Tuesday, June 16, 2020

Harry Potter i kamen mudraca

A couple weeks ago I wrote about L-R, a method of increasing listening and reading proficiency in foreign languages. One part of L-R is to read a book you know well in the foreign language (L2) while listening to it also in the L2. 


I just finished the L2-L2 (Croatian) round of Harry Potter and the philosopher's stone. I gotta say, this was difficult. My Croatian is quite rusty and there were times when I was completely lost. Thankfully, I remember enough of the vocab and cognates with Russian that those times only lasted a few paragraphs. Also helps that I just read the book in English right before starting this.

Next step: reading it in English while listening in Croatian. I think I'll wait till this weekend to start that though!

The lady on the audio was interesting. She'd take breathing breaks in the middle of a paragraph/idea. Also, not one of the clips was a whole chapter. Every. Single. Chapter started in the middle or end of a cut. What that means for me is that in the middle of Harry getting saved by the Centaur in the forbidden forest, a new clip started, and she'd say "Harry Potter i kamen mudraca..." It also meant that I had to keep an eye on the cut I was on and the time when I finished a chapter so I could find it the next day, if my app didn't save it.

2 comments:

  1. This often happens to me with Croatian audiobooks as well! I often find that when they're books which have been read aloud for the blind, they were originally recorded onto cassette tapes and so each file runs for 45 minutes, regardless of whether that means it cuts out in the middle of a really exciting chapter or not!

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    1. That makes sense. Didn't think about the cassette tape. They were each about 45 minutes long!

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