Radioclare's 2018 log (Croatian/Russian)

[IronMike]

OMG! Julio Baghy! One of my favorite writers ever. Awesome.

And thanks for the E-o book review. I've had his books on my list for a while, but I've been putting them off as I want to wait till I get some years between my time in Russia and the next book I read about Russia.

[Radioclare]

Still on holiday, still doing a lot of reading Since my last post I've read 1 book in German, 1 in Esperanto, 3 in Croatian and 1 in English.

The book I read in German was dreadful: 'Der Fänger' by Andreas Franz and Daniel Holbe. I may be being unfair because it turns out it's the 16th book in a crime series about the same detective and I haven't read the previous 15 books. But I just couldn't get into it at all. There were too many police characters with similar names and I couldn't keep track of who was working with who, who was sleeping with who, etc. Definitely not one I will re-read!

In Esperanto I read the fourth book by Kalle Kniivilä: 'La strato de Tanja'. He describes the history of Russia over the past century via a series of snapshots into the lives of people who lived on a particular street in St Petersburg. This one might be my favourite out of all his books

In Croatian...

1) 'Oblik vode' by Andrea Camilleri. This is the Croatian translation of the first Montalbano book. I love the series so I enjoyed it, although I don't think this one is the best story overall.

2) 'Basne o komunizmu' by Slavenka Drakulić. This was really good. It's a series of fables about life in the former Communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe, narrated from the point of view of animals. So for example, a mole tries to explain to a group of other moles what the Berlin Wall was and why human beings tried to dig tunnels under it to get from one side to the other. A dog talks about the huge problem of stray dogs roaming the streets of Bucharest. It sounds a bit bizarre... which it is... but it's amusing and very thought-provoking

3) 'Žena vremenskog putnika' by Audrey Niffenegger. This is the Croatian translation of 'The Time Traveller's Wife'. I have read the original book in English a couple of times, but not for years, so I was excited to re-read it in Croatian and it didn't disappoint. I guess this is a book you probably either love or hate, but I love it and I still can't get through it without crying

I've also been to Croatia (just a brief stay of 3 days) and am now in Slovenia. Three days was only just about long enough to get into the swing of hearing Croatian before it was time to leave again. I've decided my biggest weakness right now is numbers. Or, more specifically, prices. If Croatia could join the Euro, that would be great because I'm pretty good at counting to about 20 But with kuna, all the prices are in hundreds and whenever anyone tells me how much something costs, I get confused

The language I have unexpectedly had the longest conversation in on this holiday is actually German. I spent a few days by Lake Balaton in Hungary, which is not a place where much English is spoken. The lady I was renting an apartment from didn't speak English at all so we interacted completely in German and I was glad that I was able to sustain a normal conversation with her, despite the fact that that might be the first time I've spoken German since 2012(?).

Anyway, I did use the opportunity of being in Zagreb to stock up on books, which will be my Christmas presents at the end of this year. One of the things I bought was a grammar of Russian in Croatian, which should be pretty cool.

Being in Slovenia now is weird because sometimes I can understand nothing and other times I can understand everything I have done pretty well at understanding football commentary on the TV over the past couple of days. The main words I have learned are:

nič - nil
žoga - ball
rumen - yellow

The word for yellow is very confusing, because in Croatian I'm pretty sure 'rumen' would imply a red or pink colour. So when I heard the Slovenian commentator say that one of the players was getting a "rumeni karton" I figured it was a red card, until I realised that the referee was holding up a yellow one

It will be back to work on Monday unfortunately, but hopefully I can get through another couple of books before then

[Radioclare]

I only ended up reading two more books on my holiday in the end, and both were in German. The first was another Krimi, this one called 'Trotzkis Narr' by Ulrich Ritzel. I thought it was okay, but it didn't blow me away. This may be partly because it was the ninth book in a series where I haven't read the previous eight books, so maybe I just didn't care about any of the characters enough.

The second was a novel called 'Limassol' by Yishai Sarid, which was a translation into German of a book written in Hebrew. The main character works for the Israeli intelligence services and interrogates Palestinian suspects with the aim of trying to prevent suicide bombers. The plot involves him being asked to take part in a sensitive undercover operation to get close to the family of a Palestinian suspect, and the closer he gets the more conflicted he becomes about what the 'right' thing to do is. It's a really powerful book, because on the one hand he is not a likeable character at all, and on the other hand you start to feel empathy for him as his life spins out of control and you get glimpses of the person he might have been before his career took over his life. Obviously also a book where you could make a lot of political comments, so that's all I'll say, but I definitely recommend it and I think it's been translated into several other languages as well as German.

I was planning to sign up for Tadoku this week but every time I try on the website I just get an error message, so I've given up and I'm going to read a book in English instead

Not much else to report otherwise. I really enjoyed being in Slovenia and it's very tempting to want to learn Slovenian, but I'm not allowed to until I try harder at learning Russian

[Denzagathist]

Nisam još pročitao cijeli tvoj log, pa je sasvim moguće da si to već spomenula drugdje... ali gdje kupuješ knjige na hrvatskome? Jel to možeš preko interneta, ili jednostavno ideš u kupovinu po hrpu knjiga kad god si u Hrvatskoj?

[IronMike]

You're studying Japanese now? Or am I getting the wrong results when I Google Tadoku?

[Serpent]

tadoku was originally a challenge for learners of Japanese i think, but it allows other languages too https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... =21&t=1197

[Radioclare]

Nisam još pročitao cijeli tvoj log, pa je sasvim moguće da si to već spomenula drugdje... ali gdje kupuješ knjige na hrvatskome? Jel to možeš preko interneta, ili jednostavno ideš u kupovinu po hrpu knjiga kad god si u Hrvatskoj?

Uglavnom kupujem knjige kad sam u Hrvatskoj ili Crnoj Gori. Pokušala sam kupiti knjige preko interneta... ako se dobro sjećam, mislim da sam kupila i od superknjizara.hr i od delfi.rs ... ali to nije bilo jeftino zbog troškova slanja i sve to. Obično uspijem provesti barem nekoliko dana u Hrvatskoj svake godine i tada kupujem koliko god knjiga mogu staviti u kofer

Prije nekoliko godina sam tražila stranicu koja omogućava kupovinu e-knjiga na hrvatskom, ali nisam pronašla ništa što je bilo i zakonito i dostupno za ljude izvan Hrvatske

[Radioclare]

You're studying Japanese now? Or am I getting the wrong results when I Google Tadoku?

If I ever announce I'm studying Japanese, I have officially bitten off more than I can chew and you have permission to come and shoot me

You can choose up to three languages for Tadoku, so I normally sign up for German, Esperanto and Croatian

[Chung]

You probably know a few hundred of these by heart already, but here's a list of 4003 verbs with their repsective aspectual counterparts. It's probably easier to look things up here instead of trying to find out the aspectual pair of some unfamiliar verb by looking it up on Wiktionary or other dictionaries as they rarely mark aspectual pairs explicitly.

As far as I can tell the only substantive difference between the Croatian and Serbian sheets is in script used. I wouldn't be surprised though if there are a few aspectual pairs that differ between the variants but I can't think of any though at the moment. Despite the use of Cyrillic, the Serbian chart is ordered per the Latinic alphabet rather than the Cyrillic one. For example, verbs starting with ц rather than в follow those starting with б.

[Radioclare]

Thank you Chung - that looks incredibly useful

I haven't updated for a while because I don't seem to have done much since I got back from holiday. I realised that my Croatian Super Challenge was in quite a sorry state, so my main focus has been trying to make myself watch Croatian TV more frequently. I've managed 9 episodes of 'Zora Dubrovačka' since I got back, which feels like quite a respectable number. The series is so nearly over... but not quite. I'm on episode 146 of 161, so the end is definitely in sight and I just wish everyone would hurry up and live happily ever after now. I think it's fair to say that I may have lost enthusiasm with this series now I thought the first half of it was pretty good (it was set in Dubrovnik during the war in the early 90s, so it was quite exciting), but the second half of the series jumped forward to 1995 or 1996 and it feels a bit like they just ran out of storyline because there wasn't a war anymore.

I've read lots of interesting articles in Croatian, and some in German, over the past few weeks, but they're all about topics which are too political to start discussing here. It's been cool though because I've managed to find some more interesting accounts which tweet in Croatian to follow on Twitter. It's nice to get a little bit of Croatian in my feed if I just randomly check my phone during the day at work.

Otherwise all I've been doing is a bit of Glossika (the old Glossika) in Serbian. I suddenly got an urge to listen to it while walking to work one day and I still had it on my ipod from last time I had a Glossika phase. I've only got through about six lessons so far this time, but I do enjoy it. I had an email about the new Glossika while I was on holiday, saying that if I logged in and used it for x days in a row I could get some sort of discount. But being on holiday and travelling around so much just meant it wasn't the right time to try and do something consistently every day, and although I can't remember the numbers I felt like even with the discount it was more money than I could justify spending.

It's nearly time for the 6WC, which I've signed up for with Russian (again!) so I'm hoping that will give me the motivation to start studying properly again (I think I may have said that last time as well?!)