Radioclare's 2017 log (Croatian/Russian)

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Radioclare
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Re: Radioclare's 2017 log (Croatian/Russian)

Postby Radioclare » Sun May 14, 2017 8:30 pm

Now I'm torn between telling you all about the new series I've started watching and doing a final update on 'Larin izbor' :D I guess I'd better do the latter now, or else I never will.

I actually haven't done a proper update on 'Larin izbor' for a really long time. This one is the most recent one I can find, which ended with half the cast sailing to a place called Safi in Morocco.

To recap briefly, Jakov and his half-brother Dinko were fleeing Croatia because they were wanted for the murder of Šimun Santini, a baddie who Dinko shot in self-defence when he was trying to kill their father, Tonči. They tried to cover up the crime so that Dinko didn't end up in prison (he was on a conditional discharge for a previous murder) but didn't do so very successfully, and a guy called Lucijan Krstulović figured out that they were the culprits. Lucijan is a corrupt police officer and the son of Šimun Santini; he is totally obsessed with getting revenge on the people who killed his father.

That explains why they left Split. The reason they ended up in Safi was because of Lara's best friend Karmen, who was initially abducted by a gypsy and then sold to a people trafficker who is holding her prisoner in Safi. Jakov and Dinko are there to try and track her down, together with Karmen's boyfriend Nikša (the same Nikša that Lara married in series 1 when she thought Jakov was dead). I hope that's clear.

There must have been about 40 episodes filmed in Morocco and they were, without exception, dreadful. Mainly because the Croatian characters had to speak to the Moroccan characters in varying degrees of painful English. The only comic relief came from Dinko, who couldn't speak English and so just went round yelling at people in Croatian regardless.

We had lots of mournful scenes where Lara and Jakov thought about how much they missed each other:


At one stage Jakov wrote Lara a letter and sent it out to sea in a bottle. By the standards of realism we had at this point, I expected it to turn up in Split the next day. But actually it didn't :lol:



Anyway, Karmen is being held in Safi by a Croatian people-trafficker called Leon. Why a Croatian would smuggle another Croatian to Morocco was not very well explained. Leon finds out that Jakov/Dinko/Nikša are looking for Karmen and promises to help them, while obviously not helping them at all. He promises work to Jakov and Nikša but it turns out to be some illegal smuggling of ivory. He also finds out that Jakov's family back in Split are wealthy, so he sails back there and by various tricks and deceits starts to worm his way into the confidence of the family. I should explain here that Lara and Jakov's mother Nela are currently attempting to run the family business, because Jakov's father has been put in prison in Ancona for drug smuggling (the corrupt Lucijan planted drugs on him to get him arrested and out of the way).

The good thing about Leon being in Split for a bit is that Karmen finally gets rescued, and is remarkably un-traumatised by her whole people-trafficking ordeal.

Dinko doesn't really get involved in all these goings on with Leon and Karmen, because he is otherwise occupied. He finds a pretty Moroccan girl, seduces her and is subsequently confronted by her very angry father, who insists Dinko marry her to restore the family honour. Dinko is, of course, already married to Leila back in Split, but the Moroccans don't see this as an issue. Dinko marries her, makes her life a misery and divorces her all within about 10 episodes, so this is really just a side note to the main plot.

In the course of whatever Jakov is doing at sea for Leon, he gets shipwrecked and is found on the beach in some sort of coma. This provides the other characters with an ethical dilemma, because if they take Jakov to the hospital then they risk him and Dinko getting arrested by Interpol, but then they do acknowledge it would be a shame for him to die. They settle for making him cups of Moroccan tea and hoping for the best, which does the trick and he soon makes the miraculous recovery you would expect. But in the middle of all this, someone decides they'd better tell Lara that Jakov is dying.

This is illustrated in the clip below by some more mournful singing by Lara and a few shots of Jakov on his deathbed.



The other girl looking sad in that clip is Dinko's wife Leila, who can't decide whether she still loves Dinko or has fallen in love with the corrupt police inspector, Lucijan, whose life goal is to avenge his father by killing Dinko. That's a dilemma to which we'll return later.

As the wife of a murder suspect, Lara can't just hop on a plane to Safi; the police are watching her every move, and still don't know that Jakov and Dinko are in Morocco. (Un)luckily, the cunning Leon is on hand to help her out. He offers to ferry Lara to Safi in his boat, but halfway there he turns a gun on her and threatens to kill her if she doesn't sign a document turning over the family business to him. Leila and Dinko's son, David, who is desperate to see his dad again, has stowed away on the boat as well, so Lara has no choice but to sign the document. Leon dumps her and the child on an island in the middle of nowhere and you might have thought she would stay there for the rest of eternity, but if you thought that you were failing to take into account the fact that Lara and Jakov are telepathic.

Following his miraculous recovery, Jakov realises Lara is in danger and sails to exactly the right spot on exactly the right island, just on time to save her. They are happily reunited and return to Morocco, only to find that corrupt policeman Lucijan has found out that Jakov and Dinko are in Morocco and arrested Dinko at gunpoint. This may or may not have something to do with the fact that Dinko's wife Leila is now dating Lucijan. Lucijan is taking Dinko back to Split, so Jakov decides it's time for him to return as well.

Finally everyone leaves Morocco and we are spared more scenes in excruciating English :lol:

Of course, not long after returning to Split, Jakov is arrested and ends up in prison, in the cell next door to Dinko. Cue a lot more mournful scenes featuring Lara. There follows a long trial during which it looks like both Jakov and Dinko will be sentenced to life in prison for premeditated murder. Their defence lawyer is trying to prove that it was self defence and the key witness who will help prove this is Jakov's sister, Nikol. Lucijan, desperate to see them go down, kidnaps Nikol and gets Leon to keep her locked up in a room somewhere. Hold that thought.

Meanwhile Dinko's wife Leila has been pretty irritating. She decides she has no more feelings for Dinko, moves in with Lucijan, agrees to marry him and visits Dinko in prison to get him to sign the divorce papers. She seems to have no concept of the fact that Lucijan is a dangerous maniac and can't understand why Lara doesn't want to speak to her. When it got to the stage that there were only five or six episodes left and she was still with Lucijan, I wasn't sure we were going to have a happy ending at all.

Lara is obviously thinking the same thing and she decides that, even if there isn't going to be a happy ending for Leila and Dinko, there should still be a chance of a happy ending for her and Jakov. Together with Jakov's mother Nela, she convinces poor Dinko that his life is not worth living now that Leila is marrying Lucijan, and so there's no point him being released from prison anyway. Dinko, under pressure, agrees to therefore testify in court that the entire murder was his fault and that Jakov had nothing to do with it, with the expected result that Dinko will get life in prison, and Jakov will be released to live happily ever after.

It's worth noting here that Jakov does have some moral backbone, and that when he finds out what Lara has done, he is absolutely furious.

Anyway, the court cases is ongoing and the judge is on the verge of sentencing at least one of the brothers, if not both, to life in prison, despite Dinko's attempts to throw the blame on himself. The progress of the case isn't helped by the fact that they are missing the testimony of the key witness, Nikol (due to her afore-mentioned kidnapping by Lucijan).

What I guess I should have mentioned earlier re Jakov's sister Nikol is that she is actually his half sister. This was a plot twist somewhere earlier in this season. Jakov's father, Tonči, had always assumed Nikol was his, but Jakov's mother had had an affair with the (now murdered) Šimun Santini. This is part of the reason that Tonči and Šimun had a feud which ended with Dinko murdering Šimun in the first place. If you're keeping up with the family tree here, this means that Nikol is also Lucijan's half sister and it turns out that Lucijan does have a small amount family feeling after all...

Leon has kept Nikol locked up for several days at Lucijan's request. Nikol happens to be pregnant, however, and develops a life-threatening medical complication of a highly unspecified nature, from which she will completely recover within two episodes with no harm done to her or her baby. But for at least half an episode it looks like she might die. In an unexpected twist of fate, Lucijan has an attack of conscience and takes her to hospital.

This is Lucijan's undoing and as soon as Nikol is well enough to speak, Lucijan and Leon's entire web of lies is exposed. Leila realises that Lucijan is a dangerous maniac and leaves him. The judge realises that Lucijan has been perverting the course of justice. Leon testifies against Lucijan, which leads to Lucijan admitting the truth to the court: that Dinko did in fact kill Šimun in self defence.

In the clip below you can see the moment when the sentence is finally read out in court. I decided to do some listening practice and (very roughly!) paraphrase the judge's decision.

The court has established that Dinko Bilić shot and killed Šimun Santini in the garden of the Zlatar villa.

The court has established that it was not a matter of premeditated murder, but that it was self defence.

Dinko Bilić afterwards - together with his brother, the other defendant Jakov Zlatar - fled the country while their father Tonči Zlatar gave them an alibi with his false testimony.

In the light of all the happenings up to now and the evidence of the witnesses, plus the many twists and turns during the process, it has turned out the person who was supposed to be the representative of law and justice, Inspector Lucijan Krstulović, lost that trust and, led by his desire for revenge, to which he had a moral but not vested right, threatened both the legitimacy of this case on several occasions, and unfortunately also the life of an important witness, his own sister.

There is no doubt that Dinko Bilić committed this murder and that his brother helped him to hide. But that murder was not planned; it was in self defence. The court has ordered an investigation into the case of his father, Tonči Zlatar, who is serving a prison sentence in Italy, for which Inspector Krstulović was also responsible.

The brothers were trying to protect their father, who had an unresolved dispute with Šimun Santini. The court has also investigated the criminal past of Šimun Santini. As a mitigating circumstance, we are taking into account the fact that Tonči Zlatar brought up the child of Šimun Santini as his own. A second mitigating circumstance is the fact that Inspector Lucijan Krstulović helped another accused, Leon Lozar, to acquire the property of the Zlatar family in a criminal manner.

The court, after all this, pronounces the murder of Šimun Santini to be self-defence and throws out all accusations against Dinko Bilić and Jakov Zlatar. The accused will be set free. The hearing is finished.


Later in the clip you will see Jakov and Dinko leaving the courtroom and giving the good news about their freedom to Leila and Lara. I'm explaining this very badly, so I need to go back in time slightly and explain to you that Leila and Dinko are now back together :shock:

You see, Leila had a late realisation that she had never wanted to marry Lucijan anyway. And when she heard that Dinko was prepared to sacrifice his own freedom for the sake of getting Jakov off the hook, she decided he couldn't be completely bad after all. So she went to the prison and proposed to him. Dinko was as shocked by this sudden of heart as you probably are. Leila does have the grace to look a bit sheepish.



So, we finally have a happy ending :) Jakov and Dinko are free and back together with Lara and Leila respectively. They are also now the best of friends; the bonding in prison seems to have enabled Jakov to forgive Dinko for kidnapping his son on his (Jakov's) wedding day and hiding him on an island for six years. The clever lawyer helps Jakov get all the family property back from Leon and Jakov grants Dinko and Nikša shares in the ownership of the business to thank them for all their help. And is it possible for this happy ending to get any happier? Only by Leila and Dinko getting married for the second time.

The clip below shows this wedding and the final scenes of the series as follows:

0:00 - 02:45 - Leila and Dinko in bed with a lurid purple duvet, on the morning of their wedding day, talking about how much they love each other

02:45 - 03:39- Leila reminiscing about Dinko's first proposal and their first wedding, six or seven years ago, which ended awkwardly when the person Dinko had stolen the money off to fund the wedding assaulted Leila in the toilets, Dinko subsequently murdered him by locking him in a walk-in freezer, and Leila was so freaked out by Dinko's behaviour she faked her own death to escape him. That isn't the bit she is reminiscing about, just a bit of background knowledge ;)

03:39 - 04:05 - Dinko getting ready for the wedding. He doesn't want to wear a tie :lol:

04:05 - 05:11 - Leila getting ready for her wedding with Lara and Karmen. Lara remarks how this is going to be a great day; one which they will remember for a long time

05:11 - 07:17 - Lara reminisces about some particularly memorable days in her life; the day she met Jakov at the masked ball, their first kiss on the beach, the day he proposed to her (for the first time) and their first wedding

07:17 - 08:55 - Dinko is still getting ready. Everyone is sad that Tonči (the father) is still in prison in Ancona. It turns out Dinko doesn't know how to tie a tie, so he asks Jakov to prove he can do it. And then Tonči appears at the door and takes them all by surprise :D

08:55 - 11.23 - Wedding ceremony. Everyone laughs when the celebrant says they're getting married for the second time, this time for ever :lol:

11.23 - 13.07 - Tonči is reunited with his aged mother indoors, and everyone enjoys the party outdoors. The music is the theme tune from the first series.

13.07 - 14:46 - The camera cuts to Lara and Jakov, standing at the top of the stairs. Jakov remarks that Lara is quite quiet today. Lara explains she's quiet because she is happy. "We've been on a long journey, my captain". Jakov reflects on the fact that if they hadn't met, if he hadn't caught sight of her at that party, his life would be empty now. Lara agrees and adds that none of this would exist: their children and their love. Jakov counters that none of the bad things would have happened either, but Lara says that she would repeat everything, in exactly the same way - the good and the bad - and that she would never choose a different life, even if it was happier that this one.



The end!
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Re: Radioclare's 2017 log (Croatian/Russian)

Postby Elenia » Mon May 15, 2017 12:03 am

Thank you for that mammoth post! I excepted nothing less (of Larin Izbor, of course!)
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Re: Radioclare's 2017 log (Croatian/Russian)

Postby Radioclare » Tue May 16, 2017 9:06 pm

I really want to tell you all about the new Croatian series I've started watching, but I'm not sure whether the forum can cope with two long posts about Croatian TV in one week, so I'm holding off :lol: I am making some brief notes in a notebook on my phone though of things that occur to me when I'm watching it, particularly interesting language points.

Instead I'll tell you about how badly my 6WC is going: very! In the sense that I haven't done any textbook studying, I haven't really done any Memrise or Clozemaster, I haven't done any Tom sentences and I haven't even read a page of the big Croatian novel which is sitting and staring at me. I just feel a bit tired and demotivated really. It's not really anything to do with Croatian; more that Esperanto-related activities are sucking every joy from life.

But the one thing that I am succeeding with is listening and this is A Good Thing because if there is one thing which is going to make me feel more fluent and confident before I go to Croatia on 15 June (eek!) it is an excessive amount of Croatian listening.

I finished listening to the Roger Ackroyd audiobook yesterday, which worked out as about 540 minutes in total. This morning I had a long commute to London, so I started a new audiobook: 'K2 - Trijumf i tragedija' by Stipe Božić. Stipe Božić is a successful Croatian mountaineer, and this book is mainly about his dramatic experiences climbing K2, though the chapters I have listened to today were more of an introduction to his life, how he got into mountaineering and his climb of Everest via the West Ridge.

Listening to this audiobook is making me happy because: a) The audio quality is so much better than the Serbian one I was listening to last week so I can actually hear and understand the words properly and b) This is the sort of book I would read in real life if it was in English, so it feels like I'm doing something I would normally do, and it just happens to be in Croatian, rather than that I'm forced to listen to something I'm not particularly interested in, just because it's in Croatian.

I think there's a watershed point with each language you learn where you tip from being prepared to read anything, just because it's in the language and you need practice, to only wanting to read things you're actually interested in, and I think I'm approaching that in Croatian.

The most interesting anecdote from the audiobook so far is that the author nearly got into trouble when returning to Croatia after one of his climbs (I think it was Everest) when he showed photos of himself on the summit with the Yugoslav flag... and he was holding it upside down. This had been an accident, but because the colours of the Yugoslav flag were blue/white/red (in that order), when turned upside down people could imply that it looked more like the Croatian flag (whose colours are in the order red/white/blue). But 10 years or so later when Yugoslavia broke up, it actually turned out to be advantageous to have a photo with something that looked more like a Croatian flag :lol:
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Re: Radioclare's 2017 log (Croatian/Russian)

Postby Radioclare » Thu May 25, 2017 9:40 pm

If I thought last week was going badly for Croatian, this week is going a lot worse!

First the positives...

1) I finished listening to the Stipe Božić audiobook, which has given me another 5 hours or so of audio towards the Super Challenge.

2) I managed to watch 12 episodes of the new Croatian series I've started before last Friday.

3) I have started reading another Croatian novel, 'Muzej revolucije' by Pavao Pavličić. Although that doesn't mean I've finished reading the other Zoran Ferić novel I mentioned before, only that I needed a small paperback to take to Edinburgh with me last weekend.

Last weekend. Last weekend is the negative really. I flew to Edinburgh for the national Esperanto conference and - to be fair - it was actually a really good event. Sometimes I find the lectures at these things a bit dull, but there were some really good speakers and topics this year and so in different circumstances, I might have enjoyed myself. I certainly clocked up multiple hours of Esperanto listening and by the end of the weekend my Esperanto conversation was much more fluent (where "fluent" is defined as "less likely to have a Croatian word inserted in it").

Unfortunately, the conference was also host to the AGM of the charity I help run and that was an interesting experience (where "interesting" is defined as "completely miserable"). It was a challenging experience for me anyway because I find it intimidating to speak in front of groups of people at the best of times but there were particular circumstances to this meeting which meant that the atmosphere was more than usually toxic. It seems to be a feature of voluntary organisations that some people feel empowered to behave to other people in ways which would not be countenanced in any other walk of life. The glass of wine I had when I came out of that meeting was probably the best glass of wine I've ever had in my life :lol:

In any case, the relevance of all this here is that firstly I haven't felt very motivated (to do anything at all) since the weekend's negativity, and secondly that I have a lot of things to sort out following the meeting which are taking up the free time I would rather spend watching Croatian TV.

The good news though is that it's time for another public holiday in the UK, on Monday. This means I'm going to Amsterdam for the weekend, which is exciting because I've never been to the Netherlands before. Going away for the weekend means that I won't be doing any Esperanto work and therefore I will hopefully have time to de-stress and catch up on some Croatian reading :)
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Re: Radioclare's 2017 log (Croatian/Russian)

Postby MamaPata » Sun May 28, 2017 4:56 pm

Enjoy Amsterdam! Rest and recover!
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Re: Radioclare's 2017 log (Croatian/Russian)

Postby Radioclare » Wed May 31, 2017 8:35 pm

Thanks MamaPata :)

The weekend was indeed really good fun. Amsterdam is a really beautiful city. I also visited Eindhoven which has a nice atmosphere, though there isn't a lot to see from a typical tourist point of view. My main impressions of the Netherlands are that this is a country which prefers bicycles to humans :lol: And that - as a sweeping generalisation - Dutch people are loud and confident. The price of hotels in Amsterdam is astronomical, but other costs (eating/drinking) seem pretty reasonable, and positively cheap in comparison to Scandinavian countries (for the public holidays in the UK in 2016, I visited Bergen, Stockholm and Copenhagen - hence the comparison!).

On the last day, we found this:
amsterdam-212.jpg


The only language practice I got while I was away was Esperanto. We met up with a couple of friends who we'd seen at the Esperanto conference in Edinburgh the previous weekend and who are coincidentally living in Amsterdam right now. One of them is an Esperanto native speaker and speaks the language with a beautifully clear accent. It was a fun evening; firstly because much wine was drunk, and secondly because we discovered several common people in the Esperanto community that we all dislike :lol:

Otherwise I was reading in English while I was away so I don't have much to report. While commuting this week I have started listening to a new audiobook - 'Velika četvorka' (The Big Four) by Agatha Christie. This was another of my absolute favourites when I was a child, although the audiobook is being ruined slightly for me by the very raspy voice of the woman reading it out.

I am very jealous of everyone attending the Polyglot Gathering, including my own boyfriend. In all honesty, I'm less jealous about the lectures because when I looked at the programme there were only a handful of things I would have been interested in attending. But I'm jealous of everyone being in Bratislava, which is one of my favourite cities of all time :)

To cheer myself up this evening I have been listening to a new song just released by the Bosnian band Dubioza Kolektiv, called 'Himna generacije'.
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Re: Radioclare's 2017 log (Croatian/Russian)

Postby Radioclare » Sat Jun 03, 2017 3:00 pm

Wow, May went quickly :( Time for another goals update.

Goal 1 - Read 10 books in German
I read one German novel in May: 'Stimmen' by Ursula Poznanski. I may be slightly obsessed by Ursula Poznanski novels. This one was really, really good. I've read 4 books in German during 2017 now so feel like I'm more or less on track to reach 10 by the end of the year. 10 was a bit of an arbitrary number to be honest; my underlying aim was just to read in German frequently enough to stop my knowledge completing deteriorating.

Goal 2 - Try not to forget any more Esperanto
May has been the most Esperanto-filled month of my year so far (and I can't think of any coming months that are likely to knock it off that position). First of all we had a small meet-up of Esperanto learners in my home town, thanks to the new Amikumu app. That was fun, although we probably spent more time speaking about Esperanto than in it. Then from 19 - 21 May I was in Edinburgh for the British Conference. I'm still not far enough away from this weekend to be able to write about it objectively. But from a purely language point of view it was a success, because I spoke and listened to lots of Esperanto and by the end of the weekend I felt a lot less rusty. Finally, last weekend in Amsterdam, we went out for a drink with a couple of Esperanto speakers and found a Zamenhof Street. After all that, Esperanto feels dangerously high up in my brain and I could with actually forgetting it a bit so that I have Croatian in my top language drawer instead :lol:

Goal 3 - Increase my Croatian vocabulary
Nope. Abject failure here. I did log into Memrise at the start of the 6WC and get myself down to Memrise zero, but having just logged into right now to check, I'm back to 2,166 reviews needed for Croatian plus 132 for Serbian. My stats tell me I've only used Memrise on 4 days this month, which must be a personal worst.

Goal 4 - Read at least 4,200 pages in Croatian
Reading is not something which has gone terribly well in May either. I think it's mainly because I've been so busy with Esperanto work and stress that I haven't felt relaxed enough to pick up a book. I've read 78 pages of a novel called 'Muzej revolucije' by Pavao Pavličić and that it is it :shock: So I'm on 2,826 pages of Croatian for the year.

Goal 5 - Listen to/watch at least 9,990 minutes of Croatian TV/films/audiobooks
Still struggling to assess this one without the Super Challenge website being up. I estimated I was on 3,176 minutes at the end of April. During May I watched 267 minutes of 'Larin izbor' and the most significant achievement of May 2017 is that I finally finished this series, which I started on 17 July 2015. I've also watched 541 minutes of 'Zora dubrovačka' which is the new series I still haven't found time to tell you about. In an attempt to get into the mood for going to Croatia in June, I've also been listening to Croatian audiobooks: 333 minutes of 'K2 - trijumf i tragedija' and 540 minutes of 'Tko je ubio Roger Ackroyd?'. I make that 1,681 minute for May, so 4,857 for 2017 so far. But I may need to revise these figures when the proper page comes back online :D

Goal 6 - Do better than last year at Croatian output
This hasn't even been on my radar as something to attempt this month to be honest, which is unfortunate because I was planning to write lots of Tom sentences this month. Again, no excuse except having my life dominated by Esperanto stuff.

Goal 7 - Learn enough Russian to feel confident enough to take my Mom to St Petersburg.
Russian remains on hold until July.

Overall I guess the conclusion is that it hasn't been a great month, except perhaps for audio which was only really successful for the 18 days before I went to Edinburgh for the Esperanto event. I haven't watched any TV since I got back from Edinburgh because I haven't had a single evening yet where there wasn't something more productive on my task list that I needed to be doing. I need to find a way to get a grip soon though because today is 3 June... and I'm going to Croatia on 15 June :shock:
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Re: Radioclare's 2017 log (Croatian/Russian)

Postby Radioclare » Sun Jun 04, 2017 2:18 pm

I'm having a bit of a rubbish weekend - no matter how much you tell yourself that you shouldn't let people get to you, sometimes its just unavoidable.

But I am cheering myself up by having found a new Croatian song that I really love on Youtube. I have no idea what it's about really, but it sounds dark and angry enough for my current mood. It's called 'Teške boje' by Goran Bare and Majke. Don't watch the video if you're offended by blood, crows or slightly odd religious imagery.

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Re: Radioclare's 2017 log (Croatian/Russian)

Postby MamaPata » Sun Jun 04, 2017 8:29 pm

Radioclare wrote:I'm having a bit of a rubbish weekend - no matter how much you tell yourself that you shouldn't let people get to you, sometimes its just unavoidable.


Sorry to hear that things are tough! Sometimes people are really annoying! :evil: Hopefully this next week is better.
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Re: Radioclare's 2017 log (Croatian/Russian)

Postby Radioclare » Sun Jun 25, 2017 10:11 pm

Long time, no post! Things didn't really get much better lifewise since my last post on 4 June. The atmosphere in my little corner of the Esperanto world continues to be particularly toxic and work stuff became stressful too. I had had all these great plans of revising Croatian grammar before I went away and then it got to 14 June and I hadn't done any of the things I'd planned, and I couldn't think of anything I felt like less to be honest than going on holiday.

But then 15 June came and I had to go whether I wanted to or not, because I was taking my parents and they definitely wanted to go :lol: This was a big trip from their point of view because we hadn't been on holiday anywhere together since 2009 and this was going to be their first visit to southern Europe. I was worried that they wouldn't like it, because they spend most of their holidays in Switzerland (with occasional variations to Germany and Austria) and while I might extol the virtues of Croatia and Montenegro to anyone who is prepared to listen, even I have to admit that my favourite countries haven't quite reached Swiss standards of efficiency/cleanliness/organisation. Croatia is very laid back, and Montenegro is both laid back and chaotic :lol: I wasn't sure how well they would react to that. And I wasn't sure whether I would be able to speak the language well enough to deal with any unexpected crises which might come up.

It turns out I needn't have worried though :) My parents absolutely loved both countries and even dealt quite well with some authentic Balkan experiences, like not getting their assigned seats on the bus :D And once I was away from all the emails and negativity of real life, I was able to relax and enjoy myself as well.

Some observations, recommendations and comments in no particular order...

  • Practising Croatian in Dubrovnik continues to be a challenge. There are so many English people on cruises and package holidays that everyone in the tourist industry can speak wonderful English and some of them are determined to speak their wonderful English whether you want them to or not. I was a bit dispirited for the first couple of days at having more English spoken back at me during interactions I'd initiated in Croatian than I had when I was here in September 2016. But having reflected on it, I think this was mainly due to being with my non-Croatian-speaking parents; waiters etc naturally spoke to them in English and then carried on speaking English to me.
  • I have never got drawn into so many conversations with other English-speaking tourists on holiday in my life! This makes me realise that - whatever else happens - Esperanto continues to have one positive function in my life; as a secret language for me and my boyfriend to speak when we're on holiday together and hear another English voice :D
  • Practising the language continues to be slightly easier in Montenegro, where the older generation at least don't really speak any meaningful English and are relieved if they don't have to try.
  • Never try to cross the Croatia-Montenegro border within a passport. You might think this was self-evident, but one American backpacker on my bus from Dubrovnik to Kotor had forgotten his passport and had to be ejected from the bus at the border checkpoint by a very angry bus driver, amidst much waving of arms and shouting about "jebeni stranci". I felt very sorry for him; goodness knows whether he ever made it back to Dubrovnik and found his passport.
  • Don't try asking a Montenegrin waiter for a shandy. We were having a meal in Kotor one day and a very sunburned English cruise ship tourist asked the waiter for a shandy and the waiter, quite naturally, didn't know the word. Having repeated the word "shandy" multiple times at increasing levels of volume to help the waiter's understanding, the Englishman eventually tried to explain that it was beer and lemonade. The waiter was very confused: "You want me to put lemon juice in your beer?". He disappeared and appeared again after a while with a tankard of beer and a shot glass of lemon juice, much to the Englishman's disgust. The Englishman started to explain it needed to be a fizzy lemonade. "You want Fanta in your beer?". It ended with the waiter bringing a small glass of Sprite and leaving the man to mix it into his beer himself, amidst much cursing of foreigners. I felt sorry for the waiter, who had done a far better job than I could possibly have done at keeping his temper with a complete imbecile.
  • Every time I was sitting on a bus or in a cafe and I recognised one of the Croatian pop songs being played on the radio I got ridiculously excited, even if it was a song I actually don't like at all; just recognising it and knowing what it was called made me feel like I'd cracked the code to some sort of secret society :lol:
  • If you read my log very attentively, you might remember that last summer in Dubrovnik I visited two bookshops to stock up on Croatian reading material. There was one large bookshop (Algoritam) which was a bit disappointing because it was mainly full of translations of English and American trashy fiction, and one smaller bookshop (Algebra) which was amazing and where the shop assistant helped me find lots of interesting books by Croatian authors. I still have half the books I bought back then on my shelf unread, but I wanted to stock up when I was in Dubrovnik again, because it could potentially be as far away as September 2018 before I'm in that part of the world again ( :cry: ). On Friday afternoon I went to the big Algoritam store first of all, thinking that I would look for some translations of easy books I enjoy reading for relaxation, like Agatha Christie or Ken Follett. Imagine my surprise when I found it all shut up and the windows papered over! I went to the smaller Algebra store and bought 10 books there, with the help of the wonderful lady behind the desk who gave me lots of recommendations. While I was paying I asked her what had happened to Algoritam and she said that they had been unable to pay their bills and the entire chain had gone bust :shock: I guess my reading of Croatian news on Twitter is not as diligent as I thought, because this had completely passed me by. Although their range of books didn't really impress me, it's sad to hear of any bookshop going out of business. Especially because there's a weird system I don't quite understand in Croatia whereby lots of the bookshops are owned by the book publishers. So Algoritam were a publisher of books too :(
  • On the theme of bookshops, you all need to go to Herceg Novi in Montenegro and visit the place that proclaims itself as "probably" the smallest bookshop in the world, at 3.8 square metres. It's tiny, but they have packed a lot of books in; in English as well as in Serbian. As I think I mentioned before, a lot of refugees from Bosnia settled in Herceg Novi during the war years and the town now has a majority Orthodox population and a lot of people who identify as ethnically Serbian. For this reason, you see a lot more signage in Cyrillic around the town than elsewhere on the Montenegrin coast and I noticed straight away that there were lots of books in Cyrillic in this shop. I'd go as far as to say that they had more Cyrillic books in 3.8 square metres than I managed to find in a bookshop in the centre of Belgrade in 2014 :lol: This made me very excited so I asked the bookshop man if he could recommend me something simple. I came away with two books of Serbian fairytales; one called "bajke" (which is the word I have learned for fairytales) and one called "basne" which is a word I've never heard before. I had to ask the man to explain to me what the difference is between "bajke" and "basne"; from what he said, it sounds like "bajke" are what I would think of as traditional fairytales, with princesses and castles and things, whereas "basne" are stories about animals who have human characteristics. It was cool to learn a new word :) I also bought a small book about the history of Herceg Novi, in Latin script.
  • As you can probably tell from the above, I did manage to have some decent conversations with people in Croatian as the holiday progressed; with the man in the Herceg Novi shop about fairytales, with the lady in the Dubrovnik shop about Croatian authors and the demise of Algoritam, with the lady we rented an apartment from in Kotor who spoke no English and more or less offered to try and fix me up with a nice Montenegrin so that I could stay here and practise the language :D My mom asked why I was laughing at this point and then when I translated what had been said, drew the lady's attention to the finger with my engagement ring on quite indignantly :lol:
  • I still made a lot of mistakes. I definitely made language mistakes when speaking but I've tried to forget about them so that I don't have to do too much retrospective cringing. I also got ripped off in a taxi from the bus station to the apartment in Kotor for which I paid the grand sum of €5. On the return journey, when the landlady called the taxi for me, it turned out that the correct price should have been a mere €2.20. Oh well, you live and learn! My parents thought €5 was a good deal, so no great harm was done.
  • For me the really big positive was that - despite the less than ideal preparation in terms of language revision - I felt really confident about speaking. I can only think of a couple of occasions when I had to ask someone to repeat what they'd said to me; mostly I understood everything first time and this is 100% down to the amount of listening I've done with watching 'Larin izbor' etc over the past few years. Next time someone asks me how I learned Croatian, I'm going to have to tell them it was down to watching telenovelas :) The other big breakthrough was that I was able to speak spontaneously and didn't have to plan in my head what I was going to say in advance, which is definitely the stage I was at a couple of years ago. There were definitely times when I wished I had planned in advance what I was going to say and where my sentences tailed off because I couldn't remember a word or was hesitant about the correct declension of a noun on the spur of the moment. But for me the big thing was that I felt confident enough to start the sentence in the first place and to initiate conversations rather than just trying to cope with responding to what had been said to me. We had a few minor crises, like when we couldn't turn off the air-conditioning unit in my parents' bedroom in Kotor and my Mom asked me to go and explain about it to the landlady. Probably even a year ago the thought of doing so would have filled me with absolute dread. But I was able to go and explain the problem and come back with the explanation that there was a technical fault which meant it couldn't be turned off, but if my parents were feeling chilly they could try putting a towel over it at night to block out the cold air. Those are conversations that textbooks don't prepare you for :)
  • If we were still on the old forum, I think I would move Croatian to "speaks" at this point, because I do feel able to "speak" it now and I feel like I could get a lot better very quickly with more practice. But on this forum the trend is more for attributing CEFR levels to languages and I don't really want to do that because I haven't passed an exam in any of my languages and every time I look at CEFR tables I feel like I don't have half those skills even in English :?
  • Coming home was painful. The end of any holiday is sad, but coming home from Croatia and/or Montenegro feels particularly sad to me, despite the fact that I can't put into coherent words why it is that I feel such a pull towards this part of the world. It will probably be a long time until I am there again but at least I have come back inspired and with renewed enthusiasm to keep my language studies up, in particular to continue reading, to continue getting my listening practice with telenovelas and to make more concerted efforts to read up on regional history and politics.
  • Now that I'm back from Croatia, technically that means I'm supposed to be learning Russian again :shock:
15 x


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