Radioclare's 2019 log (Croatian/Russian)

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Re: Radioclare's 2019 log (Croatian/Russian)

Postby IronMike » Tue Jan 15, 2019 2:01 pm

Chung wrote:...
"Teach Yourself Slovene" - Unit 9 (out of 13)

"Teach Yourself Slovene" deviates big time from the other books with which I started, although I have to say that "Teach Yourself Slovene" is exceptionally bad. If it had been designed like the other volumes for Slavonic languages in the series, it would (and should) have been longer - maybe even having 18 or 20 units like the volumes for Croatian and Serbian respectively.

TY Slovene is probably the worst language book I'd ever seen. I'd totally forgotten about that crap book till your post!
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Re: Radioclare's 2019 log (Croatian/Russian)

Postby StringerBell » Tue Jan 15, 2019 2:48 pm

Chung wrote:I didn't find aspect too difficult in Polish, but I attribute that to having a teacher who explained well what it describes and how Poles use it to get around the fact that there are "only" 3 tenses. She also reminded us that we native speakers of English distinguish aspects but don't necessarily do it like Poles with aspectual pairs. She added that she found our use in English of many "tenses" some of which fuse considerations for tense and aspect to be needlessly complicated to her Polish mind, not to mention how we use auxiliary verbs and gerunds.


It sounds like your teacher was really good. In the classes I took, the teachers were instructed to only speak in Polish and resort to English only when absolutely necessary, though it was really discouraged. We learned cases and basic tenses (present/future/past) pretty early on, but never got the detailed explanations like you did, probably because our level of Polish was fairly low so it would have been too difficult to explain in Polish. This strict adherence to only speaking Polish was my only criticism of the classes. Anyway, I eventually figured out for myself what your teacher explained, but it took me a really long time to come up with that realization, and I wish I'd just had someone tell me early on that verb aspects are essentially a way to deal with the fact there are far fewer verb tenses.

Chung wrote:If anything, I found Polish verbs of motion to be more of a pain to figure out initially since I had to get over the fact that I couldn't just reuse "go" or "come" as in English


I have a difficult time deciding which is worse... :lol: For me it's verb aspects, but only because I haven't figured out how to use them yet, while I do have (a somewhat tenuous) grip on verbs of motion and can use them more or less correctly.
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Re: Radioclare's 2019 log (Croatian/Russian)

Postby Radioclare » Tue Jan 15, 2019 11:14 pm

StringerBell wrote:It's like waiting until the learner gets a false sense of security that they kind of have a grip on the language and then BAM! big sucker-punch. I think it would be better to mention the existence of verb aspects early on but not make a big deal of it, and then periodically return to it as a concept until gradually you get used to the idea, even if you can't use them proficiently yourself for a really long time.


Yes, I 100% agree with this! If you don't know it's coming, there's a risk you feel kinda betrayed when you eventually find out that every verb has a secret twin no one told you about :lol:

Does Croatian also have 2,000 ways to say go/come/went? :lol:


I think Croatian must be a strong contender for simplest Slavic language to learn! (Although if I remember correctly, I think Chung says Slovak is the easiest).

Chung wrote:For comparison here's what I got:

"Colloquial Czech" - Unit 8 (out of 18)
"Colloquial Slovak" - Unit 8 (out of 16)
"Cześć, jak się masz?" (1st ed. - Polish textbook) - Unit 6 (out of 13)
"The New Penguin Russian Course" - Unit 12 (out of 30)
"Teach Yourself Croatian" - Unit 6 (out of 18)
"Teach Yourself Serbian" - Unit 9 (out of 20)
"Teach Yourself Slovene" - Unit 9 (out of 13)
"Teach Yourself Ukrainian" - Unit 7 (out of 18)


Thank you for looking this up! I was thinking about "Colloquial Croatian", which mentions aspect briefly in Unit 2 (out of 20) and then makes an attempt at marking aspect in the vocab lists from Unit 3 onwards. Otherwise it's actually a pretty dire textbook, but I thought this was one positive it had going for it :D

Daniel N. wrote:Now I have once again that desire to delete everything and start from scratch :lol:


Definitely don't do that :lol:

Daniel N. wrote:It's just a tall mountain to climb. My idea with Easy Croatian was: give the low hanging fruits first, but don't leave out any essential things such as stress shifts. People need to be told that the stress sometimes moves to negation, that it moves in various cases with some nouns, that they will encounter various pronunciations even on the public TV, etc etc.


It is really successful at this :) I've not found any other resource which explains the difference between standard vs western stress at all. I downloaded the pdf again at the weekend; it's one of my new year resolutions to reread!

IronMike wrote:
Chung wrote:...
"Teach Yourself Slovene" - Unit 9 (out of 13)

"Teach Yourself Slovene" deviates big time from the other books with which I started, although I have to say that "Teach Yourself Slovene" is exceptionally bad. If it had been designed like the other volumes for Slavonic languages in the series, it would (and should) have been longer - maybe even having 18 or 20 units like the volumes for Croatian and Serbian respectively.

TY Slovene is probably the worst language book I'd ever seen. I'd totally forgotten about that crap book till your post!


So... if TY Slovene is rubbish, do any of you have a recommendation for a better textbook for Slovene? I probably want to make a serious attempt at learning Slovene within the next couple of years. Is Colloquial Slovene a better bet?

StringerBell wrote:I have a difficult time deciding which is worse... :lol: For me it's verb aspects, but only because I haven't figured out how to use them yet, while I do have (a somewhat tenuous) grip on verbs of motion and can use them more or less correctly.


I am really scared about verbs of motion in Russian because I haven't got that far yet :( I feel like I have a slight head start on aspect having already tried to learn it once for Croatian. For me the main problem with aspect is that I can read the textbook explanation and understand it, then do the textbook exercises and get them right... but whenever I try to write something myself it seems less clear cut, I confuse myself, second guess myself, end up choosing the wrong verb... Sometimes I resort to googling a version of what I'm trying to say with both verbs and seeing which has the most hits! I have a theory that my attempts at writing in Croatian are more successful after a glass of wine, because I stress about it less and just write what 'feels' right. But my accuracy with case endings gets worse after wine, so it's swings and roundabouts :lol:

****
15 January
I didn't get as much done as I hoped this evening because I got distracted following Brexit-related news.

Russian
I managed 23 minutes of Memrise while on trains to and from a client meeting today. Given I spent the best part of two hours travelling, this doesn't feel terribly impressive. But it was one of those frustrating journeys where you have 10 minutes on one train, then 10 minutes waiting for the next one, then 10 minutes on that, so you can't concentrate on anything for very long.

This evening I learned the dative plural endings for nouns, as well as rules for when the dative should be used, from the Penguin book. I was sad to read that the dative is the least used case, given that it seems to be a mercifully straight forward one.

Total time = 41 minutes. Streak = 15 days

Croatian
Yesterday I experimented with watching the Nova TV version of 'Dnevnik'. Previously I was watching the HRT one but I started to get a bit confused because the person in HRT whose job it is to upload the programme to the TV on-demand service seems to cut it at different places every day. Some days they cut it just as the sports new starts, which is fine with me because I am not yet so obsessed with Croatian that I've managed to develop an interest in handball. But other days they upload the entire programme, complete with sports news and weather forecast and everything. One day the clip they uploaded started partway through a quiz programme and I had to try and fast forward through this and a surprising amount of adverts before I eventually found the news :lol: I couldn't tell a huge difference between the Nova TV version and the HRT version to be honest. I don't know whether in Croatia one is considered to be more popular/better quality than the other? Or whether there's another channel I should try as well?
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Re: Radioclare's 2019 log (Croatian/Russian)

Postby Daniel N. » Wed Jan 16, 2019 10:02 am

Radioclare wrote:I downloaded the pdf again at the weekend; it's one of my new year resolutions to reread!

Please, don't - there will be an updated version in a week or so, with at least 10 pages more.

Radioclare wrote:I couldn't tell a huge difference between the Nova TV version and the HRT version to be honest. I don't know whether in Croatia one is considered to be more popular/better quality than the other? Or whether there's another channel I should try as well?

HRT Dnevnik tended to be more "official". It started at 19:30 for like ages. But then the NOVA Dnevnik started to get more views, so today HRT Dnevnik starts at 19:00 and looks a lot like the NOVA Dnevnik. Likely, RTL Direkt is the most fun to watch because of Zoran Šprajc, who has a lot of funny moments.



I don't watch any of them. Note that Šprajc consistently calls his show direkt (which immediately violates the standard stress laws).
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Re: Radioclare's 2019 log (Croatian/Russian)

Postby Ogrim » Wed Jan 16, 2019 2:47 pm

Radioclare wrote:15 January
I didn't get as much done as I hoped this evening because I got distracted following Brexit-related news.


You're not alone, I "hacked" BBC yesterday to follow the debate and the voting, and I'm not even British! :?

Regarding Russian verbs of motion, I still make mistakes when I speak, and I am often unsure about which form to use. The main problem for me was suddenly to find "a threesome", not the usual imperfective/perfective couple. Now I think I understand the concept, and reading a text I can understand why a certain form is used and not another one, but translating that into practice is still difficult.

It seems you are making good progress on Russian though, keep it up!
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Re: Radioclare's 2019 log (Croatian/Russian)

Postby Daniel N. » Wed Jan 16, 2019 9:48 pm

Chung wrote:She also reminded us that we native speakers of English distinguish aspects but don't necessarily do it like Poles with aspectual pairs.

A problem is, often you don't. Like you don't always distinguish female from male friends, not to mention all-male from all-female from mixed groups. Sure, you can if you really need to. It's known in linguistics that languages differ greatly in forcing speakers to express some things.
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Re: Radioclare's 2019 log (Croatian/Russian)

Postby Radioclare » Wed Jan 16, 2019 11:00 pm

16 January
Tired! Definitely one of those days when I wouldn't have done any Russian if it wasn't for the challenge.

Russian
I managed an entire 30 minutes of Memrise today, although it wasn't without a few technical problems. I was travelling to a client this morning, so had slightly longer on the train than normal.

This evening I made more progress with the dative, learning adjective endings etc, and doing the exercises in the book. There really aren't very many exercises, so I might go back to Schaum for more practice at the weekend.

Total time = 61 minutes. Streak = 16 days

Croatian
Zoran Šprajc looks hilarious :) I wasted some time this evening watching clips of him on Youtube. Unfortunately, it turns out you can't watch any RTL programmes from outside of Croatia. So this evening I have watched the Nova TV Dnevnik instead, which is quite easy to watch with my OYO subscription. It is hard to decide whether the Croatian or British parliament was the most chaotic one today :lol:
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Re: Radioclare's 2019 log (Croatian/Russian)

Postby Daniel N. » Thu Jan 17, 2019 11:12 am

Radioclare wrote:Yes, I 100% agree with this! If you don't know it's coming, there's a risk you feel kinda betrayed when you eventually find out that every verb has a secret twin no one told you about :lol:

Not every, and some have a strange inchoative half-twin, while others have 2 or three brothers (e.g. ones with 'travel' semantics) and it's actually impossible to explain it all at once.

After some thinking, I've decided to briefly introduce perfective verbs in 24 Past Tense in something what will likely turn out to be the shortest introduction to verb aspect in history.
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Re: Radioclare's 2019 log (Croatian/Russian)

Postby Radioclare » Thu Jan 17, 2019 10:20 pm

17 January
Can't decide whether I'm getting a cold or having a weird allergic reaction to something, but I've spent most of the day coughing which has been rather tedious. Luckily this has coincided with a day of working from home.

Russian
Working from home is actually bad for my language learning, because I lose out on my commuting time. I had to force myself to do some Memrise at my computer this evening instead, but I find it very boring on the computer. I think SRS is much better suited to the train, when you haven't got a whole lot of options for something more enjoyable to do :lol:

I didn't feel like the Penguin book tonight, so I've done two lessons (7 and 8) on the RT site instead. The first was about the past tense and the second was about the nominative case of adjectives, so fairly straight forward content but I still find about one question per lesson (often the multiple choice comprehension questions) where I cannot for the life of me get to the combination of answers which they want. I do like the fact that they often try to insert some humour into the dialogues though; it makes the lessons more fun :)

My mom text me to say she'd spent today making her own table of case endings. I should probably do this at the weekend too, as I feel like there are some cases that aren't really sticking in my head at the moment (especially plural endings).

I've also been doing some research for potentially planning a trip to Russia and now I'm not sure what is harder; the genitive plural or understanding the process for a visa application :lol:

Total time = 47 minutes. Streak = 17 days

Croatian
Today I learned what inchoative means :D
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Re: Radioclare's 2019 log (Croatian/Russian)

Postby IronMike » Thu Jan 17, 2019 11:55 pm

Radioclare wrote:I've also been doing some research for potentially planning a trip to Russia and now I'm not sure what is harder; the genitive plural or understanding the process for a visa application :lol:

Russian order of difficulty, easiest to hardest (any subject I missed automatically goes to the top):

gender of nouns
past tense of verbs
future tense of imperfective verbs
all noun case endings except genitive plural
adjectival case endings
aspect
past passive participles
determining genitive plural noun ending
Russian visa application process
motion verbs


You're welcome! ;)
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