Radioclare's 2018 log (Croatian/Russian)

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Re: Radioclare's 2018 log (Croatian/Russian)

Postby Daniel N. » Thu Jan 18, 2018 10:00 am

Radioclare wrote:I have a quick question for people who speak Russian: what does "общежитие" mean?

I will steal Clare's log a bit to demonstrate how Croatian/Serbian and Russian are similar and dissimilar.

"Уже две недели Марина студентка университета. Eё день - типичный день студента МГУ. Но Марина живёт в общежитии, далеко от центра, а её факультет в центре города."

Transliterated (to my best knowledge, there might be errors. :/):

Uže dv’e n’ed’el’i Mar’ina stud’entka un’iv’ers’it’eta. Jejo d’en’ - t’ip’ičnyj d’en’ stud’enta MGU. No Mar’ina živ’ot’ v obśežit’iji, dal’eko ot centra, a jejo fakul’t’et v centr’e goroda.

Croatian:

Već dva tjedna Marina je studentica sveučilišta. Njen dan je tipičan dan studenta MGU. Međutim
(also possible: no), Marina živi u studentskom domu, daleko od centra, a njen fakultet je u centru grada.

(Ekavian) Serbian:

Već dve nedelje Marina je studentkinja univerziteta. Njen dan je tipičan dan studenta MGU. Međutim, Marina živi u studentskom domu, daleko od centra, a njen fakultet je u centru grada.

So it's not that different in writing, you need to look up some words in dictionary, of course, but pronunciation is much more different, with a lot of palatal consonants and reduced vowels (for example, университета is pronounced [ʊnʲɪvʲɪrsʲɪˈtʲetə]).

And I think this is a real problem for learners, many words are quite close, but pronounced or spelled differently, you have to keep two similar sets of rules and words in head and don't mix them up...

edit: fixed transliteration, had missed one ë :(
Last edited by Daniel N. on Sun Jan 21, 2018 11:45 pm, edited 4 times in total.
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Radioclare
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Re: Radioclare's 2018 log (Croatian/Russian)

Postby Radioclare » Thu Jan 18, 2018 10:34 am

And I think this is a real problem for learners, many words are quite close, but pronounced or spelled differently, you have to keep two similar sets of rules and words in head and don't mix them up...


Thank you Daniel, this is really interesting :) And I think you have hit the nail on the head; it isn't so difficult to understand the words, at least when they are written down, but learning the correct pronunciation and spelling when they are so similar but different to Croatian words is the challenge. And my biggest fear is that my Croatian will deteriorate because I will start getting confused with Russian words and mispronouncing things :( That's why for every 15 minutes of Memrise Russian I am doing each morning, I am also doing 15 minutes of Croatian Memrise, mainly revising words I already know. I'm not quite sure what else to do, but any advice from other people about how not to get confused would be appreciated. Do other people have this issue when learning similar Romance languages, for example?

Transliterated (to my best knowledge, there might be errors. :/ Also, I think ёе should be rather ? Shouldn't there be a genitive after типичный день?)


Yes sorry, the mistakes are due to my poor Cyrillic typing skills :oops: The correct text should be:

"Уже две недели Марина студентка университета. Eё день - типичный день студента МГУ. Но Марина живёт в общежитии, далеко от центра, а eё факультет в центре города."
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Re: Radioclare's 2018 log (Croatian/Russian)

Postby Daniel N. » Thu Jan 18, 2018 11:08 am

Radioclare wrote:Yes sorry, the mistakes are due to my poor Cyrillic typing skills :oops: The correct text should be:

"Уже две недели Марина студентка университета. Eё день - типичный день студента МГУ. Но Марина живёт в общежитии, далеко от центра, а eё факультет в центре города."

Nema problema, I'll fix the transliterated and translated text as well :)
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Re: Radioclare's 2018 log (Croatian/Russian)

Postby Radioclare » Sat Jan 20, 2018 2:59 pm

2018 seems to be going quite well so far :) At least, it's going better than 2017 did and I haven't run out of steam with any of my new year's resolutions yet.

I've finished 16 lessons of Russian Assimil now and I'm still really enjoying it, although I can feel that the lessons are starting to get a bit harder now, so I'm wondering whether one lesson per day is going to be too ambitious to keep up into the future. I'm about halfway through the fourth chapter of Colloquial Russian too, and I think working through that at the speed of one chapter per week is going to be about right. I'm mainly using my 15 minutes of Russian Memrise time every morning to learn the vocab from Colloquial Russian, so that I feel confident with it when doing the exercises in the book, and so far that seems to be working well. I'm relieved that Colloquial Russian seems to be a good book, and definitely miles better than Colloquial Croatian.

The main achievement of this week was definitely finishing 'Na rubu večnosti'. So far this year, I've now read one novel in German and finished one in Serbian, so although Tadoku is still on I've decided to take a break and read a book in English. I've chosen 'Kosovo: A Short History' by Noel Malcolm, which was one of my 2016 Christmas presents that I ran out of time to read in 2017. I guess the history of Kosovo is not a great forum topic but towards the start of the book there was an introduction to Albanian pronunciation, which is apparently quite simple. I have no intention of learning Albanian, but on the other hand I do very much want to go to Albania at some point in my life, so this is good to know :)

I have kept up with Croatian Memrise every day but was extremely shocked yesterday morning on the train when I was presented with the word "popušiti" to learn. I was certain that I knew what this word meant and it is the sort of meaning I would probably have learned from reading 'Fifty Shades of Grey' in Serbian for the Super Challenge, so I was surprised because this is not the sort of word you normally find in vocab lists :oops: It turns out, however, that this verb also has a more innocent meaning and is the perfective pair of pušiti (to smoke). At least I am not likely to forget that now :lol:

I am writing at least 150 words in Croatian every day, but I am starting to question what this is achieving except to give me a distraction on my commute home. I have discovered that a major downside of leaving work on time is experiencing the evening commuter rush-hour. Last year I mostly caught trains which arrived in my home station at 19.22 or 19.52, and these trains were havens of peace and tranquillity, where I could not only have a seat for myself but also a seat for my bag. Now I'm catching the first train leaving Birmingham after 17.30 (AKA the train which the entire world wants to catch) and it is a special kind of hell. I have learned that a train can reach a certain level of fullness where it doesn't actually matter whether you have anything to hold onto, because there's no space to fall over anyway :lol: And that it is possible to write 150 words of Croatian while jammed into a very small space indeed. But I guess I feel like what I'm writing in Croatian isn't very exciting and I'm basically rearranging the same words in different orders, mostly writing about something which happened in my day. Because I'm doing it in less than ideal conditions on the train, I'm not in a position to look up words I don't know (and thus maybe learn something) but rather I'm sticking with the words I'm comfortable with and sometimes just having to make my best guess with the grammar, and I'm not sure whether this is teaching me anything or not. Perhaps I need to go back to posting what I write on Lang8, because knowing that someone else is going to cover what I've written in red pen might give me motivation to try harder; I don't know. I've got 3,205 words anyway, so if I had signed up for the Output Challenge I would be on track.

The thing I'm not doing terribly well with in Croatian at the moment is watching TV. So far this year I've only watched one single episode, and when I went to watch it I realised that my OYO subscription had expired since my last episode (pre-Christmas) and I needed to sign up again. It was 319 kuna (about £38) to renew for the year, which I think is a bargain compared to Sky :) I think the reason I haven't watched more TV is that I've been so successful at doing productive things in my evenings instead. But it is something I really want to keep up with because it's had such a hugely positive impact on my Croatian over the past few years, so I'm thinking of introducing a rule where I either read or watch TV on alternate nights.

I worked from home one day this week and that meant I was able to listen to music while I worked (yay!). I discovered a new favourite song to listen to if I ever want to cry; "Boško i Admira" by Zabranjeno Pušenje. The song is based on what seems to be quite a famous story (though I had never heard it before!) about a couple who were killed by snipers while trying to escape from war-torn Sarajevo. You can read about it in English here

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Re: Radioclare's 2018 log (Croatian/Russian)

Postby Radioclare » Sat Jan 27, 2018 9:25 pm

New Year's resolutions are still going strong. I've signed up for the 6WC with Russian, and I'm hoping that will help me with the motivation to keep them going into February/March as well :)

Russian
I've completed 24 lessons of Assimil now and I'm still having fun with it. I wish I had had a course like this when I was learning Croatian. It's really cool having so much audio to listen to and the conversations are way more interesting than the standard Pimsleur "Say that you are an American man" approach.

I'm working through Colloquial Russian simultaneously and have just completed chapter 5. I feel like it's going well, but the test will be whether I make it to chapter 7 or 8 without giving up. I have quite a poor record as far as finishing language textbooks is concerned. When I started learning German I bought a lovely Berlitz book and I don't think I ever made it past chapter 6. When I first learned Esperanto, I got bored after chapter 4 of Teach Yourself. So Croatian is the only language where I have been successful at starting a textbook at the beginning and working all the way through it until the end :lol: I think it's partly because I don't actually enjoy learning languages; I only enjoy having learned them.

Colloquial Russian is fine as textbooks go, though the chapters seem to be weighted a bit unevenly. Chapter 4 was a really grammar-heavy chapter where we had pages of the genitive, followed by a point on prepositional case endings, an introduction to the concept of short adjectives and all the ordinal numbers. Whereas I've been struggling to work out what the point of Chapter 5 was; it basically taught vocabulary for family members and personal pronouns, which seemed significantly easier than Chapter 4. My boyfriend spent half of last year writing a language textbook, which has been an interesting insight, and so I find now as I'm going through Colloquial Russian that I'm either admiring how cleverly the author has managed to create a coherent dialogue with minimal vocabulary or else wondering if they were having a bad day when they set an utterly pointless exercise (like identifying first names, surnames and patronymics from a list of names, which was the biggest waste of time in Ch 5!).

My Memrise course of all the vocab from the book is progressing nicely. I'm scheduling bursts of downloading audio from Forvo for evenings when I feel too tired to do anything more useful :D

Croatian
I'm starting to wonder whether I should belatedly add audio to some of my Croatian courses on Memrise to remind me of the correct pronunciation of words when my brain gets addled by Russian.

There's a nice course just called 'Croatian vocab' on Memrise which has 1300 words in thematic categories. I'm a bit over halfway through now and this week I've been studying meat. So I've learned, for example, that bunček is pork leg and lungić is pork loin. I don't think I'd have a clue what the difference between those two is in English - and I'm not a huge fan of pork anyway - but my aim is just to expand my vocabulary and I guess these are the sort of words which I might pleasantly surprise myself by recognising in a novel one day.

I've kept up writing in Croatian every day, despite feeling a bit sceptical about it, so I now have 4636 words. That must be about two thirds of the total words I wrote last year already.

TV watching is still going slowly. I am enjoying the series I'm watching, but the plot is nowhere near as exciting/convoluted/bizarre as 'Larin izbor' so I guess I don't feel the same compulsion to watch it every day.

Still working my way through the history of Kosovo in English. I read an extremely interesting chapter the other day about the origins of the Albanians and about various attempts by linguists to analyse their language and determine whether they were descended from Illyrians or Thracians.

When I'm working on things in the evening I often have Youtube on in the background playing a random mix of songs. I don't know how their algorithms work but it normally does a good job of sticking to songs I like or introducing new songs which are from a similar genre to the ones I like. But for the past week, something has gone crazy and no matter how dark and depressing the song I start listening to, within half an hour I seem to find Youtube playing me the following bouncy pop song called 'Vidi se iz aviona'. I don't like this kind of music at all, but I've accidentally listened to it so many times this week that I now can't get the chorus out of my head :lol: I can only assume that the song has been a huge hit in Croatia recently and that Youtube therefore thinks that because I'm listening to one Croatian song, I must want to listen to this one too! I think it might make a good Eurovision song, but it's definitely not one I'll be buying for my iPod :)

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Re: Radioclare's 2018 log (Croatian/Russian)

Postby Daniel N. » Sat Jan 27, 2018 9:47 pm

Actually, buncek. This is mostly eaten in the wider Zagreb area; don't expect buncek on Korčula :)
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Re: Radioclare's 2018 log (Croatian/Russian)

Postby Radioclare » Sat Jan 27, 2018 9:55 pm

Oh dear, the course isn't quite as good as I thought then because it says bunček :-(

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Re: Radioclare's 2018 log (Croatian/Russian)

Postby Brun Ugle » Sun Jan 28, 2018 9:41 am

I was just catching up on your log. I remember the story of Boško and Admira. I followed the news from the Bosnian war at the time. It fascinated me in a way. Fascinated doesn’t seem like the right word because it’s so often used with a positive meaning and I don’t mean it that way, but none of the alternatives I can think of seem to fit any better. I guess I was just at the right age to feel compelled to do something, but at the same time powerless to do anything. It still haunts me a little and I think it’s one of the reasons I feel such a desire to learn the language.
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Re: Radioclare's 2018 log (Croatian/Russian)

Postby Radioclare » Sun Jan 28, 2018 10:42 pm

Aww, that's cool that you remember it from when it happened and I know what you mean by "fascinated". I barely remember anything about the Bosnian war at all. I would have been 9 for most of 1993 and my parents didn't allow me to watch the news at that age, so I only had a very vague idea of what was going on. I think that's partly why I'm so interested in it now; it seems incredible (again, not meant in a positive way!) to look back and think that things like that happened in Europe in our lifetime and many people seemingly just didn't care. I definitely want to visit Bosnia at some point in my life but I'm not in a rush. At the moment it still feels like it would be almost be a bit frivolous to plan a "holiday" to places where people have suffered so much and there are still so many problems to be resolved. Although very recently one of my colleagues did inform me that she had "seen" Bosnia and she thought I would like it. When I tried to ask her more about it, all she could tell me about Bosnia was that there was a pretty bridge. Turned out that she'd been on some sort of package-tour day trip to Mostar from Dubrovnik :lol:
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Re: Radioclare's 2018 log (Croatian/Russian)

Postby Brun Ugle » Mon Jan 29, 2018 7:27 am

I turned 20 in 1993, so I still probably had some of the idealism of adolescence (not sure I’ve ever completely outgrown it, to be honest).

Yes, it was incredible. It was that feeling I remember, the shock that such a thing could happen again in Europe when we were all so sure that lessons had been learnt and it couldn’t happen again. That coupled with a strong feeling that I should be doing something and a feeling of not having the power to do anything.

Now I’m over forty and still can’t change the world, but I channel that energy into helping refugees here where I live.
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