Expug's TAC 2016 - Writing the lines of fluency

[Expugnator]

I am flabbergasted about what you have accomplished in Mandarin, while studying head on like 4 other languages, and you are not even in a Chinese speaking region! This should be an example for me and anyone else that anything is possible Keep riding the wave Expugnator!

Thanks outcast. I don't have the dedication that people who have Chinese as main focus possess, but it's a language I learned to like and have fun with, and I'm still amazed that I went far enough to realize that speaking Chinese is possible. Looking forward to learn from all other students.


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Started my first episode of Очень по-русски. I will study them chronologically. It's just what I need: entirely in Russian, and transcript has translation as well. I had to pause a few times to follow the Russian entirely, because I'm not studying just the theme of the day, for example the word круто , but rather the whole text intensively. I won't even add another podcast for the time being, but I suspect it will become easy one day and I may just listen to the audio, and then I'll have more time and more 'energy' to learn from another podcast right after this one.

Another busy day, actually the last one before things get back to normality. If I don't manage to save time once I finish reviewing the Georgian grammar (that takes me 40 minutes each day) I will probably have to do some reformulation.

[Radioclare]

The Russian participles are so varied for something I don't find that useful. For example, you have present participles (The girl, readee the book) and the past participle can be either imperfect or perfect (The girl, was-readee-the book OR The girl, having-read the book). I don't know, I feel at some situations especially involving events in the past prior to a past event Russian (other Slavic languages as well?) isn't so much resourceful, and for this which is a rather bordering feat, there are those nuances. Reminds me of Esperanto and its participles and gerunds. I guess they were developped from Slavic influence. What do our Esperantist+Slavists have to say about this?

I don't know about Russian but there are certainly participles in Esperanto which I have never had an urge to use. And in both Croatian and Esperanto there sometimes isn't a satisfactory (to me) way to express a distinction which seems important, for example the distinction between "If I learned French, I could read the book" and "If I had learned French, I could have read the book". In Croatian it would be a struggle to distinguish between "I could read" and "I could have read". In Esperanto you could force a distinction by rendering the last part of the second sentence as "mi povintus (=estus povinta) legi la libron" but no sooner had the words left your mouth, you would find Esperantists queuing up to reprimand you and insist that both phrases can be adequately rendered as "mi povus legi la libron".

If anyone is interested, Claude Piron wrote an interesting article called "Esperanto - European or Asiatic Language", in which he compares aspects of Esperanto grammar to French, Hungarian, Russian and Chinese. There is a section on the Slavic influences on Esperanto grammar starting on page 14 of the linked copy and also a passage about participles on page 17, which compares nuances in Esperanto and Russian.

[Serpent]

Yeah, I think it's an influence from Russian, Polish and Latin.

OMG world cup 2018 TBH I've been hoping not to be in Russia during it, but we'll see.

[Brun Ugle]

You are amazing. I don't know how you manage to fit so much studying into your day or make such effective progress.

I think you're probably right that there is a lot of crime fiction in Norwegian. It's very popular here. In fact, the entire week of Easter is practically dedicated to it. That's what you do doing Easter in Norway, watch mysteries, read mysteries and go skiing. Even the milk cartons have mysteries printed on them at Easter.

What kind of books would you prefer to read in Norwegian?

I wonder if the difference in price when you are buying books has anything to do with VAT. Norway doesn't have VAT on books in order to encourage people to read more. This is supposed to included book-equivalents like audiobooks too. However for some reason, e-books and audiobooks on MP3 don't count, so they have VAT when sold in Norway. Maybe the price is listed with Norwegian VAT and it gets knocked off when the book is sold to Brazil? I have no idea, really. I'm just making a guess.

[Expugnator]

@Clare and @Serpent, thanks for the info. You gals were whom I had in mind when I wrote esperantist+slavicist

What kind of books would you prefer to read in Norwegian?

I wonder if the difference in price when you are buying books has anything to do with VAT. Norway doesn't have VAT on books in order to encourage people to read more. This is supposed to included book-equivalents like audiobooks too. However for some reason, e-books and audiobooks on MP3 don't count, so they have VAT when sold in Norway. Maybe the price is listed with Norwegian VAT and it gets knocked off when the book is sold to Brazil? I have no idea, really. I'm just making a guess.

Thank you, Brun Ugle! I do have the prerogative to study nearly all day long from Monday to Friday, so that allows me to try this multiplicity of languages.

I think it has to do with taxes indeed. Well I'm actually relieved. The other e-bookstore doesn't take my credit cards even though both use the same payment and authentication system.

I'd be glad to find fantasy, sci-fi, books with spirituality themes such as Paulo Coelho, but I think what I need the most is non fiction. I enjoy reading something in the lines of behavioral economy, creativity but I doubt those books hey translated in Norwegian. Authors like Malcolm Gladwell. Maybe there are Norwegian equivalents. I'm not very fond of the mood some crime books put me in, like Jo Nesbø's, but for the language they are great. It's just that when it's a language I understand more in depth, I'm better off reading something that will add to my general knowledge.

[Brun Ugle]

If you don't mind translated literature, I'm sure most of that exists. As for science fiction, I remember reading and enjoying some of Ingar Knudtsen's books when I first came to Norway. I don't know what you have available to you there and if you can get them.

I agree with you about the crime novels. I mostly like crime novels like Agatha Christie's or Arthur Conan Doyle. Nobody is ever very upset and there isn't a lot of blood and mayhem; it's just a puzzle to be solved. Scandinavian crime tends to be a little more graphic and unpleasant. I found Kurt Aust'sbooks interesting because of the historical setting (ca 1700), but they are pretty harsh and brutal in some ways. It's been a while since I've read any of them.

I'll see what else I think of and if I can come up with suggestions for where to find them.

[Expugnator]

I finished reading Eckhart Tolle's A new Earth today. It became a little repetitive towards the final quarter, but other than that it's one of the most enlightening books I've ever read. I tried always to be sure that I understood the explanations by reading the English paragraph fully when the German one was a little bit too confusing. It is indeed harder than the previous books I've read from him (The Power of Now and Stillness Speaks, both in German text+audio and English text) because his whole proposal is developped further. I think it's also a challenge for my German because I have to understand linguistically something that is also hard to understand in terms of content. So now I expect to reap the effort. I'm going to use this time so far for going further with "Como agua para chocolate/Bittersüsse Schokolade" until I catch up with the club and eventually finish the book, then it will be time for more listening/reading in German again (actually I will keep doing at least 1 chapter of Tintenherz as well, so no big deal).

"The Newsroom" is still an intense exercise of comprehension. Since it's dubbed, I can nearly transcribe the German despite the speed, but since subtitles don't match and there are several unknown words in the subs I have to pause once in a while. If you are looking for a series with plenty of text and a language that borders non-fiction and which will make it easier for you to understand the news in your TL, then go for it, even as a dubbed series. You get the best of both worlds (fiction and non-fiction).

After such a busy weekend, it's hard to believe I could study comfortably today, but it happened.

[Expugnator]

Today in Estonian I met again the verb 'ma vean' which seems like it would serve as a future.

I'm chatting consistently in Mandarin. I have a contact with whom I talk almost every morning. I only have to resume writing my paragraphs here, especially Georgian.

Finished watching "Jeux d'enfants'. It has a twsted plot and the hardcoded subtitles with bad encoding didn't help much, but other than that and some clichés it's a nice movie with lots of slang.

Today I got good practice in Norwegian at Speaky, with corrections =D Mostly prepositions. It nearly cost me 1 of the two Glossika episodes I listen to everyday, though. I had already read in Estonian before - a good read, by the way, starting to actually learn some important words.

Started to see results with German comprehension after only over an hour watching the same series. I already have the feeling it has 'slowed down' (meaning: I can understand faster language). I'm becoming used to the vocabulary employed and the themes discussed. There are still a couple of words lot I'm perhaps better off looking up, because they are typical news vocabulary, after all. It really helps to find a text-intense series to watch.

[Expugnator]

One more word in one language that sounds the funniest in another one: peida in Estonian, which means 'hide' in the present.

What I like about the podcasts ochenporusski is that the words are discussed in Russian and so I get to learn grammatical terms as well. It's usually less common words, slang that are discussed but the vocabulary used to discuss them is pretty much daily usage and not too simple, not beginner at all but not too advanced.

Still chatting a lot in Chinese. Getting used to inputting Chinese through swyping the pinyin on Android. Much easier.

The book Hulemannen which i'm listening/reading in Norwegian starts to feel the usual leve of difficulty. One sign that my Norwegian is at least one CEFR level above my other languages such as German, Russian and Mandarin is that I can endure the descriptive paragraphs. They don't seem to have those many unknown words. Given that these descriptive and environment setting words are the genre of words I pay little attention to, the fact they are becoming familiar means that the core vocabulary is more or less consolidated and so I can start absorbing those details.

Renovation work here is making it nearly impossible to do proper listening. I expect a tough month. I'm glad I have the speakers where I can plug the earphones so it serves as an amplifier, but I should still care for my hearing.

I started watching "Micmacs", learned the expression "à tire-larigot", which means "like there's no tomorrow", "profusely". The film has a continuous narration which explains what's happening on the screen, pretty redundant. I wonder if it a specific version of the audiotrack. It would be good for beginners, though.

FInished listening-reading the Chinese Breeze book "The Moon Sculpture Left Behind". Now I have one more from the series to read and then move on to another "textbook study" material. Anyway, I'm getting a little fed up with using materials aimed at learners for my stronger languages. Even though they are better for reading intensively, I think I can keep learning just by using native materials at some level of comprehensible input. I As for the remaining grammar, I can practice it through input. I want to make room for new languages.

Bittersüsse Schokolade/Como agua para chocolate starts to become easier in German. I'm reading longer sentences in German without resorting to the original in Spanish. It still feels intense, though, it's far from effortless as it is to read in French and even to some extent in Norwegian, but reaching this level in German is my main goal for 2018. I hope I don't feel too tired of German for listening-reading a chapter from Tinterherz later today. I woke up early and yet went to the gym, but the missing hours of sleep are starting to charge their bill.

NorwegianNå synes jeg jeg skal prøve å skrive litt mer på norsk. Jeg har vært litt trøt hele dagen fordi jeg sto opp tidligere, halv seks. Jeg overnattet hos svigerforeldrene mine som bor langt bort fra mitt hjem og fra kontoret. Jeg bestemte meg for å stikke hjemom før jeg gikk på jobb og jeg kom hjem tidligere enn jeg hadde forventet, klokka var fremdeles ti på syv. Derfor innså jeg at jeg hadde tid for å gå på helsestudioet, og så gjorde jeg.

Jeg føler meg bedre etter å ha trent selv når jeg ikke har fått nok søvn. Selv om det hjalp med å føle meg mer våken, hindret det ikke at jeg følt meg litt trøtt. Heldigvis klarte jeg å arbeide normalt og gjøre alt som planlagt. Jeg ser frem til å søve lengre i natt.

RussianЯ никогда не удалось долго разговаривать с людьми на русском языке.
Я знаю, что мой русский все еще слаб, но мой китайский был слаб, когда я начал, и теперь я управлять приятные и долгие разговоры. Я каждый день пытаюсь как Hello Talk и Speaky, без успеха. Иногда есть длинные разговоры, но это на английском языке. Русские (и граждане из других бывших республик СССР) очень заинтересованы в практикуя свой английский и поэтому я стараюсь помочь как могу.

Mandarin明天下午一个好朋要来到贝洛奥里藏特。 他是从自维多利亚，可是我们一起上大学，一起毕业。从二〇〇二到二〇〇六我们是室友。现在我们有很多的商业计划。他刚开了一家旅行社，要求我跟他一起工作。但是这个不是对我全天的工作，因为我已经有全职工作。我打算用我会说的外延帮助他计划更有玩儿的旅行。

Georgianდიდი ხანია რომ აქ არ დამიწერია ქართულად. მგონი, უფრო ხშირად უნდა დავწერო, უკეთესად რომ შევისწავლო ქართულ ენას. ჯერჯერობით არ ვიცი რაზე დავწერო, მაგრამ მიხარია, ამ მარტივ სასჯელსაც რომ დავწერო. იქნებ ხვალ უფრო საინტერესო საგნების შესახებ დავწერ.

Today I could finally take a breath. Meaning: I finished tasks earlier and could do different things. It was great to write paragraphs in TLs, but now it comes to mind that I actually had some stuff to study which isn't language-related (at least not directly).

[Elenia]

I started watching "Micmacs", learned the expression "à tire-larigot", which means "like there's no tomorrow", "profusely". The film has a continuous narration which explains what's happening on the screen, pretty redundant. I wonder if it a specific version of the audiotrack. It would be good for beginners, though.

I can't really remember much of 'Micmacs', which I watched a while ago for enjoyment, rather than language purposes. As far as I can remember, the narration is a stylistic feature of the film, although I may be misremembering the film completely. I much preferred 'Délicatessen' to 'Micmacs', I think it was my favourite film that I've seen by the director - whose name also escapes me today.

It's great that you got to write paragraphs in a lot of different TLs today, despite your earlier than usual start. (It's also great that I can read and understand your NO paragraphs ). I hope you weren't too tired, and that the renovation work doesn't disturb your studies too much.