Saturday 18 July
Having finished 'Budva' I've been looking for a new series to watch in Croatian. Technically I don't *need* one as I've already finished the Super Challenge and given up on a Double Challenge, but listening has helped me a lot and I'd like to continue doing it. I've had several suggestions of what to watch (including some really helpful ones from kind people at Lang-8) but the main problem I've had with each suggestion has been tracking the episodes down.
I was looking with 'Budva' that all the episodes were legally available on Youtube. With the other series I've been considering, I've managed to find some of the episodes on Youtube but not all. I don't want to start getting addicted to something and then not be able to find the next episode in a really exciting storyline, so this is a problem. Some series I can't find anything on Youtube at all, although there are some episodes (again, not necessarily all) on less reputable websites. I'm sure you can find anything online if you look hard enough for it, but (legalities aside) I want to spend the limited time I have available to watch Croatian actually, you know, watching Croatian, not trawling through google search results, battling annoying advertising and running virus scans on my computer.
I was on the verge of giving up and proceeding to watch 'Bitange i Princeze' all over again, when I accidentally found something which I would never have dreamed existed in Croatia: Oyo.
Oyo seems to be like a Croatian TV-on-demand website. For a small subscription fee you have access to thousands of episodes of Croatian TV programmes, hundreds of films and some children's cartoons and documentaries too. A lot of the films are American, but there are ex-Yu ones in there too. As well as Croatian series there are a lot of Turkish and Mexican ones as well (not sure why!).
It seemed too good to be true. I was worried that it might only work if you had a Croatian IP-address (or a Croatian mobile phone, like the wonderful e-book site I found before!) but there was an entire section of the instructions explaining what you could access from abroad. Each series on the website has a summary page which clearly shows whether it can only be watched by people in Croatia or whether it can be viewed from anywhere, so I was able to see that not being Croatian wasn't going to significantly hamper me. The first 7 days are free anyway, so if I'd signed up and then found there was nothing I wanted to watch it wouldn't have been a problem.
The subscription is 99 kuna for 3 months. I thought for a moment about whether that it was too extravagant to pay that, and then I remembered that I pay the equivalent of 115 kuna every day just for my train fare to work. So 99 kuna over 3 months is nothing. Of course, my bank will slap me with a horrible charge for making an international transaction, but if I decide I really like OYO there is an option to pay for 24 months upfront, which I guess would limit the frequency of the bank charges.
I've already been making good use of. I had a few teething problems as the software to watch the videos doesn't seem to work well with Google Chrome. In fairness, this is clearly stated on the website and there is an entire page of instructions about settings to change in Chrome which is supposed to make it work, but it didn't for me. Not sure whether this was because my computer is on Windows 8 or because I wasn't following the instructions properly. Obviously there were in Croatian, and computer instructions aren't my strong point anyway
The easy solution was to watch in Firefox instead, which works perfectly I've already watched the first four episodes of "Larin Izbor".
What to say about "Larin Izbor"? Well, I've decided to give it a go because it's a famous Croatian telenovela. It's about a young girl called Lara who comes from one of the Croatian islands. It might be Korčula, or I might have misunderstood that. She's a talented musician with a potential career as a concert pianist ahead of her, but she's currently working for a catering company in Split to earn money. The story is about how she meets and falls in love with a guy called Jakov, who is from an aristocratic Dalmatian family, From the synopsis it sounds like she is ultimately going to marry him and then, because he works as a captain, spent vast quantities of time being bullied by his evil mother and sister while he is away at sea.
First impressions after four episodes? Jakov is played by the extremely attractive Croatian actor Ivan Herceg, who I first saw in the film 'Pjevajte nešto ljubavno'. I was initially put off by the fact that the combined two seasons of 'Larin Izbor' consist of no fewer than 347 episodes(!!!) but actually, I could probably watch 347 hours of Ivan Herceg without too many problems
The downside is that his character Jakov seems extremely wet. In the first episode he let his mother slap Lara in the face without intervening; he just stood there looking mildly embarrassed. In the second or third episode, a man is hitting a woman in the street and he doesn't want to intervene until Lara tells him to about five times. This could get annoying.
Language-wise, the characters speak a bit faster than on 'Budva' and don't enunciate as clearer, so it's definitely more difficult to follow. That said, I'm not having any problems understanding enough to follow the story, even if there are some words or sentences I have missed. The accents are obviously quite different and the way the characters speak remind me of the book I read last year: "Što je muškarac bez brkova". Firstly, there are some n's where there should be m's, eg. "jesan", "iman" etc. This doesn't hinder understanding and if I hadn't already seen it in print, I might just think I was mishearing. Secondly, some people speak in a way which seems more ikavian than ijekavian, so we have "vrime" instead of "vrijeme", "misto" instead of "mjesto" etc. I'm finding this a little harder to follow. The oddest thing I've noticed - which doesn't make sense to me even if people are using an ikavian pronunciation - is that they are using i's in words which don't have "ije" in the first place. So, for example, Jakov's mother keeps banging on about whether she is "sritna" or "nesritna" rather than "sretna" and "nesretna". There was one old lady in the second epsiode who said "ča" for "what", but the rest of what she was saying was fairly intelligble so I'm guessing she wasn't actually speaking proper čakavian.
It's all interesting at the moment anyway, and getting exposure to different accents and dialects is what I wanted
Today's words...
U kolovozu idem na odmor u Litvaniju. Mislim da to nije uobičajena zemlja za odmor, ali se ipak nadam da će biti lijepo tamo. Posjetila sam Litvaniju prvi put prije tri godine. Tada sam bila samo u glavnom gradu. Provela sam dva dana u Vilniusu i nakon toga sam putovala u Letoniju, Estoniju i Finsku. Ovog ljeta namjeravam provesti tjedan dana samo u Litvaniji. Letjet ću u Kaunas (to je drugi grad po veličini u Litvaniji) i nakon kratkog boravka tamo, putovat ću u Ignalinu. Ignalina je mali grad blizu granice s Bjelorusijom. Tamo ima puno šuma i jezera, a ne previše ljudi, pa mislim da je to dobro mjesto za odmor. Nakon Ignaline putujem u Vilnius, gdje ću provesti nekoliko dana prije nego što se vratim u Englesku. Bojim se da ću imati problema vezanih za jezik u Litvaniji jer ne govorim ni jednu riječ na litvanskom. Prije nekoliko tjedana mi je palo na pamet da bih trebala učiti barem nekoliko fraze na litvanskom, ali još nisam uspjela. Mislim da je taj jezik jako težak!