Jeffers' German, French and Hindi

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DaveAgain
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Re: Jeffers' German, French and Hindi

Postby DaveAgain » Fri Jan 29, 2021 3:40 pm

jeffers wrote:[*]Engrenages s1-7 My wife joined me during series 5, got hooked, and watched the rest with me. We finished series 7 a few days ago, and when I found out that series 8 is coming out on DVD in February, she insisted I pre-order the set. I have mixed feelings about Engrenages because the police sometimes do really dodgy things. In a TV series it usually means that they get the bad guys and justice is served, but when real life police officers do the same it usually means that the police victimize innocent people.
1. If you want a follow-on series after 8, Channel 4 have one featuring the Gilou actor as a [different] policeman, Les Dames (UK title: Dead Beautiful).

2. I share your uneasiness about portraying police officers routinely breaking the law! :-)
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Re: Jeffers' German, French and Hindi

Postby rdearman » Fri Jan 29, 2021 3:54 pm

BTW Season 8 is on iPlayer at the moment. But you best be quick before they remove it. :)
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Re: Jeffers' German, French and Hindi

Postby MorkTheFiddle » Fri Jan 29, 2021 6:34 pm

DaveAgain wrote:
jeffers wrote:[*]Engrenages s1-7 My wife joined me during series 5, got hooked, and watched the rest with me. We finished series 7 a few days ago, and when I found out that series 8 is coming out on DVD in February, she insisted I pre-order the set. I have mixed feelings about Engrenages because the police sometimes do really dodgy things. In a TV series it usually means that they get the bad guys and justice is served, but when real life police officers do the same it usually means that the police victimize innocent people.
1. If you want a follow-on series after 8, Channel 4 have one featuring the Gilou actor as a [different] policeman, Les Dames (UK title: Dead Beautiful).

Gilou ( Thierry Godard) and lawyer Joséphine Karlsson (Audrey Fleurot) also play prominent roles in the series A French Village, another possibility as a follow-up.
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Re: Jeffers' German, French and Hindi

Postby MorkTheFiddle » Fri Jan 29, 2021 6:40 pm

jeffers wrote:[*]Dino lernt Deutsch Collector's Edition (the first four books in the series). I read through these stories twice (maybe three times?) These are nice and simple beginner readers. The good thing is that the stories are interesting enough. The bad thing is that the vocabulary help is at the very end of each chapter, so I found myself flipping back and forth quite a bit which really killed flow.
There are two possible solutions to this. (1) photocopy or photograph the vocabulary help and keep it to the side or on your handheld or (2) tear out the pages of the vocabulary from the book and keep them to the side.
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Re: Jeffers' German, French and Hindi

Postby jeffers » Fri Jan 29, 2021 8:08 pm

DaveAgain wrote:1. If you want a follow-on series after 8, Channel 4 have one featuring the Gilou actor as a [different] policeman, Les Dames (UK title: Dead Beautiful).

2. I share your uneasiness about portraying police officers routinely breaking the law! :-)


Thanks, a useful suggestion. I have actually seen two or three episodes on Les Dames when I had TV5 Monde and you just got a random cop series of the week. It was quite good, so I'm glad you've given me a source in the UK.


rdearman wrote:BTW Season 8 is on iPlayer at the moment. But you best be quick before they remove it. :)


That's good to know, although I'm happy to give it a break for now while I watch Babylon Berlin.


MorkTheFiddle wrote:Gilou ( Thierry Godard) and lawyer Joséphine Karlsson (Audrey Fleurot) also play prominent roles in the series A French Village, another possibility as a follow-up.


Thanks. I've seen all of Un village français, and it started out really well but I feel the series kind of dragged down in the middle and the final season was a completed mess. They tried to do a bunch of "what happened to them later?" stories, but they were very rushed, almost like the series had been cancelled and they had to complete the stories in a limited time.

MorkTheFiddle wrote:There are two possible solutions to this. (1) photocopy or photograph the vocabulary help and keep it to the side or on your handheld or (2) tear out the pages of the vocabulary from the book and keep them to the side.


A good suggestion, although I'm reading on Kindle rather than in a book. Although, tear pages out of a book? Are you mad? As Agnan said, you should never cause harm to a book, an animal or a tree. :lol:

Instead, I can take print screens of the vocab sections and print them out.
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Re: Jeffers' German, French and Hindi

Postby MorkTheFiddle » Sat Jan 30, 2021 5:52 pm

jeffers wrote:
MorkTheFiddle wrote:Gilou ( Thierry Godard) and lawyer Joséphine Karlsson (Audrey Fleurot) also play prominent roles in the series A French Village, another possibility as a follow-up.

Thanks. I've seen all of Un village français, and it started out really well but I feel the series kind of dragged down in the middle and the final season was a completed mess. They tried to do a bunch of "what happened to them later?" stories, but they were very rushed, almost like the series had been cancelled and they had to complete the stories in a limited time.
MorkTheFiddle wrote:There are two possible solutions to this. (1) photocopy or photograph the vocabulary help and keep it to the side or on your handheld or (2) tear out the pages of the vocabulary from the book and keep them to the side.

A good suggestion, although I'm reading on Kindle rather than in a book. Although, tear pages out of a book? Are you mad? As Agnan said, you should never cause harm to a book, an animal or a tree. :lol:
Instead, I can take print screens of the vocab sections and print them out.

Had a hunch you'd seen Village, but thought I'd mention it anyway. I enjoyed the first two seasons.
A camping guide taught me to tear pages out of a book as I read them and toss them in the campfire, progressively cutting down on weight.
And yes, I am mad. :D
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Re: Jeffers' German, French and Hindi

Postby jeffers » Mon Feb 01, 2021 8:54 pm

A quick update, to keep myself going:

First, a note about my post-Covid recovery. I'm tired after being awake for a couple of hours, despite sleeping well, but I'm at a point where watching and reading isn't too taxing for me. I had a phone consult with my doctor today who said I should continue to rest from work for now, but going for a short walk each day would be good for my physical and mental health.

German
On Friday I opened my DVD set of Babylon Berlin. I didn't want to binge this because I realized a long time ago that I forget most of the story of shows I've binged. However, once I started I couldn't stop! I watched three episodes Friday and then watched the remaining five episodes in series one the next day. What can I say? I really like this series a lot: the characters are interesting, the setting is wonderful, I love the music, and I'm really enjoying an introduction to a slice of history that I know very little about. According to things I've read about the series, the setting is very realistic and the historical references are accurate, although the main characters are fictional. The author's intention was to explore the period of German history, to tease out how a democracy that could have succeeded ended up following Hitler.

Saturday night I decided to try something different, and listened to an audiobook before going to sleep, with my headphones on and the light off. It was an easy one, Dino Lernt Deutsch: Plötzlich in Palermo, and I quite enjoyed the experience. I listened to a couple more chapters last night before bed, and also some as I took the dog on a short wallk. My intention is to listen to it twice through before reading the text, and so far I'm about 2/3 of the way through the audiobook.


French
Friday I watched an episode of Nota Bene (YouTube), which looks like something I could return to from time to time.

In addition I listened to the latest episode of InnerFrench about why the French are becoming afraid of vaccines. It was interesting to hear about the attitudes of differnt countries to vaccination; in short, poorer countries with a lot more disease are far more positive about vaccination than wealthy countries. This tallies with my experience of living in India, where people can see for themselves that vaccines save lives.

Yesterday I started the new Netflix series Lupin. From watching the trailer I expected the whole thing would have more of the feel of a heist film, but the actual heist only took place in the first episode. At first I found it a bit slow, but now that I've watched three episodes I'm really enjoying it. I've been watching it in French with French subtitles, and have been pleasantly surprised that I have had almost no issues understanding the vocabulary. In a few cases I backed it up a bit and switched to English subs to rewatch a section because I understood every French word, but couldn't make sense of the sentence formed! :lol:

I finished reading Les vacances du Petit Nicolas Saturday morening, and started Mon ami Maigret in the evening. For the most part, Simenon's language is pretty clear to me. I've had to look up a word or two per page, but occasionally I've put a sentence into translate because, again, although I understood each word separately, the combination wasn't something I could decode fully. I was sure I was enjoying the story very much during the first two chapters, but now that the investigation is finally getting underway I'm beginning to be drawn into it.


Hindi
Did a bit of reading from children's books.

EDIT
For reference, I thought I should add a picture of my SC tracker dashboard.
SC progress Feb 01, 2021.png


A week ago the speedometer for my French reading was in the red (i.e. I had read less than half what I should have by now), so it's nice that it's creeped up into the yellow zone. It's unfortunate that my Hindi is in the red, but my priorities are French > German > Hindi right now.
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Re: Jeffers' German, French and Hindi

Postby rdearman » Mon Feb 01, 2021 10:56 pm

I do like your dashboard, pity it doesn't work in LibreOffice. :)
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Re: Jeffers' German, French and Hindi

Postby jeffers » Sun Feb 07, 2021 5:50 pm

Sunday update

French
  • Lupin episodes 4 & 5. I've been vaguely disappointed with this series, some of the tricks Assane gets away with are just too improbable. Nevertheless it was engaging enough, and I was pleased with my level of comprehension. I was also disappointed to find it the series ending on a cliff-hanger, so hopefully the next episodes will be coming soon?
  • C'est du gâteau (aka Nailed It! France) I watched the first two episodes inspired by a thread about using another similar show to practice German. The idea is that the conversations are more "real" and unscripted than in a drama, and from episode to episode there will be common themes and vocabulary. It has worked quite well so far in this respect, but what surprised me was that on several occasions I found myself laughing out loud! Sadly there is only one season with six episodes.
  • InnerFrench, listened to episodes 87 and 86 (I'm working backwards from the end to where I last got up to :lol:)
  • Les singes d'une nuit d'été (audiobook) by Vincent Remède. This is the third book by the author in the Mondes en VF series of readers, and it's not quite as good as his previous books, but it is still remarkably interesting for a book supposed to be an A2 reader. I've listened to it 1.8x and will probably listen a third time before starting the actual book.
  • Mon ami Maigret I'm on chapter 7, around 70% complete. This is the first full Maigret I've read, and I'm enjoying it but still have to look up a lot of vocabulary I've not come across before, like brouette (wheelbarrow).

German
  • Babylon Berlin I watched the whole 2nd series on Tuesday. I woke up inexplicably around 4:30 am, so watched a few episodes then. After a bit of sleep I got back to it and just kept going. I've enjoyed the show very much so far, and I'm looking forward to series 3, while disappointed that I will be finished with the DVDs I have after that.
  • Audiobook: Plötzlich in Palermo I've now listened through twice, and I'll probably listen one more time before starting to read it. As a result, I've not done any reading in German this week.

Hindi
Almost nothing. I read a children's book through a few times on Tuesday.
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DaveAgain
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Re: Jeffers' German, French and Hindi

Postby DaveAgain » Thu Mar 04, 2021 11:22 am

jeffers wrote: I have mixed feelings about Engrenages because the police sometimes do really dodgy things. In a TV series it usually means that they get the bad guys and justice is served, but when real life police officers do the same it usually means that the police victimize innocent people.
The recent Sarkozy case seems to have depended on telephone tapping. In addition to conversations with his lawyer, the investigators tapped a range of targets who might be leaking information to Mr Sarkozy in order to find a mole.

https://youtu.be/-xubndkSgFQ
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