Radioclare's 2019 log (Croatian/Russian)

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

Postby Brun Ugle » Sun Jan 13, 2019 7:24 am

Radioclare wrote:
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 :lol:

I figured that, but I didn't want to say anything just in case. I didn't want to give you any ideas.

I can't really say who's winning. Croatian seems like fun and it looks a lot easier to pronounce, but French would give me access to all the Assimil courses plus it would really annoy Rick if I could speak French better than he does.
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Re: Radioclare's 2019 log (Croatian/Russian)

Postby Radioclare » Sun Jan 13, 2019 10:30 pm

Brun Ugle wrote:plus it would really annoy Rick if I could speak French better than he does.


You should probably go with French then :lol:

reineke wrote:Bahahahaha! Anyway, you can say krepati for animals and machines. Uginuti is formal use for animals. Krepaću' may be used if you're very hot/stressed/dying from laughter. Also used for someone living at minimum subsistence level. Crknuti may be used interchangeably with krepati in many cases. Krepati/crknuti/otegnuti are all offensive when used for human beings. Otegnuti is somewhere in between offensive and insensitive. Crkavica means low salary. Can't say krepavica although it sounds hilarious.


Thank you, reineke - lots of new words for me to learn there :)

Robierre wrote:Bio sam za praznike u Hrvatskoj, pa sam vidio na televiziji seriju "Na granici". Radioclaire, svaka čast što to gledaš, meni su te nove hrvatske serije užas! Naslovna pjesma mi je zatrovala glavu u roku od par dana (moja mama to gleda). :mrgreen: Ali vjerujem da je korisno za učenje jezika.


Ni ja ne bih gledala takvo nešto na engleskom :D Ali mislim da su te serije kao 'Sumrak' ili 'Pedeset nijansi'; znaš dok čitaš da to nije neka velika literatura, ali ipak uživaš u tome više nego što si očekivao. I jesu jako korisne za učenje. Priča nije tako komplicirana da je ne možeš pratiti, iako ne razumiješ sve riječi, a dovoljno je uzbudljiva da ti nije dosadno. Glumci govore jasno - nema jakih naglasaka - i isti likovi govore manje ili više iste stvari svakom epizodom :D

***

13 January
Another lazy day where I had plenty of time to devote to Russian. Having survived one working week of doing this challenge, I think I've convinced myself that fitting in 30 minutes of Russian ought to be achievable, however busy a working day is. Mainly because however busy I am, I am almost always going to have an hour a day of commuting which I can use for some Memrise/Duolingo/Clozemaster. There will definitely be days when that's all I can manage. But definitely the most valuable thing this past week has been studying some of the Penguin textbook everyday. I mean some days I've only spent about ten minutes on it, but it is so much better doing a little bit of a chapter each day rather than saving it all for the weekend, then procrastinating it all day Saturday and most of Sunday, before finally trying to cram an entire chapter into Sunday evening. This inevitably ends in failure and wine. So I'm really hoping I can keep this up beyond the first few weeks of January!

As inspiration, I spent some time today re-reading parts of my 2014 Croatian log on HTLAL. This was quite motivating because it reminded me that there was a time when I found learning Croatian really frustrating and difficult too. A time when I was struggling through textbooks, envying the 90% of the forum who seemed to be learning French and/or Spanish with infinite resources, and only able to catch every other word of Thomas the Tank on a good day :lol: There were definitely days when I felt like learning Croatian was all a terrible mistake and I should give up, but ultimately trying to update my log every day in 2014 gave me the motivation I needed to continue and by the end of the year I had made some real progress. I am hoping 2019 can be the year I manage to replicate that with Russian! But it really was useful to remind myself of all that struggling, because sometimes nowadays it's too easy to convince myself that learning Croatian was a walk in the park and Russian is extra specially difficult :lol: I have also sometimes convinced myself that my life in general was easier in 2014, because I had less responsibility at work. But having read back through that log, I can see that actually in some ways life was significantly more difficult back then. I spent most of the first few months of 2014 working away from home, not always able to fit my BCS textbook in my luggage, and working in hotel rooms long into the night. I seem to have set my alarm early some days so that I could get up and do Croatian before work :shock: I can't see myself replicating that for Russian, but at least next time I get discouraged I can tell myself that life is actually easier now and however busy I may be, at least I won't be spending February in a Travelodge in Telford :lol:

***

Russian
Things I did today included:
* Getting up-to-date on my Memrise watering and planting some new words from chapter 11 of Penguin Russian
* Completing lessons 4 - 6 on the RT site. I nearly gave up on lesson 4 because I was having problems with some of the questions where you have to drag and drop words - technical problems, I mean; however many times I dragged words, they just wouldn't drop - but everything magically seemed to resolve itself in lessons 5 and 6.
* I finished all the stuff on the future tense in Penguin Russian, and covered the section on the verb хотеть. The next bit of chapter 12 goes onto the dative, but I decided to save that for another day.
* Chapter 12 is the first chapter in that book which mentions aspect, so I then had the joy of going back through all the verbs I'd learned and updating my Memrise course to label them as perfective/imperfective. Most of them were obviously imperfective, but there were a few perfective ones lurking. I do wish textbooks would just label this from the beginning so that you could learn it straight off. You wouldn't get a German textbook which spent 11 chapters teaching you a tonne of nouns and then in chapter 12 said "Surprise! German nouns have something called gender! Now go back and relearn all the words you thought you already knew with the correct gender!" I mean, it's not like I didn't know aspect was a thing in Russian, so theoretically I could have looked the aspects up and learned them myself from the start, but I didn't think :oops:
* I started putting some of the chapter 12 vocabulary into Memrise but I lost the will to live partway through so I'll have to finish it another day.
* I didn't feel like the textbook had enough practice on the future tense, so I consulted the "Verbs" chapter in Schaum's Russian Grammar. To be honest, this didn't have many exercises on the future tense either, so after a while I gave up.
* Inspired by my Croatian log, I watched a couple of episodes of Thomas the Tank in Russian. My Russian isn't even good enough to understand the theme tune yet :lol:

Total time = 204 minutes. Streak = 13 days

Croatian
I caught up on a couple of days of 'Dnevnik'. And I did get to end of 'Dvadeset godina samostalne Hrvatske'. It was so good - definitely one of the best books I've read on Croatian history. Maybe the best. I was really impressed in particular by how objective it was about subjects which are difficult to be objective about. I learned a lot from the latter half of the book, which dealt with 1999 - 2010. Most of the books I've read on the history of the region stop at 1995, some perhaps go as far as 1999, but that's it. So it was really interesting to read about more recent political developments. Definitely a book I would recommend, and it gives me another 391 pages for the Super Challenge :)
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Re: Radioclare's 2019 log (Croatian/Russian)

Postby rdearman » Mon Jan 14, 2019 10:31 am

Brun Ugle wrote:
Radioclare wrote:
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 :lol:

I figured that, but I didn't want to say anything just in case. I didn't want to give you any ideas.

I can't really say who's winning. Croatian seems like fun and it looks a lot easier to pronounce, but French would give me access to all the Assimil courses plus it would really annoy Rick if I could speak French better than he does.

Why would that annoy me? Everybody speaks better French than I do!

EDIT: I have zero music on my playlist in Croatian BTW. :)
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Re: Radioclare's 2019 log (Croatian/Russian)

Postby Daniel N. » Mon Jan 14, 2019 10:38 am

Radioclare wrote:Most of them were obviously imperfective, but there were a few perfective ones lurking. I do wish textbooks would just label this from the beginning so that you could learn it straight off. You wouldn't get a German textbook which spent 11 chapters teaching you a tonne of nouns and then in chapter 12 said "Surprise! German nouns have something called gender! Now go back and relearn all the words you thought you already knew with the correct gender!"

This is controversial. Ten years ago, I thought aspect is an essential thing and it should be introduced from the start, from the moment you introduce the past tense, which is usually quite soon. However, basically everyone who teaches Croatian to foreigners told me that aspect should be delayed as long as possible, to focus on declensions, gender and vocab first. So the first 47 chapters :lol: of Easy Croatian don't mention aspect at all (well, they do in the examples, when such verb is encountered, they just mention it's perfective, and that perfectivity, i.e. the aspect, will be explained later), but all examples use imperfective verbs only.

Also, the first 9 chapters don't mention gender, but BCMS gender is trivial in comparison to German, it's easy to learn "all nouns in -a are feminine, except for tata Dad (which is easy to remember) and a couple of others".
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Re: Radioclare's 2019 log (Croatian/Russian)

Postby Brun Ugle » Mon Jan 14, 2019 10:51 am

rdearman wrote:
Brun Ugle wrote:
Radioclare wrote:
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 :lol:

I figured that, but I didn't want to say anything just in case. I didn't want to give you any ideas.

I can't really say who's winning. Croatian seems like fun and it looks a lot easier to pronounce, but French would give me access to all the Assimil courses plus it would really annoy Rick if I could speak French better than he does.

Why would that annoy me? Everybody speaks better French than I do!

Well, you just took away my main motivation for learning French, so I guess I should go with Croatian then.
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Re: Radioclare's 2019 log (Croatian/Russian)

Postby Radioclare » Mon Jan 14, 2019 10:19 pm

Daniel N. wrote:This is controversial. Ten years ago, I thought aspect is an essential thing and it should be introduced from the start, from the moment you introduce the past tense, which is usually quite soon. However, basically everyone who teaches Croatian to foreigners told me that aspect should be delayed as long as possible, to focus on declensions, gender and vocab first. So the first 47 chapters :lol: of Easy Croatian don't mention aspect at all (well, they do in the examples, when such verb is encountered, they just mention it's perfective, and that perfectivity, i.e. the aspect, will be explained later), but all examples use imperfective verbs only.


I definitely didn't intend to criticise Easy Croatian :) And I understand the point that teachers don't want to scare new learners off, especially if they are English native speakers, by mentioning a 'difficult' bit of grammar right at the start of their acquaintance with Croatian. But on the other hand, it is such a big concept that I feel like it should be introduced early so that people have time to get used to it. I had one textbook which introduced aspect briefly in chapter 2 and I found that useful.

***
14 January
I forgot to say yesterday that I've figured out a solution for my social media. I've got it blocked all week, including Saturdays, but then completely unblocked on Sunday evenings. I figure checking everything once a week is reasonable and anything productive which is going to be achieved on a weekend should be achieved by Sunday evening. I've also got Twitter unblocked for a brief period every evening so that I can tweet anything I've read/watched for the Super Challenge.

Russian
I had quite a boring evening adding the remaining words from chapter 12 of Penguin Russian to Memrise. I found 93 new words to learn in this chapter, which feels like quite a lot :shock: It took a while to download/upload all the audio. Well, precisely, all of this took 48 minutes. I'm not 100% sure whether it should count towards "learning" given that a lot of the time it's more of an admin task. I've included it in my total time below, but I do have more than 30 minutes on genuine learning:

*I spent 15 minutes on the train this morning learning new vocabulary on Memrise. All my technical problems seem to have resolved themselves now :)

* I spent 19 minutes this evening learning the dative case endings for singular nouns and doing the exercises in the textbook. Not too taxing for a Monday night, as I've already learned these once already :)

Total time = 82 minutes. Streak = 14 days
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Re: Radioclare's 2019 log (Croatian/Russian)

Postby StringerBell » Tue Jan 15, 2019 12:38 am

Radioclare wrote:I definitely didn't intend to criticise Easy Croatian :) And I understand the point that teachers don't want to scare new learners off, especially if they are English native speakers, by mentioning a 'difficult' bit of grammar right at the start of their acquaintance with Croatian. But on the other hand, it is such a big concept that I feel like it should be introduced early so that people have time to get used to it. I had one textbook which introduced aspect briefly in chapter 2 and I found that useful.


I have the same issue with verb aspects in Polish. I understand why teachers/textbooks don't want to introduce it early, because I think it really would freak most people out and make them give up immediately. But it's such a fundamental part of the language that to try to pretend like it doesn't exist is counterproductive.

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. But I've never tried to design a textbook, so maybe there are practical reasons for not doing it this way.

In the RealPolish stuff I was using, he writes/talks normally, so the verb aspects were there pretty much from the beginning (unlike the classes/coursebooks I had many years ago that never even mentioned verb aspects. Still not sure how they pulled that off). Somehow being exposed to them made me feel ok about them, because I knew they existed, and I knew that at some point I'd have to figure out how/when to use them myself (still not there yet) but I could put that on the back burner and focus on the stuff that I was ready to deal with...like verbs of motion. Does Croatian also have 2,000 ways to say go/come/went? :lol:
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Re: Radioclare's 2019 log (Croatian/Russian)

Postby reineke » Tue Jan 15, 2019 3:44 am

Idem u/na I'm going to/on...
school, Australia, hospital, garden, shopping, vacation, cinema...on foot, by car, plane or boat today or every day and no one needs to know if I intend to come back. It's great!
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Re: Radioclare's 2019 log (Croatian/Russian)

Postby Chung » Tue Jan 15, 2019 4:50 am

Daniel N. wrote:
Radioclare wrote:Most of them were obviously imperfective, but there were a few perfective ones lurking. I do wish textbooks would just label this from the beginning so that you could learn it straight off. You wouldn't get a German textbook which spent 11 chapters teaching you a tonne of nouns and then in chapter 12 said "Surprise! German nouns have something called gender! Now go back and relearn all the words you thought you already knew with the correct gender!"


This is controversial. Ten years ago, I thought aspect is an essential thing and it should be introduced from the start, from the moment you introduce the past tense, which is usually quite soon. However, basically everyone who teaches Croatian to foreigners told me that aspect should be delayed as long as possible, to focus on declensions, gender and vocab first. So the first 47 chapters :lol: of Easy Croatian don't mention aspect at all (well, they do in the examples, when such verb is encountered, they just mention it's perfective, and that perfectivity, i.e. the aspect, will be explained later), but all examples use imperfective verbs only.

Also, the first 9 chapters don't mention gender, but BCMS gender is trivial in comparison to German, it's easy to learn "all nouns in -a are feminine, except for tata Dad (which is easy to remember) and a couple of others".


StringerBell wrote:
Radioclare wrote:I definitely didn't intend to criticise Easy Croatian :) And I understand the point that teachers don't want to scare new learners off, especially if they are English native speakers, by mentioning a 'difficult' bit of grammar right at the start of their acquaintance with Croatian. But on the other hand, it is such a big concept that I feel like it should be introduced early so that people have time to get used to it. I had one textbook which introduced aspect briefly in chapter 2 and I found that useful.


I have the same issue with verb aspects in Polish. I understand why teachers/textbooks don't want to introduce it early, because I think it really would freak most people out and make them give up immediately. But it's such a fundamental part of the language that to try to pretend like it doesn't exist is counterproductive.


Since Polish is the first Slavonic language that I studied, y'all got me thinking about the first time our Polish teacher explained aspect to us in 1st year Polish. If I remember correctly it was in the 2nd term, and so after we had plowed through nominative, instrumental, genitive, accusative, possessive adjectives/pronouns, verbs of motion, and present and past tenses (these last two involved conjugating what we later realized were imperfective verbs). In a fit of nerdishness, you made me open boxes to dig out each of the books that I had used to begin my studies of various Slavonic languages (I moved onto other books/resources after completing the ones in the list)

The general trend, as far as I can make it, is that aspect is introduced (or explained) formally by the author when you're 35%-45% through an introductory textbook's contents. The topic is then revisited in subsequent chapters, with the frequency depending on the author's judgement and grammatical point that he/she wants to teach (e.g. by the time one learns the imperative or conditional in a Slavonic language, one will really need to mind considerations for aspect and mood even if the teacher doesn't actually use those terms). 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)

"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.

I also see that whenever a perfective verb is introduced in a dialogue/narrative before the chapter which explicitly introduces verb aspect, the perfective is just translated piecemeal in the accompanying wordlist with no explanation. I guess that it's understandable lest the author then needing to explain the whole business of aspect right then and there before when he/she feels it is appropriate.

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. I think that her approach on teaching aspect was a good one, although like Clare, I don't think that it would hurt for any teacher or author of a beginners' textbook to touch on aspect to a beginner in a Slavonic language as he/she wades into the present tense (which almost always draws on examples from imperfective verbs). There'd be no need for a detailed explanation then since that could be done after the student has got his/her feet wet in other points. I'm thinking instead of a comment while introducing examples of the present tense that conjugating these (imperfective) verbs in this way (i.e. present tense) signals that the action is ongoing/timeless or happening at the moment of speaking, and says nothing about the completeness or result of the action - essentially describing the imperfective aspect in present tense without using the term.

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 (or French, German or Hungarian), but first had to choose the appropriate verb to signal how the motion occurs (on foot? by surface transport? by plane? by boat? motion towards the speaker/point of reference? motion away from the speaker/point of reference? motion through/across sb/sg?), and only then could I start to think about the aspect, and finally the conjugation. I was relieved to learn that verbs of motion in BCMS/SC, Slovak and Slovenian don't really make all of these kinds of distinctions as in Polish (and Czech, and Russian, and Ukrainian).
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Re: Radioclare's 2019 log (Croatian/Russian)

Postby Daniel N. » Tue Jan 15, 2019 7:37 am

Now I have once again that desire to delete everything and start from scratch :lol: My idea was to introduce:
- cases
- counting
- tenses
- then aspect
- and then various clauses and a bit advanced things
- and then passive forms

But it took almost 40 chapters just to introduce cases :lol: I even received some suggestions like "why don't you give us just case endings and explain briefly how each case is used". Well, that would be essentially a Wikipedia page...

In retrospective, I should have introduced aspect a bit earlier. However, I introduce such an "elementary" thing as counting to 10 around chapter #45 :lol:

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. I have left tones completely out, since they are not taught by schools at all (I mean, schools teaching Croatian to foreigners). But in the upcoming Easy Serbian, Bosnian, Montenegrin, tones will be described in detail, and that actually scares me a bit, because there's like a ton of stuff to explain, and I don't have tones in my dialect at all, so I need to check each sentence against a dictionary or grammar or some linguistic works...

(edit) it's interesting that the BCS Grammar with Sociolinguistic Commentary by R. Alexander introduces aspect on the page 31 (out of 378 pages of the grammar).
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