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Radioclare’s tac log 2015 (*jäŋe/*ledús)

 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log Post Reply
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Radioclare
Triglot
Senior Member
United Kingdom
timeofftakeoff.com
Joined 4378 days ago

689 posts - 1119 votes 
Speaks: English*, German, Esperanto
Studies: Croatian, Serbian, Macedonian

 
 Message 145 of 292
23 April 2015 at 12:11am | IP Logged 
This morning on the train I started reading "Serbian: An Essential Grammar". I've had a pdf of this on my Kindle literally for years but never read it
because I was theoretically learning "Croatian" rather than "Serbian". I discovered it this morning when I was stuck for something to read and thought
might be some good grammar revision for me. So far I've read a nice condensed version of Serbian history in the first chapter and moved onto the second
chapter which is all about consonants, a subject I find rather painful. But I'm hoping that once I get through this inevitable bit about pronunciation,
the rest of the book will be quite informative.

I bought Hladno Pivo's new album yesterday, so have been enjoying listening to that, and I also bought a compilation of the greatest hits of 'Die Toten
Hosen', a German band who I listened to in the early 2000's and whose existence I somehow managed to forget for over 10 years until I recently
rediscovered them via lastfm. My favourite song by Die Toten Hosen is called "Kein Alkohol is auch
keine Lösung"
. I didn't particularly like the song when I was young, but that may have been because I was teetotal back then. Now I think it is
hilarious, especially the following lyrics:

"Ganz ohne Drogen geht es nicht,
es wird auch immer so sein.
Und Jesus sah das genauso,
denn aus Wasser machte er Wein.

Von Vatikan bis Taliban
sieht man, dass es stimmt,
dass die ganzen Abstinenzler
noch immer die Schlimmsten sind!"

:D

That song isn't actually on the album I bought (I already had it as a single) but I was listening to it on the train home today to cheer myself up after
listening to another song (Nur zu Besuch) which literally make me cry on the train. It was a bit
awkward, I had to pretend I was having an extreme attack of hayfever. I have listened to this song loads of times over the past month or so as background
music when I've been at the computer doing something else and never once actually listened to the lyrics. So when I did actually listen to them for the
first time this evening, I was overwhelmed by what a sad song it is. Don't listen to it if you are as emotional as me ;)

I should really try to participate in the Music Challenge, but I'm not organised enough and also I'm sulking because my ipod won't scrobble anymore.

I am slowly working through the book suggestions from the British Croatian society and setting up a new Amazon wishlist which I am adding as many of them
as I can find to in case I want to buy them on day. So far there is a mixture of books which have been out of print for years and are horribly expensive,
books I can't find at all, and a few relatively cheap e-books and paperbacks. I have been searching for the author names rather than the book names (tip
- Amazon can't cope with diacritics, it only seemed to find authors if I typed the final letter of their names as c rather than ć) and my hope was that
by doing this I might find some books in Croatian as well as in English. I was perhaps a bit over-optimistic about this and I've actually only found two
e-books so far, both by Ivana Brlić Mažuranić:

Čudnovate zgode šegrta
Hlapića
and
Priče iz davnine.

Both of them seem to be fairy tales, which isn't normally my thing, so I haven't bought them yet, though for 99p I may change my mind.

I'm still working my way through the list but one positive is that this exercise has inspired me to Google for Croatian/Serbian e-books again and I'm
excited to see that in the course of the past year we seem to have gone from virtually no e-books in either language existing at all, to a few promising-
looking websites springing up. One website which looks like it is developing a good collection of books is
eKnjižara. I haven't got as far as buying a book on it yet because they are in epub format and I need to
re-download Calibre and remind myself how to make epub files readable for my Kindle, but I have bookmarked it to come back to when I have more time :)
4 persons have voted this message useful



rdearman
Senior Member
United Kingdom
rdearman.orgRegistered users can see my Skype Name
Joined 5031 days ago

881 posts - 1812 votes 
Speaks: English*
Studies: Italian, French, Mandarin

 
 Message 146 of 292
23 April 2015 at 11:12am | IP Logged 
You don't have to download calibre (although it is well worth it) because there are online converters. Ebook Converter. Most of these just run calibre on the server. LOL. Just convert epub to mobi.




2 persons have voted this message useful



Radioclare
Triglot
Senior Member
United Kingdom
timeofftakeoff.com
Joined 4378 days ago

689 posts - 1119 votes 
Speaks: English*, German, Esperanto
Studies: Croatian, Serbian, Macedonian

 
 Message 147 of 292
23 April 2015 at 1:02pm | IP Logged 
rdearman wrote:
You don't have to download calibre (although it is well worth it) because there are online converters. Ebook Converter. Most of these just run calibre on the server. LOL. Just convert epub to mobi.


Oh cool, I didn't know that :) I did have Calibre installed at one point but I've had to reinstall Windows on my current laptop a couple of times so don't have it currently. Even better if I don't need to install it again :)
1 person has voted this message useful



Expugnator
Hexaglot
Senior Member
Brazil
Joined 4961 days ago

3335 posts - 4349 votes 
Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento
Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian

 
 Message 148 of 292
24 April 2015 at 12:00am | IP Logged 
"Schön sein und ein bisschen obszön sein", I listened to that over 13 years ago...Nice to know they got updated.
1 person has voted this message useful



Serpent
Octoglot
Senior Member
Russian Federation
serpent-849.livejour
Joined 6392 days ago

9753 posts - 15779 votes 
4 sounds
Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese
Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish

 
 Message 149 of 292
24 April 2015 at 12:26am | IP Logged 
Radioclare wrote:
I should really try to participate in the Music Challenge, but I'm not organised enough and also I'm sulking because my ipod won't scrobble anymore.

You don't need to be organized :D Just listen to one song per day or one album per week :)
What kind of problems are you having with last.fm?

Quote:
I was perhaps a bit over-optimistic about this and I've actually only found two
e-books so far, both by Ivana Brlić Mažuranić:

Čudnovate zgode šegrta
Hlapića
and
Priče iz davnine.

Both of them seem to be fairy tales, which isn't normally my thing, so I haven't bought them yet, though for 99p I may change my mind.

You don't even have to pay 99p, get these for free here :)
I've read one of the stories and it was sexist but okay otherwise (maybe even good). Before I had an e-reader, I actually ordered a print of like 800+ pages from that site. That was supposed to be for the May 6WC 2013, but I still have read only that one story XD

Edited by Serpent on 24 April 2015 at 12:27am

2 persons have voted this message useful



Radioclare
Triglot
Senior Member
United Kingdom
timeofftakeoff.com
Joined 4378 days ago

689 posts - 1119 votes 
Speaks: English*, German, Esperanto
Studies: Croatian, Serbian, Macedonian

 
 Message 150 of 292
24 April 2015 at 2:34pm | IP Logged 
Serpent wrote:
You don't need to be organized :D Just listen to one song per day or one album per week :) What kind of problems are you having with last.fm?


I keep telling myself I will do the music challenge when I have a quiet week, but so far I'm still waiting for a quiet week!

I have two separate problems with lastfm. Firstly I can no longer scrobble my ipod because there was an update to iTunes which means the existing scrobbler doesn't work any more. I don't understand the technical details but there is a big thread about it at lastfm because it's affected loads of people. They released an updated scrobbler the other day but that only seems to make it possible to scrobble music that you're playing in iTunes itself and not from the actual ipod.

So all I've been scrobbling on lastfm recently is music that I've been listening to on Youtube. Then this week the plugin I have for Chrome stopped scrobbling videos properly. It scrobbles the first music video I watch, but then when Youtube automatically moves on to the next video it doesn't register that and thinks I'm still on the first one. The only way to get it to scrobble is to refresh the page at the start of each song, which is too much hassle. It had been working fine for weeks so no idea why it's broken now :(

Quote:
You don't even have to pay 99p, get these for free here :)
I've read one of the stories and it was sexist but okay otherwise (maybe even good). Before I had an e-reader, I actually ordered a print of like 800+ pages from that site. That was supposed to be for the May 6WC 2013, but I still have read only that one story XD


Wow, that looks like a really great website! Thank you for sharing :) I will definitely investigate some stories from there as it turns out the e-book store I discovered the other day is no use. I finally investigated it in more detail last night and found it had a really good range of books, but that when you come to pay for one you have to enter a (Croatian) mobile phone number. It turns out that the website belongs to a phone network to call VIP and so only their customers are able to purchase books from it via their mobile phones. Seems a strange system but I suppose they hope it will encourage people to join that phone network.

This morning I started reading a Serbian translation of John Gresham's book 'Racketeer'. Thanks to Nikolić for pointing me in the direction of it :)
1 person has voted this message useful



Serpent
Octoglot
Senior Member
Russian Federation
serpent-849.livejour
Joined 6392 days ago

9753 posts - 15779 votes 
4 sounds
Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese
Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish

 
 Message 151 of 292
24 April 2015 at 4:44pm | IP Logged 
Annoying about lastfm. In 2007-2009 or so I used a third party client because the official app didn't support iPod yet, haha. I found this, seems to be the same app but much newer obviously :D Back then I had to create a dynamic playlist on my ipod with the recently played songs. Seems like nowadays it should be more simple, haha.

The youtube add-on was updated recently. The one for Firefox just told me to update a couple of weeks ago (although it kept working normally). So if it fails there's also the option of watching on Firefox :)
1 person has voted this message useful



Radioclare
Triglot
Senior Member
United Kingdom
timeofftakeoff.com
Joined 4378 days ago

689 posts - 1119 votes 
Speaks: English*, German, Esperanto
Studies: Croatian, Serbian, Macedonian

 
 Message 152 of 292
28 April 2015 at 9:56pm | IP Logged 
Thank you Serpent, I hadn't thought about trying to listen to music via Firefox but
will give that a try :)

I still don't feel like I'm doing very well at anything at the moment. This weekend
was entirely taken up by an Esperanto trustee meeting and so I didn't have a lot of
free time.

I've read about 60 pages of 'Reketaš' so far and I'm enjoying it.

I've been exploring other options for buying e-books in Serbian or Croatian and come
to the conclusion that it still isn't really possible on a large scale in the way that
it is for western European languages. I'm sure that will change over the course of the
next few years and I just have to be patient, but I'm rubbish at being patient. I've
bought a collection of 90 books as pdfs instead and am going to experiment to see
whether I can get them into any format which is a bit easy to read on my Kindle.


1 person has voted this message useful



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