Brun Ugle wrote:I can’t believe you’ve got me watching Croatian stand-up now. It’s bad enough that my “music in other languages” playlist on YouTube has pretty much turned into a “music in Croatian” playlist thanks to you.
It's a subtle campaign to get you learning Croatian before French
***
12 JanuaryA much-needed day at home without any obligations
RussianI managed to stop my computer blocking the RT site so I planned to start working through lessons this morning. I had done some of them already last year, so I was hoping there would be an easy way to 're-set' my account and lose all my progress so that I could start again at the beginning. It's quite easy to do this on Memrise and Duolingo, for example. Unfortunately there didn't seem to be a similar option on this website and I couldn't even find a way to delete my account, so I tried to create a new account with a different email address instead. That felt like a good idea but it didn't work out because the email to confirm my registration never came through. After a bit of frustration, I eventually figured out that I could go into each individual lesson and click to re-set every single question I'd previously entered an answer for, one by one. That was rather a tedious task and for once I was glad I hadn't made too much progress last year
With that done, I should have been all ready to make a start... but I couldn't get the audio to work
I'm not sure, but I think it had something to do with flash. It wouldn't work in Chrome so I tried it in Firefox and it didn't work there either, but then I got a notification asking me to enable flash, and after that it worked in Firefox. By the time I'd sorted all that out I didn't have much time left for learning
I worked through the first three lessons in the end.
Later in the afternoon I finished the final bit of chapter 11 in the Penguin book and started chapter 12, which is about the future tense. This feels like it's going to be harder than the past tense. I learned that the Russian word for a fortress is 'крепость' and I don't feel like this is a strong word. The word for fortress in Croatian is 'tvrđava' and that feels like an appropriately awe-inspiring noun for something as serious as a fortress, perhaps especially because it's so hard to pronounce. Whereas 'крепость' reminds me of the Croatian word 'krepati' which means to die, but I think is used in a derogatory/disrespectful sort of way. I now have an image of a Russian fortress just keeling over and dying, so I guess this will help me remember the word at least
Total time = 136 minutes. Streak = 12 daysCroatianI read another 40 pages or so of 'Dvadeset godina samostalne Hrvatske'. I haven't felt like I've had the energy to read it in the evenings this week by the time I've finished studying Russian. It would be cool if I could finish it tomorrow, but there are another 100 pages to go, so not sure whether that's realistic. I learned a new word: čimbenik (factor).
I logged into Goodreads to update my page count and at the side of the page, under the "Recommendations" heading, it says "Because you are currently reading 'Dvadeset godina samostalne Hrvatske'" and then recommends me a book called "Control Unleashed: Creating a Focused and Confident Dog"
Slightly struggling to see what the link is