Zelda's French Log (+ Modern Greek)

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MamaPata
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Re: Zelda's French Log (+ Modern Greek)

Postby MamaPata » Wed Nov 14, 2018 7:39 am

There's been a lot of discussion and criticism of some subtitles for d/Deaf people, particularly on Netflix. There was a particular point about Luke Cage, where a lot of the specifics of the speech were wiped away in the subtitles. Or censoring swearing in a way that wasn't done in the show itself. That definitely isn't a space issue, though I understand it is for other shows/scenes. (I'm on my phone so won't try and link but it's something Valissa Thompson and Riki Poynter have discussed, among others).

However, I think the issue for dubbing is that the subtitles and the dubbing are done by different teams at different times, each working from the original.
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Re: Zelda's French Log (+ Modern Greek)

Postby Fortheo » Wed Nov 14, 2018 8:46 pm

zjones wrote:Ugh, I'm really kicking myself for choosing this month of all others to be a "No Spending" month. Next time I have a stupid idea like that, I hope my husband stops me. This is why I haven't been able to buy myself a proper Greek course: we have cut off all spending except for bills and gasoline, not out of necessity but as a "fun" household challenge. We did a lot of prep for food (thank goodness for frozen meat and my amateur baking skills), but I really wish I would have bought Assimil's Greek course before November started.

It's been interesting to approach Greek without any paid courses, though. So far it's all been free and legal which can sometimes be frustrating but also feels like an accomplishment for a less popular language like Greek.

French

Unfortunately, Harry gets kind of annoying in the 4th HP book, and I hope this trend doesn't continue. :( On the other hand, I have some other French books on my Kindle so I can switch to them if needed. I'm feeling quite attached to the HP writing style and vocabulary, which may make it difficult to move on to other series.

US Netflix has a lot of shows dubbed in French, but they are only the newer Netflix shows and the dubs never match the subtitles. So I've been watching "A Good Place" (with Kristen Bell, it's funny and I like it) without subs, and I'm having unexpected success understanding the show. Yay! :D It's a step or two easier than watching Dix Pour Cent which had so much more colloquial/vulgar/fast/mumbling/screaming speech.



If you finish Harry potter and feel like starting a french young adult series, I strongly suggest autre monde by Maxime Chattam. I'm currently on book 4, and I'll just say that it's one hell of an adventure.

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Re: Zelda's French Log (+ Modern Greek)

Postby zjones » Wed Nov 14, 2018 9:37 pm

Fortheo wrote:If you finish Harry potter and feel like starting a french young adult series, I strongly suggest autre monde by Maxime Chattam. I'm currently on book 4, and I'll just say that it's one hell of an adventure.


Oh! Thank you! I think you mentioned that book series on one of my old threads, but I had forgotten about it. I'm very interested in any recommendations in YA adventure series in French. I'll see if I can get my hands on it!
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Re: Zelda's French Log (+ Modern Greek)

Postby Fortheo » Wed Nov 14, 2018 11:32 pm

zjones wrote:
Fortheo wrote:If you finish Harry potter and feel like starting a french young adult series, I strongly suggest autre monde by Maxime Chattam. I'm currently on book 4, and I'll just say that it's one hell of an adventure.


Oh! Thank you! I think you mentioned that book series on one of my old threads, but I had forgotten about it. I'm very interested in any recommendations in YA adventure series in French. I'll see if I can get my hands on it!



I probably did mention it! I'm getting forgetful these days. I have read a few french young adult series, so if there's a genre in particular that interests you, let me know and maybe I can suggest some titles. For instance, the series "Tara Duncan" is a magic themed series somewhat similar to Harry Potter, but with a female lead.

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Re: Zelda's French Log (+ Modern Greek)

Postby zjones » Tue Nov 20, 2018 6:52 pm

Despite sticking to my goals fairly well this week, I'm struggling to keep any sort of stability in my language-learning. Actually, I think I might be suffering from mild depression. Considering that languages are a large part of my life right now, not feeling inspired or capable of learning has been soul-draining. Depression is always difficult to deal with, and my strategies for coping are not great because I suffer so infrequently. I'm already doing the things that are recommended for depression (exercising, decreasing junk food, not drinking etc.) but I just feel all caught up in my own head and expectations. I wish I could take a break from all my incessant thoughts. :(

Here are some things I did this week: Gave up on not spending any money this month, so that I could buy Assimil Le Grec before the holidays. I also bought tea advent calendar from DAVIDsTEA, which isn't language-related but is kind of exciting for me because their tea blends are luscious. I mean, just look at it. I can't wait to recreate that exciting Christmas countdown feeling.

As for French, I finished reading Coraline by Neil Gaiman. I think it took me about a week? The book is fairly short and quite creepy -- I found myself very worried that it wouldn't end well, even though it's a pre-teen/young adult book. I was impressed by some of the new vocabulary. The sentence "Elle devora á belles dents" was particularly interesting to me. I am now reading Odd et les Géants de Glace, which is also by Gaiman. I discovered out that A Series of Unfortunate events has a French version, Les Desastreuses Aventures des Orphelins Baudelaire, so along with Fortheo's recommendations I should be set for awhile.

I got to the Hogwarts ball/dance chapter in Harry Potter Tome 4 and I haven't been able to convince myself to pick it up again.

In Modern Greek, I am reading a short story meant for beginners (A1+) that is available as an app through Deltos Publishing. I would have preferred a physical copy or ebook, but the app is fine too. It cost $4.99 on the App Store. I've spent a couple hours getting through the first few paragraphs because I'm looking up every third word. With the help of the WordReference forum, I've discovered that I'll need to become familiar with cases or I won't know what's going on due to the free word order in Greek. Sometimes the subject is at the end of the sentence and that is very confusing for me.
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Re: Zelda's French Log (+ Modern Greek)

Postby Mista » Tue Nov 20, 2018 7:11 pm

zjones wrote:Despite sticking to my goals fairly well this week, I'm struggling to keep any sort of stability in my language-learning. Actually, I think I might be suffering from mild depression. Considering that languages are a large part of my life right now, not feeling inspired or capable of learning has been soul-draining. Depression is always difficult to deal with, and my strategies for coping are not great because I suffer so infrequently. I'm already doing the things that are recommended for depression (exercising, decreasing junk food, not drinking etc.) but I just feel all caught up in my own head and expectations. I wish I could take a break from all my incessant thoughts. :(

Have you considered if you need a vitamin D supplement? For me, they are absolutely necessary to avoid winter depression at this time of the year.
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Re: Zelda's French Log (+ Modern Greek)

Postby StringerBell » Tue Nov 20, 2018 9:38 pm

zjones wrote:I've spent a couple hours getting through the first few paragraphs because I'm looking up every third word. With the help of the WordReference forum, I've discovered that I'll need to become familiar with cases or I won't know what's going on due to the free word order in Greek. Sometimes the subject is at the end of the sentence and that is very confusing for me.


I absolutely HATE having to constantly look up words while I'm reading. I find that it not only wastes an enormous amount of time, but then 2 seconds after I looked up the word I've already forgotten it, so if I try to reread anything, I have to waste time looking up all the same words again.

I came up with a work around for this. It's not perfect, but in my opinion it's light years ahead of looking up each individual word. It really only works with ebooks/digital copies, which I'm not sure if you have access to through that app, but you could use it with anything else that you can read on your computer (as an epub file, PDF, etc...)

What I've been doing is to create my own parallel text. I copy+paste a whole chapter (or page or paragraph) to a Word doc. I add a space after every 3-5 lines, and paste a whole chunk into google translate, then paste the English translation directly under the corresponding section. As a beginner, you might prefer to do this for each sentence instead of for a group of lines. The benefits of doing this (other than eliminating the constant dictionary lookups) are that google translate deals with the cases pretty well (at least with Polish, I'm not sure how well it works with Greek). Sometimes it's doesn't translate very well idioms or expressions, but very beginner stuff shouldn't have much of this, and if it does, you can try using reverso context (or asking a native Greek speaker here) for clarification.

I then also take it one step further and color code. In the beginning, I was coding individual words, but now I code whole phrases or sentences. I started doing this because it made it easier for me to keep track of where I was in the text, and then eventually I found that it helped me to pay attention to the meaning of words and phrases. Now, it's just kind of a habit. I'm attaching a screen shot so you can see what this looks like.

Screen Shot 2018-11-20 at 4.36.50 PM.png


***There are also free and very cheap parallel Greek/English stories for Kindle available on Amazon. Here is one in Greek/English that I read in Polish called Boxer and Brandon (it's a children's story, but it's pretty decent): https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07HNH7C91/re ... il_3?psc=1
and here is another parallel text for Kindle for $3: https://www.amazon.com/Learn-Greek-Para ... llel+story
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zjones
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Re: Zelda's French Log (+ Modern Greek)

Postby zjones » Wed Nov 21, 2018 9:38 pm

Mista wrote:Have you considered if you need a vitamin D supplement? For me, they are absolutely necessary to avoid winter depression at this time of the year.


Thanks Mista. This is something I am already doing, but I am happy to see you recommend it because low vitamin D can cause so many mood problems. :)

StringerBell wrote:What I've been doing is to create my own parallel text. I copy+paste a whole chapter (or page or paragraph) to a Word doc. I add a space after every 3-5 lines, and paste a whole chunk into google translate, then paste the English translation directly under the corresponding section. As a beginner, you might prefer to do this for each sentence instead of for a group of lines. The benefits of doing this (other than eliminating the constant dictionary lookups) are that google translate deals with the cases pretty well (at least with Polish, I'm not sure how well it works with Greek). Sometimes it's doesn't translate very well idioms or expressions, but very beginner stuff shouldn't have much of this, and if it does, you can try using reverso context (or asking a native Greek speaker here) for clarification.

[...etc.]


Thank you for the picture! I think I read about this method on your log. Working with color-coded text to identify cases and clauses would help me a lot because my brain seems to like things that are sorted by color. I'm very interested in trying this now, especially with the story I am currently reading (it's written for teens and adults, is split up into 13 tiny chapters, and even has some romance sprinkled in which is cute). Unfortunately, the story app I have doesn't have any kind of parallel text, and I cannot copy the text either. However, I could probably take a screenshot on my phone and get a text recognition app to work on a chapter at a time.

Or, to work on my Greek typing, I could probably just type it myself.

Thanks for all the ideas. I'm slowing becoming habituated to working a lot harder with Greek, particularly in forcing myself to come up with creative new methods to get things done. It's exhausting but also fun.
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Re: Zelda's French Log (+ Modern Greek)

Postby StringerBell » Wed Nov 21, 2018 9:44 pm

Have you already considered greekpod101? I've seen many people on here using the pod101 series for various languages and most seem to be very satisfied. They have video and audio (and I'd assume text, but can't say for sure) and seem to have a lot of absolute beginner material as well as intermediate stuff. It looks like you can try out the first lesson for free to see what you think.

https://www.greekpod101.com/index.php

You've probably already found this YT channel, but just in case you don't know about it, Learn Greek with Lina seems to have a lot of useful beginner info:


*OK, time to stop posting resources you probably already know about.
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Re: Zelda's French Log (+ Modern Greek)

Postby James.A. » Wed Nov 21, 2018 10:05 pm

zjones wrote:Modern Greek

TypeRacer -- Ελλινικά: This website allows for practice typing different languages and their corresponding keyboards. This is the only typing website I could find that had a nice set-up for typing in Greek. I've set up my Mac so that I can click ctrl+space to switch keyboards between American and Greek. It's wonderful, and I use it all the time.



Look at that: https://www.typingstudy.com/el-greek-2/lesson/1/part/2 I used it for Russian. It's quite nice and it is divided to small lessons. It actually have a lot of languages. The translations in the instructions of the lessons are from google translate (simply horrible) but it doesn't really matter. At least it teaches you where the keys are. Try it! :D

I suggest you "À la croisée des mondes" (His dark materials). It's a series of 3 books. I liked it very much and it was one of the first books in English I've ever read. It's YA, though at some points there are some peculiar words (it has some extensive descriptions, particularly in book 3). But it is a very nice series.

Take care! :D
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