εφηύρε τη φωτοσύνθεση και άρχισε να σκοτώνει τα πάντα με οξυγόνο. Εμείς προέρχεται από τις μορφές ζωής που επέζησαν από το μακελειό.

DA: I går var det i øvrigt klamt og koldt og køligt og tåget vejr, men jeg ville ikke blot sidde hjemme og glo - så jeg kørte 100 kilometer ned til museet i slottet i Sønderborg - lokalt kendt som Synneborre. Landsdelen er ellers mest kendt for sine overdådige kageborde ("kage" udtales /kach/ på synnejysk), men har også sin egen dialekt, som nogle indbyggere dernede er stolte af at tale. Jeg lyttede til adskillige besøgende, der talte ægte synnejysk, og der var videoer på dialekten - men jeg taler den desværre ikke selv.

Billedet nedenfor viser to bøger på Synnejysk ("Sønderjyllands historie" og "De første 1000 ord på sønderjysk"), men den røde er anderledes: indbyggerne på den lillebitte ø Als har deres egen dialekt: alsisk - og den røde bog er en ordsamling med 1000 ord på denne meget lokale dialekt. Og VOV ikke at sige at alsinger snakker synnejysk - nej, de snakker alsisk (eller rigsdansk) - faneme!

F6635a03_Synnejysk_oe.jpg

Addendum Montag: .. und heute marschieren die Karnevalisten in Mainz....addendum addendum und später auch die närrischen Rosenmontagisten von Köln und Düsseldorf. Die Deutschen sind merkwürdig, aber sie haben anscheinend Spaß daran. Vielleicht könnten ihre Nachbarn etwas davon lernen...

[Iversen]

I have not updated this log the last few days, but that doesn't mean that I haven't done anything, but every time I intended to write something here I ended up adding to another thread. So let me just state that I have started a new painting after a fairly long pause. Unfortunately you won't ever see the result here because that would be against the rules of the forum (one item thereon being a certain Putin). One reason that it took a few years the get back to that hobby is that I had to buy several new paint tubes because the old ones had petrified.

However in the meantime I have made drawings in a series of museums, but since I don't collect drawings - not even my own - I just photographed them and left them at the site - often as a gift to the employee who was stationed there to activate the kids. Then in this week I got the splendid idea to have 19 of those photos copied in A5 format, and now I have put them on a wall - and they actually look better in A5 than in the original A4 format. But things like that take time away from my language activities. By the way you may notice on the image below that I still haven't taken my braided christmas hearts down. We have a saying here in Denmark that Christmas last until Easter, and this might actually hold true in this case.

F6637a02_A5.jpg

And languages .. well, I have at long last done all the repetitions for my most recent Czech wordlists, and the final result can be seen below (around 400 words). Besides I have worked on some of the printouts I made a couple of weeks ago. For instance I have transcribed a couple of Georgian texts, and now I only have to check a few of the less used letters against my printed alphabet. But one of the texts contained a letter that looked like a small Greek omega (ჲ), and that has left me perplexed because that letter counts as deprecated since 1879 in modern Mkhedruli - so maybe the text isn't actually Kartuli, but Mingrelian or Laz (even though the word "kartuli" is used several times). But since I'm not trying to learn the language itself I don't need to care about an explanation yet.

Rep_400CzechWords.jpg

I have also worked on a Bulgarian textcollection about lucid dreams (sing. осъзнат сън, plur. осъзнати сънища), all in all..

BU: три статии за осъзнато сънуване. Първият споменава книга на Силия Грийн, която всъщност изучавах с интерес през 80-те години на миналия век в период, когато се интересувах от подобни неща. Другият споменава философ, който отрича, че можете да докажете съществуването им - но всъщност можете. Не знам защо си струва да цитирам мнения на неуместен философ.. Третата статия е най-интересна с това, че избрах да я преведа на люксембургски език, който мога да чета, но не се опитвам да науча.

INDO: Saya juga mempelajari teks bahasa Indonesia dari Wikipedia tentang zaman Silurian, ketika kehidupan di laut mencakup kalajengking laut dan brakiopoda berukuran besar. Paleontologi merupakan mata pelajaran yang cukup saya pahami dalam bahasa Indonesia karena saya telah membaca beberapa artikel tentangnya.

And of course I have also read things in Czech, which for the moment is the Slavic language I spend most of my time on.

My goodnight reading was switched to goodmorning reading, and here I read about Pterosaurians and cladistics in Low German, but also a four page textcollection in Scots from the site ScottishCorpus.ac.uk aboot the Scots leid. All of these in monolingual printouts because 1) Google Translate can't translate them, 2) but I can, ..

SCO: ..an ah dinna need no translation for yon twa leids. The first airticle in Scots laments that thare isnae just ane guid dictionar whit coud micht be used as the gowden standard for aw Scots deealects. Guid, ah have twa smaw dictionars, but hauf the wirds in those beuks are wirds that mean "stupit" in Sassenach. The author cries oot for some action frae the Scots pairlament, but wad the natives o Scotland coff a dearthfu Scots dictionar? The seicont airticle tells the cant o an Arabic sultan frae a desert country wha saw a cuddie and asked his advisors tae propone a version o that beast for use in his awn country - an that's how the camel wis invented (by a comatee, o coorse). "A camel? Whit's a camel" "Ah dinnae ken but it soonds aboot richt". An that's hou the camel got its name.

Platt: De Standard Schrievwies vun Platt sien WIkipedia is de Sass'che Rechtschrieven, aver mien grootste platte Wöörböök (Neues hochdeutsch-plattdeutsches Wörterbuch) bruukt een önner System - und de Plautschnackers höffen seker ehr egen System (oder sie schrieven nix op Plaut).

[Iversen]

Weather does have an influence on my study activities. Yesterday it was relatively nice weather, and I used the opportunity to visit the mixted cultural/art museum in Tønder, South Western Jutland (Denmark), and as usual - when it is possible - I made a drawing, photographed it and left it hanging on a wall (maybe it will also turn up on the Facebook channel of the museum, but I'm not on Facebook myself so I can't check). And after that I drove twenty kilometers South to the German town Niebüll (Naibel or Nibøl in Danish, where I of course bought some chocolate and five liters of banana juice (no booze, no cigarettes). And when I returned home I spent some time organizing my photos and eat some of the chocolate and drink one liter of banana juice. And after that i didn't feel like studying.

The border region of Germany and Denmark was established after a referendum in 1920, which in the main followed the linguistic division line - but with minorities on both sides of the border. However compared to other border regions in the world this one is reasonable peaceful, and the minorities have their own schools and kindergartens, as shown below. And many are bilingual. I spoke in German to a German man in the supermarket queue and he answered in Danish. Then I answered just for sake of balance in Danish, and he answered in German. Nullo problemo. However I also bought a few things more in a smaller town Süderlügum (Sønderløgum) just a kilometer or so South of the border, and almost all customers there were Danes profiting from the lower prices in Germany. It can't be easy to be a grocery or supermarket in Tønder just North of the border.

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Today it has rained all day long, and my studying has profited from that fact - no excursions (just out to feed the birdies and get my newspaper). I have studied two Czech texts about Archea, i.e. the primitive beings that preceded the bacteria and the eucariots (plants and anomals with cell kernels). I have recently mentioned how some irresponsable algae happened upon a process that produced oxygen - which almost wiped out every living being on the planet including themselves. But some survived in inhospitable places like the interior of stones and under ice sheats and in boiling volcanic lakes like those in Yellowstone, and the algae also found ways to adapt to the nasty poison. Otherwise we wouldn't be here. And I could almost understand the Czech articles about the topic, but not yet without having an occasional peek in a translation.

Beside I have listened to more than six hours of music by Russian composers Aram Khatchaturian and Tikhon Khrennikov.
RU: Все знают Арама Хачатуряна (парня с танцем с саблями), но, возможно, не Тихона Хренникова. Кто был он? Ну, на самом деле он был протеже Сталина и занимал важные посты при омерзительном Жданове. И может быть не политкорректно слушать музыку таких людей, но факт в том, что его музыка мед для слуховых проходов (ouch, that was an Anglicism..).

Next composer on the list will be the Finnish Uuno Klami, who was impertinent enough to write his own Kalevala music - after national hero Sibelius had delivered his immortal contributions. Kalevala is a collection of Finnish folk poetry collected by a man named Elias Lönnroth (Finnish nationalist in spite of his Swedish name and active during the dark period under Russian rule). Since it's in Finnish I sadly can't read it, so I have to just listen to the music and trying to guess what it's all about (brooding dark forests populated by dark spirits it seems, including some 'happy' music that sounds like comebody is weeping).

I have also watched TV, including four different programs from Arte, which is a German/French shared channel which I can switch from its default German to French speech and French subtitles. And most of the time I just used the subtitles, because if I switched on the sound I couldn't listen to music at the same time and it might also distract me from my text studies of Archaea in Czech. It's already bad enough that I have to switch between the TV screen and the papers. I also watched Linea Verde from Raiuno (Italian) just with subtitles, but that's because they have a tendency to use annoying background music.