Sigh.
Someone remind me to never make any more promises or predictions regarding how active I plan to be on this forum, because it seems that I have developed a shameful and nigh-on unbreakable habit of only popping up here once a year or so.
So let's try this again from the top, once more with feeling, but with no promises this time. I won't take part in a TAC and vanish off the face of the forum by May (it seems there isn't much of a TAC this year in any case), I won't set dramatic impressive goals (because they seem to discourage, rather than encourage, me), and I can't guarantee timely replies to any friendly comments (sorry
I LOVE reading them though, so feel free to pop in here and say hi any time!).
Instead, I'll just post here whenever the spirit moves me, and who even KNOWS what those posts will be like. Updates on my language-learning progress? Maybe? Probably? Past experience would suggest so… but let's not place any bets.
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I’m finally progressing through Assimil Kroatisch ohne Mühe at a semi-steady pace. Currently on lesson 19. I like this book a lot. I’m simultaneously working through the 1963 edition of Teach Yourself Serbo-Croat by Javarek and Sudjić. (Anyone who knows me knows my penchant for charming, vintage, completely out-of-date language-learning materials.)
Assimil moves at what is for me a comfortable, trundling-along kind of pace. It’s cozy. It feels like home. And true to Assimil tradition, you don’t even really notice the grammar you’re learning.
The 1963 TY, on the other hand, is a somewhat more challenging task-master. And I love it. I love both of them, in their different ways. Assimil holds my hand and walks along with me, making sure I don’t get too tired or intimidated. TY just hits me with brutal reality in every new lesson, not even glancing back to see if I’m able to keep up. If I were doing TY only, I think I’d soon be too overwhelmed and confused to progress any further. But doing a TY lesson now and then while continuing to use Assimil as my “daily bread” is a match made in heaven.
Thanks mostly to TY, in fact, I FINALLY feel for the first time – after years of being completely mystified by Croatian grammar – that I am starting to really understand the declensions. For the last couple of lessons, I’ve gotten about 95% of the exercises right. Yippee!
Oh, and I’m reading “Harry Potter i kamen mudraca” on Bliu Bliu. Double yippee! I’m almost halfway through, according to Goodreads.
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I had some sort of a weird breakthrough with French and Esperanto two days ago. As I’ve mentioned before, those are the only two languages I’ve ever really had trouble developing a fondness for. Unfortunately, they also happen to be my two strongest languages after English and German.
So I was reading aloud a website to myself – the website was about Esperanto meet-ups in France, and so it was mostly in French but there were big chunks of Esperanto too – and as I switched back and forth behind the tonalities and rhythms of the two languages, speaking aloud to the empty room, I found myself actually enjoying them, both of them, more than ever before! My French prosody sounded better than it ever had and my speed was absolutely flowmendous, and even my read-aloud speed in Eo was less stumbly than usual.
The feeling didn’t last, of course. But now I’m excited that it might come back, and trying to come up with ways to make this possible. Maybe I’ll download audiobooks in the languages and listen to them on my commute. I’ve never gotten into audiobooks, but maybe I’ll give them one more shot.
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I gilded half the Esperanto tree on Duolingo in a fit of productivity the other day. I’ve only ever gotten through three-quarters of it, but now I’m going to try to finish it completely, because that’s really one of the better Duo courses, IMO. I also return to my (finished) French tree now and then, without any real rhyme or reason.
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WANDERLUST UPDATE:
I randomly got interested in Tagalog the other day. Well, I was looking at Filipino, actually; but the problem is that most English-language language-learning resources I’ve found announce themselves to be all about “Tagalog”, and I can’t figure if they really do mean “exclusively Tagalog as opposed to Filipino” or “we’re lazy but enthusiastic foreigners who don’t know the difference and think ‘Tagalog’ sounds more exciting so we’re going to use it to refer to Filipino”. To be fair, I didn’t know the difference myself until I looked it up…
Oh well, in any case the point is semi-moot now because I really shouldn’t be picking up a new language-toy to play with, and Bliu Bliu is down right now anyway (I read texts on Bliu Bliu whenever I have a free moment during the workday, so it’s one of my main language-learning tools nowadays).
Also, I read War and Peace this past winter (in the English translation by Constance Garnett), and so now of course I feel a mad desire to read it in the original one day. Russian is going to have to stay mostly on the back burner until my Croatian is more established, though. So I'm only noting that for posterity's sake, I suppose.
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Note to self: I was thinking I ought to take a leaf out of Iversen’s book and start practicing some of my languages by writing not only about them, but IN them, here. So maybe that’ll be coming soon, too…