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

Posted: Sun Feb 05, 2017 6:09 pm
by Radioclare
Croatian
I finished reading 'O Jeruzaleme' this weekend, which takes me up to 133 books for the Super Challenge, and I've started reading Ken Follett's 'Zima sveta' ('The Winter of the World') in Serbian. I know, I know; I said I wanted to read more original literature, and I will get around to that at some point :oops: But this is the second novel in a brilliant trilogy. I enjoyed the first book so much that I read it twice last year - once in Croatian and once in Serbian - even though it was around 900 pages, and so it was always on the cards that I was going to read the second and third books too. This second one is just over 900 pages again, of which I've read about 150 this weekend. The third one is going to be even longer when I get to that. It's a nice relaxing thing to read though, because Ken Follett doesn't use difficult words :)

I've finally found some time to watch TV this weekend as well and managed five episodes of 'Larin izbor'. Half the cast is still in Morocco which is somewhat bizarre, especially because the Moroccan characters are speaking to each other in broken English rather than Arabic. I guess at least they're not speaking Croatian :lol:

I found a nice course on Memrise from Croaticum, which I've learned about 100 words of so far. I did their beginner course on Memrise a few years ago. This one is more advanced and has some interesting vocabulary in it. The 6WC definitely gives me some more motivation to do 'boring' things like Memrise than I would normally have.

Russian
The 6WC is going okay. I'm on disk 7 of the Michel Thomas now and we're still being taught how to pronounce здесь, but otherwise it is good and I am definitely learning stuff.

I've spent quite a bit of time on Russian Memrise too and completed the 'Russian 1' course so now I'm ready to move onto 'Russian 2'. The course really is streets ahead of anything else on Memrise. There are other courses which have audio - the Duolingo vocab one I'm working my way through, for example - but the quality of the audio varies significantly, with some words being pronounced loudly and others quietly. That makes it really difficult to use the audio part of the course when on public transport, for example, because if you turn the sound up to catch a quiet word, you then find that when it gets to a louder word the entire carriage gets to hear it :D Whereas the audio on this official Memrise one is perfect; all spoken at the same volume and really, really clear. The phrases it teaches are really useful too; far more useful than the obsession Russian Duolingo has with plates of rice.

I am still plugging away with Duolingo but it does feel like a chore. I've managed to advance forward by another couple of topics, but I still find I'm spending my 90% of my time trying to keep things gold.

Otherwise I think I really need to start making progress with some Russian textbooks now, but I'm being lazy and procrastinating. I started reading my 'Teach Yourself Russian Grammar' book again yesterday, but unfortunately I was at the chapter on the accusative plural of animate nouns and a few minutes of that was enough to make me fundamentally re-examine my reasons for learning Russian :lol:

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

Posted: Sun Feb 05, 2017 10:59 pm
by blaurebell
Radioclare wrote:The phrases it teaches are really useful too; far more useful than the obsession Russian Duolingo has with plates of rice.


Ah, plates of rice and glasses of juice and beer and water and ...! :roll: Yes, Duolingo is such a chore sometimes. It does a good job at grammar overview though, far less daunting than those big grammar tables in some of my more grammar heavy teaching books.

Radioclare wrote:Otherwise I think I really need to start making progress with some Russian textbooks now, but I'm being lazy and procrastinating. I started reading my 'Teach Yourself Russian Grammar' book again yesterday, but unfortunately I was at the chapter on the accusative plural of animate nouns and a few minutes of that was enough to make me fundamentally re-examine my reasons for learning Russian


I have this one textbook that went ahead and explained all accusative rules and all conjugations in present tense in a single chapter. I was close to tears by the end of it. I've hidden the book now so that I don't get tempted to torture myself with it again.

Incidentally, maybe I should listen to Michel Thomas explanation of how to pronounce здесь, since I spent like 5 minutes trying to say it properly today and don't think I succeeded. :oops:

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

Posted: Mon Feb 06, 2017 11:07 am
by neofight78
Russian grammar is like vocabulary, don't think about how much you don't know, just learn a little bit every day and before too long you will be looking back on how much you've learned. It's best to tackle the cases one by one, one ending at a time, making sure you get plenty of practice and review with each. You don't need know every situation in which they are used, just the main uses to begin with. Just a basic grasp of the accusative case will get you a long way. It's all worth it I promise 8-)

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

Posted: Fri Feb 10, 2017 8:14 am
by Daniel N.
neofight78 wrote: Just a basic grasp of the accusative case will get you a long way. It's all worth it I promise 8-)

A problem is, Clare has already quite good grasp of cases in another fairly similar Slavic language: Croatian (a.k.a. Serbian, Bosnian, Montenegrin). The cases are really the same, most case endings are the same or similar, even many words are almost the same, just spelled differently. And now she has to hold two very similar sets of words and endings in her head, without mixing them up and without her head exploding...

Radioclare wrote:I found a nice course on Memrise from Croaticum, which I've learned about 100 words of so far. I did their beginner course on Memrise a few years ago. This one is more advanced and has some interesting vocabulary in it. The 6WC definitely gives me some more motivation to do 'boring' things like Memrise than I would normally have.

I took a look at e.g. 10. lekcija and, unfortunately, there are some misspellings:

Ravnopravi = should be ravnopravni
čela = should be ćela (if it's bald, but I think somebody mixed words up)
poticajv = poticaj
mesiti (to broom) = should be mesti (mete), this is a root verb
sil = should be sila
preuziti = should be preuzeti

Based on the amount of mistakes, and left out present tense forms (when they cannot be deduced from the inf, so they have to be remembered) I think this wasn't assembled by a native speaker, and if it was created by Croaticum, then I'm quite disappointed.

It seems I'll have to make a memrise set based on my (i.e. Easy Croatian) vocab set :/

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

Posted: Sun Feb 12, 2017 9:35 pm
by Radioclare
Thank you all for the comments and encouragement with Russian :)

As Daniel says, one of my biggest concerns is around how to learn Russian without simultaneously forgetting Croatian. I'm also trying to stop myself being too negative about Russian in comparison to Croatian, because at the moment I feel like Croatian is significantly easier to learn and so much more beautiful when pronounced. But I am trying to remind myself that I haven't actually learned enough Russian to have a valid opinion, that I am massively biased in favour of Croatian anyway, and that perhaps I found Croatian equally hard when I started learning and I've just forgotten the pain over time :)

I took a look at e.g. 10. lekcija and, unfortunately, there are some misspellings

This is interesting to hear because I haven't got that far in the course yet but in level 3 I found a word which I wasn't sure whether or not was a mistake: primijeniti (to notice). If I'd been asked cold what "to notice" was, I would have said "primijetiti". I've never come across "primijeniti" before, but when I looked it up it was defined as something similar to "iskoristiti". So then I was just confused.

The reason I said I thought the course was good was that I haven't found any other course on Memrise which has such advanced vocabulary and goes into detail about different shades of meaning. For example, one of the levels teaches misliti, pomisliti, razmisliti, zamisliti, zamisliti se, umisliti... and another one teaches raditi, naraditi se, preraditi, zaraditi etc. I was enjoying the chance to get straight in my head the differences between such similar verbs. But it is discouraging to know that there are mistakes.

It seems I'll have to make a memrise set based on my (i.e. Easy Croatian) vocab set :/


If you did, that would be amazing :D If you decide to do it and there's anything I can do to help, let me know!

***
I feel like this week hasn't been massively productive, but I don't know why. Work is actually going okay, considering the time of year, and I've been home before 8pm every day in 2017 I think. But there are various things going on outside of work which are sapping my will to live and I guess this affects how I feel about everything, including languages.

Croatian
I've been doing quite well with the flawed Croaticum course on Memrise and have learned 209 words. I'm around 370 pages into Ken Follet's "Zima sveta" in Serbian and really enjoying it, even if I haven't looked up much unknown vocabulary. Words which I have looked up...

siledžija - seems to be a sort of bully
tikvan - Google translates this one as "bonehead" :lol: It's definitely an insult anyway, and not to be confused with "tikva" which I think is a pumpkin :)

I've watched 12 episodes of 'Larin izbor' so far this month, so definitely doing better in that respect that in January. I'm hoping to have finished the Super Challenge (ie. got to 100 films) by the end of the month.

Russian
I seem to have run out of steam with my enthusiasm for Michel Thomas this week and I'm still stuck somewhere in the middle of disk 7. It's partly because one day I worked from home and another day I was travelling with colleagues, so that's effectively two days when I couldn't listen to audio during my commute.

Duolingo really is a chore but I've devoted a bit of extra time to it this weekend so I've at least learned a couple of new topics. On Memrise I'm about a quarter of the way through the 'Russian 2' course. I've spent quite a bit of time on it, but it's slow going because it mainly teaches phrases rather than individual items of vocabulary.

This afternoon I spent some more time on Russian grammar and attempted to get my head around the accusative plural endings again. As with all these things, it seems slightly easier the second time you look at it. But it's still difficult :lol:

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

Posted: Mon Feb 13, 2017 9:59 pm
by Daniel N.
Radioclare wrote:This is interesting to hear because I haven't got that far in the course yet but in level 3 I found a word which I wasn't sure whether or not was a mistake: primijeniti (to notice). If I'd been asked cold what "to notice" was, I would have said "primijetiti". I've never come across "primijeniti" before, but when I looked it up it was defined as something similar to "iskoristiti". So then I was just confused.

primjećivati (primjećuje) ~ primijetiti means "notice", as you already know

primjenjivati (primjenjuje) ~ primijeniti means "apply", in sense of applying a rule, something learned, a law, but not cream on skin; it's from the same family as zamjenjivati (zamjenjuje) ~ zamijeniti etc.

Both verb pairs are frequently misspelled, but not like in Memrise, more ije/je mix (I had to look into an online dictionary as well...)

I was playing with Memrise, trying to find a way to make it useful to teach vocabulary. However, I have no idea how to teach "irregular" verbs :oops:

I took a look at Croaticum level #4 (5. Lekcija), and...

- napadati = to attack (nesvršen) - great
- napasti = to attack (svršen) - how is a student supposed to learn that pres-3 is napadne?
- napustiti = to abandon/leave - no aspect marked (it's perfective)
- tresiti = to shake - this should be tresti (trese)!
- orao = eagle - how is a student supposed to know that all other forms are derived from orl- ?
- prirodna baština = natural inheritance - this should rather be "heritage"
- gmizati = to slither - no aspect, and no pres-3 (it's gmiže)
- jedreti = to sail, to glide - it should be jedriti

next level: #5

- bore se = to fight (for) - this is not even inf, it's 3rd pers plur. present tense??
- plemo = tribe - should be pleme
- oblika = shape - should be oblik
- stati = to stop, stand - again, how is one supposed to know that pres-3 is stane?

previous level: #3

- jednica = unit - should be jedinica
- opusiti = to relax (svršen) - should be opustiti
- kovrečav = curly - should be kovrčav
- razdoblije = period - should be razdoblje
- granćice = twigs - should be grančice (and why plural? grančica is a normal noun)
- grane = braches - again plural, and English should be branches!
- natječanje = competition, championship - should be natjecanje

I think it's a rather disappointing, if it's from Croaticum :(

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

Posted: Mon Feb 13, 2017 11:26 pm
by reineke
The author studied at Croaticum.

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

Posted: Tue Feb 14, 2017 1:29 pm
by Radioclare
Okay, I think you've convinced me that I need to give up on this course :cry:

I don't think Memrise (or probably any SRS software) is perfectly designed for teaching the different forms of verbs. A lot of courses I have used just teach the infinitives, because that is easiest. You could maybe add the irregular form in brackets after the infinitive. Or if you use the advanced settings when creating a course, I think you can choose some extra columns, for example "parts of speech" or "gender". Perhaps you could use one of those to show different verb forms or put some grammatical notes instead (not 100% sure, haven't tried that to see how it works).

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

Posted: Tue Feb 14, 2017 2:01 pm
by reineke
Lara's choice would be that you collect those words yourself and that you know how to pronounce them. This "čela" might register, depending how a learner pronounces it, as bee, bald head, forehead or even baldy.

Another "course" on Memrise was put together by a lady who studies at Croaticum but she disclosed this fact and provided an email address for corrections, suggestions etc. If you're studying Russian I recommend Kipper :)

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

Posted: Tue Feb 14, 2017 2:40 pm
by Daniel N.
reineke wrote:The author studied at Croaticum.

... and created a course called "Croaticum 2A", bearing the Croaticum logo. It looks official.

I've started writing my course, with some words, then grammar, then grammar drill, then words again... Clare, what do you think? Memrise: Easy-Croatian Vocabulary + Grammar