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iguanamon Pentaglot Senior Member Virgin Islands Speaks: Ladino Joined 5282 days ago 2241 posts - 6731 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese, Haitian Creole, Creole (French)
| Message 57 of 60 21 May 2015 at 1:12pm | IP Logged |
One pays a price for the tactile "feel" and sensual pleasure of holding a book and turning its pages. In the old days, a couple of books and an extra pair of shoes took up a third of my bag. I used to want to be able to dehydrate them and shrink them to the size of peas and then rehydrate them to normal on arrival. Sadly, I never came up with a way to make dehydrated size 13 shoes, but I did manage to dehydrate my books with my kindle. That's why I like e-books, because I can take an entire library with me when I travel. Now if only the rules would be relaxed to let us buy whatever e-book in whatever language for a reasonable price. Probably not going to happen.
Well done, indeed, Tim! You went from not knowing the language at all a few weeks ago to be able to read a massive book. Considering that most books are around 300 pages, you've read the equivalent of two novels already. If you were doing the super challenge in Catalan you'd be at 10.5 "books" with just this one alone!
It's been a pleasure reading your log. Hope you both enjoy Sweden!
Edited by iguanamon on 21 May 2015 at 1:23pm
4 persons have voted this message useful
| Crush Tetraglot Senior Member ChinaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5885 days ago 1622 posts - 2299 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Mandarin, Esperanto Studies: Basque
| Message 58 of 60 26 May 2015 at 5:19am | IP Logged |
Meddysong wrote:
Però aviat anem viatjar a Itàlia i Suïssa també, així estic llegint molts llibres en idioma italià. |
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In Catalan, they generally avoid "anar a + inf." to talk about the future unless it specifically implies motion, eg. "Vaig a obrir la porta" - I am moving from here to there in order to open the door. Otherwise, the future tense is preferred: Però aviat viatjarem a Itàlia... estic llegint molts llibres en italià.
Your progress is really impressive, i don't think you've got anything to feel upset about! I've also enjoyed your log and hope you have a nice time in Sweden (and Italy and Switzerland). Catalan is a really fun language, maybe you can use it as an excuse to jump down to Catalunya :)
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| Meddysong Triglot Groupie United Kingdom timeofftakeoff.com Joined 3627 days ago 56 posts - 84 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, French Studies: Italian, Catalan Studies: Swedish
| Message 59 of 60 18 July 2015 at 11:57am | IP Logged |
Although this has often felt as though the title could be changed to Un llibre sense fi, the end is now in sight!
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| Meddysong Triglot Groupie United Kingdom timeofftakeoff.com Joined 3627 days ago 56 posts - 84 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, French Studies: Italian, Catalan Studies: Swedish
| Message 60 of 60 23 September 2017 at 5:48pm | IP Logged |
Oh, crumbs, how undisciplined of me! I vanished without confirming that I'd finished
the book. (Actually, now I think back to it, I think there was some sort of database
crash and the admin team had to revert to an earlier version. So maybe I'm not as
ignorant as I thought!)
I visited Catalonia for an Esperanto conference a few months after finishing the book.
I barely spoke a word of Catalan whilst I was there (certainly not with the Espies).
My knowledge was entirely passive and my interactions usually limited to apologising
for not being able to speak Catalan and asking whether I could use Spanish instead.
People seemed to appreciate at least knowing that Catalan is the language which they
use.
We did a holiday there in 2016 too. Lots of fun, although my Catalan hadn't magically
moved on from passive. I much prefer it to Spanish but it's too easy just to switch to
Spanish rather than struggle with Catalan, especially since I didn't actually ever
formally learn it. (I've read a few books in it since finishing the one which led to
this personal challenge.)
Oh, we've recently been to Portugal, having booked our flights a few months before.
Would anybody like to hazard a guess about how I prepared myself for it?
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