Ogrim's Krambu - a plethora of languages, mostly European, both old and new

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Ogrim
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Re: Ogrim's Krambu - a plethora of languages, mostly European, both old and new

Postby Ogrim » Thu Jun 30, 2022 3:52 pm

Thank you for the suggestion about the websites Daniel, I've had a look and they look promising. I will certainly include them in my studies.

For the time being I stick to Colloquial Croatian, and I am really enjoying it. Starting on a new language from scratch can be frustrating. I think the beginner stage is often the most boring part of the journey, you have to learn all those basic words and grammar rules, the texts are not very interesting to say the least and it's like setting out on a long walk without knowing when you will reach your goal. On this occasion though, I am excited to embark on a new language and I actually enjoy discovering the grammar little by little. Maybe it is because it is my second Slavic language, I remember I felt the same excitement when I started on Spanish after having learnt French, discovering the similarities and the differences between the two languages (which is what finally led me to study Romance comparative philology at university).

I don't find that my Russian helps me a lot. Sure, like Radioclare says, it helps me recognise words, although I am always aware of possible false friends. Grammar-wise there are similarities, but the morphology is different and from what I can tell so far, the grammar rules are not the same.

I've had less time for other languages - summer is approaching and that means a lot of pressure at work to get things done before people leave on holidays. I do try to fit Greek into my daily routine though, even if it is only 20-30 minutes, and I also try to read and listen to Latin every day with the Legentibus app, but this summer my focus is on Croatian, and if possible I hope to work my way through the Colloquial course by the time I go to Croatia.
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Re: Ogrim's Krambu - a plethora of languages, mostly European, both old and new

Postby Ogrim » Mon Aug 01, 2022 7:30 am

The month of July has passed, and it has been an eventful month for me, which is the reason I have not posted anything on the forum since June. I've been to England, I've been sick with Covid and I've been to Croatia since my last post.

At the beginning of the month we went to London for my daughter's graduation ceremony, she now has her Bachelor Honours degree. It was a great ceremony in Royal Festival Hall on the South Bank, so all in all a memorable event.

Language-wise the trip was not particularly exciting, but I will mention an interesting excursion which took us deep into the history of England. We went to visit some friends who live near a small town called Melton Mowbray in Leicestershire. I guess most people have never heard of this town (at least if you're not English), but back in the Middle Ages and early Renaissance it was a favourite place for English kings and noblemen to go hunting. It was also a major market town on the route between Yorkshire and London. The highlight for me was to discover the pub called Anne of Cleves house. It is a Tudor building dating from the late 14th century, and was the home of the local priest until the English Reformation, when king Henry VIII seized church property and gave this house to his first minister Thomas Cromwell, who lived there for a short while until he fell out with the king and was beheaded. Thereafter, Henry VIII gave the house to his fourth wife, Anne of Cleves, after he divorced her. It is not known whether Anne of Cleves ever lived in the house, but it is pretty certain that king Henry VIII himself visited the house at one point. You can read more about the building's history here.

I've always been interested in English history and I loved the TV series "The Tudors" with Jonathan Rhys Meyers as the king, so for me it was something special to have a pint in a house with such a long and interesting history.

Image
Anne of Cleves house, Melton Mowbray

I must have caught the Omicron virus in London, because the same day we came back home I started to feel ill, and then I spent five days in bed feeling lousy. In a way I was lucky getting ill just that week, because the week after we went to Croatia, and I had time to recover before the trip. I'll do a separate post about Croatia later on, I'll just say that I find I am making good steady progress in Croatian, even if I did not manage to do as much as I would have liked before the trip. And after my holiday there I am more motivated than ever to keep going with Croatian in a serious manner.

Apart from that I've managed to keep my Classical Greek in maintenance mode throughout July, and I continue reading and listening to Latin every day with the Legentibus app.
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Re: Ogrim's Krambu - a plethora of languages, mostly European, both old and new

Postby DaveAgain » Mon Aug 01, 2022 9:04 am

Ogrim wrote:
Language-wise the trip was not particularly exciting, but I will mention an interesting excursion which took us deep into the history of England. We went to visit some friends who live near a small town called Melton Mowbray in Leicestershire. I guess most people have never heard of this town (at least if you're not English), but back in the Middle Ages and early Renaissance it was a favourite place for English kings and noblemen to go hunting. It was also a major market town on the route between Yorkshire and London. The highlight for me was to discover the pub called Anne of Cleves house. It is a Tudor building dating from the late 14th century, and was the home of the local priest until the English Reformation, when king Henry VIII seized church property and gave this house to his first minister Thomas Cromwell, who lived there for a short while until he fell out with the king and was beheaded. Thereafter, Henry VIII gave the house to his fourth wife, Anne of Cleves, after he divorced her. It is not known whether Anne of Cleves ever lived in the house, but it is pretty certain that king Henry VIII himself visited the house at one point. You can read more about the building's history here.
I was watching a video about Holbein recently, his portrait of Anne of Cleves made an appearance.
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Re: Ogrim's Krambu - a plethora of languages, mostly European, both old and new

Postby Ogrim » Tue Aug 02, 2022 9:09 am

DaveAgain wrote:I was watching a video about Holbein recently, his portrait of Anne of Cleves made an appearance.


Thank you so much for the link. I've watched the whole programme and it really is excellent.

Also thanks for letting me discover this YouTube channel. There seems to be a lot of great videos about art and music to explore.
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Re: Ogrim's Krambu - a plethora of languages, mostly European, both old and new

Postby Ogrim » Fri Aug 05, 2022 3:09 pm

Time to write a little bit about the trip to Croatia before I forget.

When my wife and I started discussing where to go on our "not-visiting-the-families-trip" this summer, we hesitated between Greece and Croatia, but since my wife had never been to Croatia and I had only visited Zagreb in the past for work-related matters, we decided that it would be a good idea to find a nice place on the Adriatic coast. So we started exploring Croatia and realised that there are literally hundreds of islands and towns to choose from. We decided we wanted somewhere calm and relaxing, so decided against the most touristy places, like Split, Hvar and Dubrovnik. Our search criteria therefore became a nice hotel close to a sandy beach and a small town or village and the arrow stopped at the island of Rab which is in the north, just south of the island Krk and a two-hour drive from the city of Rijeka.

It turned out to be a very good choice. When you take the ferry from the mainland to Rab you get the impression that the island is totally barren with no vegetation, but once you drive in the direction of the town of Rab the landscape changes and it becomes green and very Mediterranean with pine trees and palms.

The town of Rab has a long history, and the island, like the country of Croatia, has been under many rulers during the centuries. Our stay there coincided with their annual Medieval festival - Rabska fjera, which started back in 1364 to celebrate that king Louis the Great freed the island from Venetian rule. It is now in honour of the patron saint of Rab, Saint Christopher.

The festival lasted for three days. On the opening night there was a parade of people dressed in Medieval clothes, Medieval music and dance, and a speech by the mayor of Rab. I actually managed to understand bits and pieces of what he said - he spoke slowly and clearly and with the little Croatian I've learnt the last two months and my knowledge of Russian I could figure out parts of the speech. Obviously far from everything - I need many many more months of Croatian studies for that. I did try to use my very limited Croatian in some shops and always greeted people with "dobar dan" and said "hvala" when receiving something, but most of the time local people would talk to me in German (lots of German and Austrian tourists visit the island).

It was a great week and we will certainly return to Croatia next year, then probably to see more well-known places like Split and Dubrovnik. By then I hope to have a much better grasp of Croatian and be able to engage in meaningful conversations in the language.

In order to achieve that, I need more resources than the Colloquial course. I have therefore added Assimil's Croatian course (in French) to my study plan. I find that it is better than other Assimil courses I have tried in the past, not least the audio sounds more natural even from the first lesson - they do not talk excruciatingly slow and the course seems to progress nicely in introducing new grammar and vocabulary. I am of course open to any suggestions from you Croatian-learners out there (looking at you Radioclare :) ) to help me advance from my beginner stage.

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The town of Rab
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Re: Ogrim's Krambu - a plethora of languages, mostly European, both old and new

Postby Radioclare » Sat Aug 06, 2022 2:38 pm

Ogrim wrote:In order to achieve that, I need more resources than the Colloquial course. I have therefore added Assimil's Croatian course (in French) to my study plan. I find that it is better than other Assimil courses I have tried in the past, not least the audio sounds more natural even from the first lesson - they do not talk excruciatingly slow and the course seems to progress nicely in introducing new grammar and vocabulary. I am of course open to any suggestions from you Croatian-learners out there (looking at you Radioclare :) ) to help me advance from my beginner stage.

Really glad you had a good time in Croatia :) Rab looks beautiful.

Re resources, I guess it depends what you're looking for! The most comprehensive textbook and grammar books which I've found in English are these: http://www.bcsgrammarandtextbook.org/. They're not cheap but they do explain grammar in a lot of detail, so worth investing in if you want to learn the language to a high level.

There's an online course for learning Croatian made by the university of Zagreb here. I did work through it at some point but I found the website a bit clunky and tedious to use to be honest. It is free though so maybe worth checking out.

It would be remiss of me not to mention Easy Croatian which has a wealth of information, including some explanations of stress that aren't properly covered by textbooks.

Look forward to following your progress :)
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Re: Ogrim's Krambu - a plethora of languages, mostly European, both old and new

Postby Ogrim » Fri Sep 02, 2022 9:43 am

Thank you for the recommendation Radioclare. Further down the line I may buy the books you mention.

I have been to Spain for two weeks, at the usual holiday place we go to every year to be with my wife's family. Linguistically the only interesting thing was that I got to hear some spoken Valencian - the nearest village is one of the places you still her more Valencian than Spanish in the street.

The time at the beach was well spent studying Croatian. I am working my way through both course books, Assimil and Colloquial Croatian, and both have their plusses and minuses so I thought I would make a quick summary of my impressions.

Colloquial Croatian: On the minus side I find that it is less well structured than other Colloquial courses I have used. The grammar explanations are OK but they come a bit "piecemeal". As I use the Kindle version, another minus is that there are some weird spelling errors (some of which seem to be an error in coding of special letters) and the layout is a bit strange whenever there is a table or columns. On the plus side is the fact that there are both dialogues and short prose texts, and there are recordings of most of the texts (something that was missing in the Colloquial Russian course).There are also plenty of exercises, which I like, in order to drill grammar and vocabulary.

Assimil Croate: Everyone (I guess) knows the Assimil method. I have never really followed the method as such with a passive and active wave, but I may try to do so with this one, at least in part. On the plus side: The audio is good. They speak more or less naturally from the first lesson and not ridiculously slowly as in many Assimil courses. The progress is relatively fast (for Assimil) and they have quite good grammar explanations and nice tables in the revision lessons. The main negative points would be the limited number of exercises and that the dialogues are sometimes ridiculous. All in all though I am pleasantly surprised by this Assimil course.

I have also read a lot of Dutch this summer. I am working my way through the book about Erasmus of Rotterdam by Sandra Langereis, Erasmus: dwarsdenker. With 750 pages in the print edition it is a monumental work about this great humanist and scholar who has given his name to the European university student exchange programme. It also provides a lot of information about life and culture in 16th century Europe.

Inspired by the Erasmus biography I have started on a bilingual Latin-French version of maybe his most famous work "Moriae Encomion" (In Praise of Folly). Erasmus' Latin is not always easy - he was an ardent proponent of going back to pure Classical Latin and this means that he uses a somewhat complex grammar and sentence structure. Still I manage to make sense of the Latin text without having to consult the French translation all the time. Apart from that I spend som time listening to Latin in the Legentibus app almost every day.

My Greek studies this month have mostly been limited to revising vocabulary and doing a couple of new lessons in Athenaze. I'll try to find more time for Greek now that I am back at my desk - it is difficult and a bit silly to drag a thick course book and an even thicker dictionary to the beach :D .
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Re: Ogrim's Krambu - a plethora of languages, mostly European, both old and new

Postby Ogrim » Mon Feb 13, 2023 6:04 pm

It's been a while...

Yes, I have been away from the forum since September last year, but now it feels good to be back and post and update.

At the beginning of September I was full of energy and motivation, and I thought I had found a good rhythm to alternate between Croatian, Latin and Classical Greek, which were my main focus languages. I had however a lot of work in the day job, and some other personal issues I won't go into, and by early October I hit a wall. I just lost motivation for language learning altogether and couldn't find the energy to pick up a course book. So I just stopped. I turned my attention to other hobbies instead, mainly classical music, trying to find more time to play the piano. I've also read a lot of philosophy and theology, I've tried to get a better understanding of cosmology and quantum mechanics, and I've watched a lot of videos on YouTube about these topics, as well as tech channels (and some British and American comedians I really enjoy).

So basically I haven't studied languages for the last four months. That doesn't mean that I haven't used my languages. I do spend a lot of time with stuff in English, but I've also read books in French, German, Italian, Spanish and Dutch during these months, and since Christmas I've been picking up Latin once more, unsing the Legentibus app. So slowly my motivation for actively studying languages is coming back, and this week I pulled the Assimil Croatian course out of the bookshelf again, and as I will have to review everything from scratch, I am eager to get back into Croatian. I've decided to let Classical Greek rest for the time being, to avoid putting too much on my plate once more. I think I have a tendency to bite over more than I can chew.

I may not be very active on the forum over the next couple of weeks, because my wife and I are going on a ten-day trip to Colombia. We'll visit some friends who live in Bogotá, and then we will go to Cartagena and Santa Marta for some tropical sun and heat. I hope to be able to give you some impressions from my trip once I am back, and share any particularities of Spanish spoken in Colombia that I may pick up.

Until then, I will try to catch up on what's been going on here the last few weeks and months, and look forward to exchanging with you all once more.
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Re: Ogrim's Krambu - a plethora of languages, mostly European, both old and new

Postby David27 » Thu Feb 16, 2023 8:14 pm

Good to hear an update from you and I’m glad you’re well. Enjoy Colombia! In 2011 I spent 2 weeks in Barranquilla, Cartagena, and Santa Marta visiting a friend, and really enjoyed the beautiful country and meeting the kind people there. Parque Tayrona is a natural park on the coast outside of Santa Marta. It is very beautiful and I would recommend a visit if your schedule permits.
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Re: Ogrim's Krambu - a plethora of languages, mostly European, both old and new

Postby Ogrim » Fri Mar 03, 2023 4:35 pm

Thank you David for your kind words.

I am back in Europe after a great time in Colombia. I still need to recover from the jetlag, so I will write more about my trip in a later post. I just wanted to share with you some observations about Spanish as spoken in Colombia before I forget.

For someone coming from European Spanish, the Colombian accent is not that hard to understand. It certinaly sounds closer to the Spanish spoken in Spain than that of e.g. Mexico, Cuba or the Dominican Republic. They do however have certain words and expressions that you do not find in Spain, some more general Latin American and some purely Colombian.

One thing that puzzled us was the use of the expression "qué pena". In Spain this means more or less "how sad", but in Colombia people use it both in the meaning of "lo siento" (I'm sorry) and "por favor" (please or you're welcome).

When you enter a shop, the first thing you will hear is "bienvenido(s), a la orden". In fact, you hear "a la orden" all the time, in shops, from street vendors, taxi drivers etc. It's used as a way to draw your attention to their prodcuts or services, inviting you to stop and browse.

Colombian Spanish also uses a lot more compound nouns than is normal in Spain. The face mask, ubiquitous since the pandemic, is called a "mascarilla" in Spain but a "tapabocas" in Colombia. What the Spanish call a "tentempié" (a snack or a quick bite) is a "pasabocas" in Colombia. A boarding card, "tarjeta de embarque" is a "pasabordos" and a jellyfish, "meduza" is a "malaguas".

Where in Spain you would use the verb "dar" (to give), in Colombia they use "regalar" all the time. Some typical sentences we heard were:
¿Me regala su firma por favor? (when signing in at a hotel)
¿Me regalan ustedes un momento? (when a taxi driver had to stop to go to the toilet)
¿Me regala su pasaporte? (at the check-in at the airport)

To someone used to European Spanish this sounds strange, as "regalar" is to give something as a gift.

Apart from this, you have more general features that are widespread in Latin Amercian Spanish, e.g. they don't use "vosotros", and there is no distinction between "C" and "S".

Those are the most notable features that I can remember. Of course my point of departure is Spanish as spoken in Spain, so for those more familiar with a Latin American variety this may not be so striking.
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