jonm's occasional log: Romance family Super Challenge

[lavengro]

Comics
Tiziano Sclavi, et al. - Dylan Dog - 3 issues (1 reread)

Dylan Dog is a fumetto about a private investigator specializing in the supernatural. It's fun and at the same time genuinely eerie and unsettling. I ordered some nice reprint editions of early issues from the '80s. The issues were originally black and white, and ordinarily I'd probably want to read them the way they were first published, but the coloring on these reprints is really well done, with fairly muted colors and old-school Ben Day dots. There are a couple sample images of the issue I just finished here.

I expect you are well aware of this, but there are Italian language Dylan Dog podcasts available. They are fun and seem really well produced from my perspective, and for many of the episodes I have listened to, the enunciation is really clear and reasonably-paced. I started listening to them after seeing StringerBell's reference to them.

[jonm]

No language learning at the moment, because I'm going through a stressful personal situation (important for me but nothing to do with any of the far more serious situations people are facing around the world), and it's hard to focus even on material I find pretty easy. My Anki reviews are piling up. Hopefully I'll be in a better place by the end of the month, and I can start digging my way out in Anki and get back to the Super Challenge. Not that the challenge is critically important or anything, but I'm glad I got ahead and gave myself a cushion just in case. I've already pretty much met my informal targets for the end of this month. I'm ahead of my reading target and ten minutes shy of my listening target, which I should be able to muster. But those progress graphs I like to make will have some plateaus.

So that's also the reason for the slow replies. Sorry!

addylad and lavengro, thanks for stopping by, and I hope to have a chance to reply soon.

How do you like Pugio Bruti? I am on their email list and thought about buying it.

Hi lingua, really enjoy your log. I've learned about lots of great Italian reading material through your reviews. I'm enjoying the Lampi di genio series, and I'm looking forward to reading some of the mysteries when my Italian vocabulary gets a little bigger and I won't have to look up so much.

Just before I had to take a break from language learning, your question inspired me to finish Pugio Bruti and then give it a full reread. So I'm very glad you asked, as it motivated me to get moving with the book.

I recommend it, with two small reservations.

First the good: It strikes me as very well done from a linguistic point of view, and reading it has definitely boosted my comprehension. In my main Latin resource, Ørberg's Familia Romana, I'm about two thirds through and meeting a new verb tense in every chapter. Pugio Bruti has been a great complement, because it puts them all together.

That means that Pugio Bruti is a lot easier and more enjoyable if you're already familiar with the different tenses and can recognize them fairly easily. You may already be at or past that point, but I wasn't when I started reading, and it was tough going. The imperfect and perfect are used throughout, but most or possibly all of the other tenses appear at some point.

(For others using Ørberg, the Pugio Bruti FAQ recommends getting to the halfway point in Familia Romana before starting Pugio Bruti, but I would recommend going further, at least through chapter 23. That way you'll know the imperfect and perfect and a few others. Or you could just get an overview of the verb tenses from a different source.)

Another thing I like about Pugio Bruti is that it seems to use lots of authentic structures, including some that seem rather colloquial. From the preface:

We have taken pains to write our narrative in a highly classical style—as far as that it possible working within the confines of a genre and level alien to the ancients. To a very high degree, only words, collocations, and expressions attested in Classical Latin have been employed. Many stylistic features and dialogue patterns stem from the plays of Plautus and Terentius and from the Satyricon of Petronius.

As a beginner, I'm not in a position to judge the authenticity of the language, but it certainly feels like they're carrying over structures from Classical texts.

So there's a wide variety of grammatical structures, but plugged into those structures are only around 350 unique words. On my first read, I often had to flip to the glossary in the back, but because the same words kept coming up, I learned them quickly. And now I can reread without checking the glossary much and just absorb the grammar—all the sentence structures and the inflections of words.

So yeah, I find it very effective as an aid to learning the language.

And then my first reservation has to do with the story (I'll be careful not to spoil anything). It's kind of an Ancient Roman Maltese Falcon, with characters competing for a MacGuffin and lots of reversals of fortune, and that's all fun. But for me, the reversals of fortune are a little unsatisfying. I like the kind of twisty story where you don't see the twists coming, but then on reflection, or the second time through, you realize the twists were foreshadowed and everything fits together. I don't really get that feeling here. But apart from that, it's a fun story, and I especially like some of the dialogue scenes. And there's nothing else like this in Latin as far as I know, so I can definitely relax my storytelling expectations a little.

And my second reservation is that for a pretty slim volume, it seems a little pricey compared to similar offerings in modern languages. But Latin resources also seem to cost more in general. And I wouldn't say it's overpriced: I've enjoyed it and found it helpful, and I expect to reread it a couple more times, so I'd say it's worth it.

Anyway, that's my take. Since I know you like mysteries, I'd be curious what you think.

[jonm]

Still stressed and finding it hard to concentrate, but I did get back into the Super Challenge. The key was sticking to material that I find fun and interesting and not too challenging, either right at my level or a bit on the easy side. For example, in Italian, I've been tearing through Luca Novelli's Lampi di genio series (which recounts the lives of scientific luminaries in the first person for young readers). That's inspired me to look at the other books I was juggling and cull anything that I wasn't actually enjoying. What remains is pure pleasure reading. I've got one book, in French, that's challenging but also really fun: Le Déchronologue, about pirates and leaks in time—thanks to emk for the recommendation. At the other end of the spectrum, those Lampi di genio books have gotten easy but not yet too easy, and since I'd like to read them all, it makes sense to go ahead and do that now. And then everything else feels right at my level.

I'm up to 61.2 "books" and 60.2 "films" (3061 pages and 5424 minutes). If I wanted to finish the challenge in ten months, my target at this point would be 50 "books" and "films," and I'd be a little over a month ahead. But now I'm wondering if I could finish by the end of the calendar year, so eight months total. With that goal in mind, I'm just slightly behind a target of 62.5 and shooting for 75 by the end of this month.

Here, as usual, are graphs of my progress. You can see where I plateaued in the second week of the month and then started back up again. Most of my reading has been in Italian, while my listening has been more evenly distributed.

pages 20-09-30.png

minutes 20-09-30.png

And here are breakdowns and comments...

(Same note as always: Unless otherwise specified, I watched films or TV with English subtitles, and I started and finished an item within this month. "x2" means two times through, usually in close succession, whereas "reread" or "rewatch" means a single time through something I knew from before.)

Portuguese

Books
Clarice Lispector - Todas as crônicas (in progress)
Clarice Lispector - A hora da estrela (suspended)

A hora da estrela is one of the books I'm setting aside. It's about a young woman living in poverty as seen through the eyes of a male narrator. I think my difficulty with the book is that at least in the first third, both the narrator and the young woman feel totally opaque. The narrator doesn't or can't speak about the young woman's experience of life with much insight or empathy. So you don't get what I consider one of the main pleasures of fiction, getting a sense of life as lived by someone else. It's so different from Clarice Lispector's columns, which I find very empathetic and humane. So I'm sure it's an intentional effect, but I'm not really responding to it. But maybe I'll try again some other time.

Podcasts
Fala Gringo - 2 episodes
Escriba Cafe - 1 episode

Spanish

Books
Soledad Puértolas - Compañeras de viaje (in progress)

Compañeras de viaje is a collection of short stories about women travelling that I've been reading off and on since before the challenge started. I really like this kind of fiction in which everything feels true to life. Things happen that are completely unspectacular but important for the characters experiencing them. And there are even places where a first-person narrator remembers the events she's describing somewhat hazily, which you might think would detract from the story by making it less vivid and concrete, but on the other hand, that's often what really happens when someone talks about their past, so it adds to the verisimilitude.

Films
Lee Unkrich - Coco (2017) (Spanish dub, no subs)
Jorge Iglesias - Gente pez (2001) (no subs)

Gente pez is sort of a counterculture comedy about flatmates in the Malasaña neighborhood of Madrid. Muy del barrio, very of the neighborhood. A nostalgia trip for me, as I was living in Madrid around this time (I don't remember the fashions being so dated!) and have a lot of affection for the neighborhood and especially one of the bars where they shot on location.

Videos
AuronPlay - "El rebelde de la cuarentena (broma telefónica)" (no subs)

Podcasts
Notes in Spanish Advanced - 1 episode
Marvel Studios Noticias - 3 episodes

Catalan

Books
Joan Anton Català Amigó - 100 qüestions sobre l'univers: Del Big Bang a la cerca de la vida (in progress)

French

Books
Stéphane Beauverger - Le Déchronologue (in progress)
Stanislas Dehaene - Apprendre ! : Les talents du cerveau, le défi des machines (in progress)

If I were reading these two books in English, the one about pirates and time leaks would probably be a lighter read than the one about neuroscience and artificial intelligence. But in the original French, it's the reverse: The scientific vocabulary in Apprendre ! is mostly familiar or guessable, whereas the pirate vocabulary in Le Déchronologue is almost all new to me. Plus, the chapters in Le Déchronologue are all jumbled up chronologically. I'm sticking with it though, because, well, pirates encountering artifacts and adversaries from other times is just a lot of fun, even if the language is a little tough.

Films
Jacques Demy - La Baie des Anges (1963) (rewatch)

Jacques Demy directed the musicals Les Parapluies de Cherbourg and Les Demoiselles de Rochefort (and he was married to Agnès Varda, director of Cléo de 5 à 7). This is a smaller film than the musicals, about the relationship between two gamblers, at least one of which, played by Jeanne Moreau, is an addict. Some of the roulette spins and more importantly some of the character beats are a little implausible, but for whatever reason that doesn't bother me at all, and I really like the film. Great opening shot.

TV
Dix pour cent - 2 episodes (no subs)

Videos
Inner French - 5 videos (no subs)

Podcasts
Impolyglot - 3 episodes
Inner French - 2 episodes
MCU Talk - 1 episode

Italian

Books
Luca Novelli - Galileo e la prima guerra stellare (finished)
Luca Novelli - Archimede e le sue macchine da guerra
Luca Novelli - Darwin e la vera storia dei dinosauri
Luca Novelli - Wegener: L'uomo che muoveva i continenti
Luca Novelli - Edison: Come inventare di tutto e di più
Luca Novelli - Marie Curie e i segreti atomici svelati
Luca Novelli - Ippocrate: Medico in prima linea
Luca Novelli - Lavoisier e il mistero del Quinto Elemento
Luca Novelli - Newton e la formula dell'antigravità
Luca Novelli - Einstein e le macchine del tempo
Elena Ferrante - L'amica geniale (suspended)
Luca Novelli - Dizionario illustrato di scienza (in progress)

So far, my favorite book in the Lampi di genio series is the one about Archimedes. I don't know a ton about physics, but I really enjoyed reading about the Mediterranean in the Hellenistic period, and especially about what it was like to visit the Library of Alexandria. The books about Galileo and Darwin also stand out for expanding on the usual (very effective) format with imagined interviews in which those figures give their perspective on modern times.

And then I both read and listened to the first dozen or so chapters of Elena Ferrante's very popular L'amica geniale. It's a little above my level, but so was Dois irmãos, the novel in Portuguese that I finished early in the challenge and described as a series of "good, strenuous mental workouts." So I could keep going, but right now I'd rather stick to material I can more easily enjoy, and maybe I'll circle back to this one later on.

Comics
Tiziano Sclavi, et al. - Dylan Dog - 4 issues (1 reread)

Films
Michelangelo Antonioni - L'eclisse (1962)
Paolo Sorrentino - Le conseguenze dell'amore (2004)

L'eclisse, like the other three films I've seen by Antonioni (which I rambled about in last month's update), is excellent but takes its time.

Le conseguenze dell'amore has very stylish direction and a pretty good story, about a mysterious man living in a Swiss hotel. (Some might know the director, Paolo Sorrentino, from his recent series The Young Pope, which I haven't seen.)

Videos
Podcast Italiano - 6 videos (no subs)

Podcasts
Risciò - 2 episodes
Podcast Italiano - 1 episode
Da Costa a Costa - 1 episode

Audiobooks
Elena Ferrante - L'amica geniale (suspended)

Latin

Books
Daniel Pettersson & Amelie Rosengren - Pugio Bruti (finished, x2)

Podcasts
Satura Lanx: Litterae Latinae Simplices - 2 episodes

[jeff_lindqvist]

Wow. That was some update. Impressive and inspiring.

I'm working on more or less the same languages as you, but not as diligently.

[lichtrausch]

I thought you might find this interesting. It reminded me of our discussion about dividing the world into civilizational/linguistic spheres.