Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

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Iversen
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Iversen » Mon Aug 24, 2020 6:00 pm

I went to the language café, and the lady who had promised to return for a bit of Greek actually did turn up. I was able to keep a conversation running in almost pure Greek for a quarter of an hour, but then disaster struck. A girl at another table had been looking in relative silence at her computer for some time, but suddenly she started to discuss something in English - and to boot with a insistant and penetrant voice that totally sabotaged my delicate thread of Greek thinking. And from then on I had problems recalling even simple words, and for all practical purposes I got stuck until the disturbance stopped ... and even then it took me several minuts to pull myself together and start speaking coherently again. But after the interruption it seemed that my conversation partner had lost patience (even though she tried to hide it). We continued speaking for fifteen minutes more, albeit partly in Danish, but then she left, and after that there were nobody else to speak to.

My impression is that the regular customers from before corona never have returned, and that the few people who have participated since then don't take it seriously enough to come several weeks in a row - and many of them didn't even know beforehand that there was such a thing as a language café. And under such adverse circumstances the project can't survive. I'm fairly sure that there are interested people out there, but when they see four empty tables they give up.

I will of course continue to activate my Greek at home now that I'm so close to the goal. If I can keep thinking and speaking in Greek in Denmark for a whole quarter under favorable conditions, then I would also be able to make my next trip to Greece monolingual. It is of course likely that some Greek service persons aren't willing to speak to foreigners in Greek, but in such situations I don't budge - Greek or no conversation. The problem right now is of course the restrictions on travel. Technically it is possible to get down there, but if the pandemy suddenly flares up you risk being quarantined at your own expense at some boring hotel, and even if that doesn't happen you will have to wear masks for the whole time from you enter the Danish airport until you leave the Greek one (and inversely on your way home), and maybe it is also compulsory also in some places down there - I haven't checked the exact rules.

Anyway, I have no plans to leave home in the near future so I'll have to train my oral Greek without saying a word. And I have several texts to work on: yesterday I studied one about the Glagolitic and Cyrillic alphabets, and this evening I'll tackle Βικιπαίδεια's article about the Greek alphabet.

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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Iversen » Wed Aug 26, 2020 1:02 pm

SCO: The day ah wis gravely flummixed readin the post frae Cenwall that telled us aw that the maist pairt o the Scots Wikipedia wis written by an American and nae by native Scotsmen, and that it wis aw daen wrangly - as puirly translated Sassenach. Ah immediately proceeded tae examine a wheen o airticles in Scots, and 'twas true that the short maistlins were written by ane 'AmaryllisGardener'. Whaiver writes in Wikipedia shoudnae be a forriner wi leemited skeels in the leid, but here this gairdener nae anely wrote te mony airticles, but forby that even wis made its administrator. Hou wis that possible? Did naebody fra Scotland notice the plyte o the site? Well, michtnae not. Last time ah veesitit Scotland ah ettled tae find some beuks in true Scots, but 'twas maistly unpossible tae locate whutsimiver in ony Scots deealect - anely tedisome Standard Sassenach. And gin the Scots thaimsels daena ask fair beuks in Scots, mebbe they forby daena daena use the Scots Wikipedia - in parteecular gif 'tis badly written. Mebbe me ain Scots is as cuify as that o the Gairdener, but ah didnae make masel administrator o a Wikipedia in a forrin leid and proceed tae write thoosands o airticles in it. Ane gairdener did...

EN: Apart from that I have continued to study Greek. Normally I flicker from language to language like a hungry butterfly, but I have set myself the task af being able to think reasonably coherently in Greek by the end of the week. Time will then tell how long it lasts before I get the next chance to try it out in practice - if the corona continues unabated it might whittle away again - at least as a vehicle for my inner monologue. Keeping it alive as a passive language shouldn't be a problem, since I have reached a level where things don't just disappear without a trace.

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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Iversen » Fri Aug 28, 2020 1:03 am

Did 500 Greek words in wordlists today (or rather yesterday, since it's since it's 3:03 and bedtime now) - mostly from things I have studied recently, but the last 100 words or so directly from a dictionary. And the funny thing is that my brain seems to remember better after several hours of constant memorizing - as if it finally accepted that this was what I intended it to do. Reminiscent of training a dog ... repetitions and perseverance matters.

Listened to some 11 hours of instrumental music by RIIsager and Rimsky-Korsakov - no languages there. Watched television without sound almost the whole day, but without sound ... ahem ..and the subtitles to my Anglophone channels are in Danish, so only the Swedish and German channels had subtitles in the relevant languages. I could have added Spanish and Italian where I also can get relevant subtitles. but didn't use this opportunity today. Too busy with Greek...

EDIT Saturday: did my repetitions
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Iversen » Mon Aug 31, 2020 9:14 am

Today is Monday so I'll be at the Language café at the library, but I don't expect anything to happen - the attendance the last couple of times has been absolutely minimal. As for my 'mostly Greek'-week I spent yesterday on a trip to a neighbour town, and I did a valiant attempt to think in Greek during the bustrip in both directions - around 1½ hour. OK, it wasn't 100% Greeek because I also thought in Danish - with some swearwords - about those dastard face masks which we now have to wear in public transport including stops and stations and bus terminals - but luckily not in shops or (god forbid) in the streets. OK, I can see the purpose when people stand too close to each other (and then I would also be happy to wear one), but when I stand totally alone in the rain at an empty tram stop I fail to see the medical purpose. Actually the main purpose seems to be to scare the population to return to keeping distance, doing hand hygiene and other things. And in that sense it has worked - our reinfection rate is below 1 again, hurray. And this leads me to an excursion to Catalunya.

CAT: Inspirat de un dels darrers anuncis en el log de Jeff, vaig escoltar avui una hora de notícies de TV3, i no és estrany que s’esmenti la situació covid (juntament amb l’adéu de Messi a algun equip de futbol local català). Se ha indicat la pressió de la infecció en una forma una mica opaca amb un índex on una línia horitzontal podria indicar una pressió d'infecció de 1 (on la infecció almenys no explota exponencialment). La regió més afectada va ser Lleida (més de 2) i es va esmentar que se estava ahì a l’alçada de la situació similar a la situaciò que provocava l’empresonament general - i això malgrat les restriccions que encara són més estrictes que les que tenim a Dinamarca. I després hi ha que les autoritats haurien de plantejar-se: per què? Per què la xifra mai no va caure per sota del 0,6, fins i tot mentre tots els espanyols estaven tancats a casa?

Sembla que aquest és el nivell causat per la infecció causat enmig de les famílies, a porta tancada. Era el mateix nivell que els danesos varen assolir tot i que podíem caminar lliurement sense mascaretas aqui. I el confinament era, doncs, innecessari - però comprensible en la situació de pànic de l'època. Les explosions que hem tingut després - inclosa en la meva pròpia ciutat - són degudes al fet que uns pocs mega-dispersors van assistir a festes ilégals i funerals amb centenars d’assistents, i també a la situació de treballadors estrangers que viuen molt junts en petits apartaments per estalviar diners - i no pas a les persones normals que es movien librement pels carrers o en transport, respectant una distància i usant desinfectants de mans o sabó sovint. Per tant, la conclusió immediata que jo puc treure és que cal controlar estrictament les festes amb dansa i cançó i alcohol (i, per tant, tenir tancats els discoteques i clubs nocturns) i també evitar multituds grans on els participants no compleixen les normes de distància. La resta és ineficient. A més, TV3 va anunciar que ara s’han iniciat les proves de vacunes covides a tres hospitals d’Espanya, un a Santander i dos a Madrid. Però ningú encara sap quant dura l’efecte d’una injecció; malauradament, la immunitat sembla que no és per a tota la vida.

EN: And now back to English, because I want to raise a question: how do you stick to thinking in a weak language when your brain desperately want to push you back to lazy thinking in your own language? In the bus I didn't have other people speaking around me, and I started thought sequences thinking about words from my wordlists. And each time I slipped back into Danish (or English) I asked my brain how that could be formulated in Greek - even when I didn't know all the necessary words. But yesterday evening I also did another thing: while reading the Danish subtitles on my TV I tried to translate them on the fly. And of course I couldn't deliver a perfect Greek translation, but just the fact that I could attach myself to a streaming external source with a limited amount of information meant that I didn't have to invent new topics myself all the time. And this could also serve as a way of keeping track of your level in a new level: if you can translate a stream of subtitles in your own language on the fly then your speed - if not precision - of thinking in the foreign language is at the level where it should be.

And right now I am listening to my second hour of news in Catalan. Somehow this became 'Catalan day' ...

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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby jeff_lindqvist » Mon Aug 31, 2020 11:19 am

Iversen wrote:And now back to English, because I want to raise a question: how do you stick to thinking in a weak language when your brain desperately want to push you back to lazy thinking in your own language?
[...]
But yesterday evening I also did another thing: while reading the Danish subtitles on my TV I tried to translate them on the fly. And of course I couldn't deliver a perfect Greek translation, but just the fact that I could attach myself to a streaming external source with a limited amount of information meant that I didn't have to invent new topics myself all the time. And this could also serve as a way of keeping track of your level in a new level: if you can translate a stream of subtitles in your own language on the fly then your speed - if not precision - of thinking in the foreign language is at the level where it should be.


Interesting! I must try this.

It reminds me of what Axon mentioned in the thread about Simultaneous interpretation:
Axon wrote:One very important skill that people work on a lot is sight translation, where you read a text in a foreign language and speak a translation aloud as close to real time as you can. As this only requires one person to do, it's the exercise you see most students doing on campus by themselves. It develops reading speed in your foreign language, which is extremely important for functioning professionally. General knowledge and curiosity about the world is also vital, because you often just never know what somebody might reference in a speech or discussion.


By the way, thanks for writing so much in Catalan in the beginning of your post.
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Iversen
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Iversen » Wed Sep 02, 2020 9:18 am

EN: Contrary to expectation, the language café this past Monday actually turned out to be quite rewarding, and the main reason was that there was another polyglot there, an Italian lady who beside excellent Danish (and Italian, of course) also spoke French, Spanish and Portuguese, So I got to speak all those languages. However when people who pass by actually can hear some foreign languages (in an area full off invitations to 'language café' and flags) they become curious, so we were soon joined by a young lad from France and another native Frenchman with his small daughter, and then we of course spoke French. Then a girl who wanted to speak Spanish arrived, and she listened patiently to our francophone babble for some time until the French natives left - and then we of course spoke in Spanish.

I even got a chance to say some sentences in Catalan when our discussion touched upon the covid situation in Spain, but none of others spoke that language (btw, thanks to Jeff for referring to my recent rant in it). On the other hand the Italian lady could speak the local dialect of Emilia Romagna fluently, and even though I didn't find it quite as incomprehensible as she had hoped, it is totally beyond me to speak any of the Italian dialects.

Actually some of the participants Monday actually mentioned the possibility that they might return - but I'll see it before I believe it. Anyway, these informal meetings - if we can get them running again with a sufficient number of participants - are about the last possibility I personally have for using any of my foreign languages outside the internet (and travels, but these are not as tempting now as they were a year ago). I am not comfortable with internet discussions, partly because my computer is quite old and maybe not the best vehicle for such things, partly because it seems to be a problem to find suitable venues and/or conversation partners. At least that's what I have learnt from this forum.

Which brings me to the subject of polyglot gatherings and conferences. I didn't even consider participating in this year's virtual gathering (not even if it had been the real deal), but on the other hand I hadn't totally ruled out participation in the conference in Cholula. Therefore I have kept an eye on its homepage and I have listened to Richard Simcott on Youtube, but it seems clear that actually going to Cholula in person isn't an option at this point in time. The problem is that the homepage is still not clear about how a virtual version would function. I have not submitted any lectures (and maybe I have stopped doing lectures for good because of the dismissive action of the Bratislava gang last spring), so for me the point of participating would be the informal multilingual corridor meetings. And I can't see how that would function in the virtual version of the event.

POR: Um dos tópicos que discutí na segunda-feira com a senhora italiana e a senhora quem falava espanhol foi, na verdade, as diferenças entre o português europeu/africano e o português brasileiro - embora tenhamos discutido isto em espanhol, com exemplos no português. Ambas as damas preferiam incondicionalmente o sonido da variante brasileira (ou melhor, variantes, pois há dialetos internos). Eu gosto de ambos e provavelmente misturo-os de uma forma completamente inaceitável agora que estou em casa, mas quando sugeri à turma de Bratislava uma palestra no português sobre o papel da tradução, tinha acabado de voltar de Recife e Natal e evidentemente falava o dialeto que pertence a esta região do Brazil. Desde então, porém, não tive a oportunidade de usar a língua até segunda-feira nesta semana, e entretanto ouvi tanto (o mais) português português do que brasileiro na internet, então agora voltei a ser um produto misto de influencias contraditórias.

FR: D'ailleurs je suis en train de faire les repetitions - quoique très en retard - des listes de mots francophones que j'ai fait il y a quelques semaines. L'histoire c'est la suivante: j'avait fait des listes de mots roumains à l'aide d'un vieux dictionaire Roumain-Français. ... et alors je fus totalement époustouflé du nombre de mots français que je ne connaissais pas ou dont j'avais oublié la signification. Pauvre de moi, je pensais, je voyais déjà monsieur Alzheimer s'approcher à l'horizon. Heureusement, un petit comptage a montré que mon vocabulaire français grosso modo restait sur un niveau satisfaisant pour une langue que je ne parle guère dans mon pays. Néanmoins j'avais alors déjà initié une campagne énergique pour fortifier mes connaissances francophones, en suite de laquelle j'ai produit des listes de mots avec environs mille mots qui tous commencaient avec la lettre P. Mais au lieu de continuer aux autres lettres j'ai terminé le projet et tourné mon attention vers la langue grecque, où un tel effort herculéen entraînerait probablement un effet immédiat plus important - étant une langue sur le point de devenir potentiellement active.

Le répétitions ci-dessus ne sont pas tout à fait en ordre selon mes critères normaux. Normalement j'écris les traductions danois et ajoute sucessivement leur correspondances dans une langue cible, mais donné le nombre de mots ici - et le fait que mon français est relativement fort - j'ai seulement noté les mots français ici.

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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Iversen » Fri Sep 04, 2020 2:28 pm

Some language learners have systems to keep track of what they are doing. The nearest thing I have to a system is an old notestand beside my comfy chair where I put the texts I study and the wordlists etc. that are connected to those texts. The situation at the start of this week was that I first had been through a French vocabulary project, then a Greek activation project - and the time obviously had to be taken from other things. But when I peel layer after layer off my notestand I can go back in time to the point where I left any given language - at least when it comes to texts I have been studying recently. And that's exactly what I have been doing the last couple of days.

OK, first Modern Greek, where I was in the middle of a text about the Greek alphabet. It didn't teach me much new stuff, except that there actually are people who have questioned whether the oldest Greek alphabet (apart from Linear B) could be called a direct descendant of the Phoenician writing system - mainly because this was an 'abjad', i.e. a vowelless system. But the inclusion of wowel signs seems to be a purely Greek idea, and since the 8. century BC they have continued using their splendid new true alphabet.

Next in line: Bulgarian, where I was studying texts about archeology, and now I could then carry on with a long passage about dating systems (like C4, dendrochronology etc). I use a bilingual format with a machine translation, and it is quite funny to see how Google treat a number of common abbreviations - like "т. нар." (= "така наречен", i.e. 'so called'), which in my printed translation systematically is rendered as "t. granatæble" ('t. pomegranate') because "нар" means pomegranate in Bulgarian.

And from there onwards to Serbian, where I found two different text collections on my notestand, but alas - I had been through everything in both of them. I nevertheless reread a text about the Avars, a tribe that was a major force on the Balkan peninsula from around the 6. century to somewhere around 800, where they were defeated by the Franks. They apparently spoke a Caucasian language of some kind, but didn't write in it. The irony was that I found this text relatively difficult, mosty because it contained words that weren't to be found in any of my Serbian dictionaries and/or weren't translated convincingly by Google. I try to stick to Serbian texts written in the Cyrillic, and one reason is that it helps me to keep Serbian apart from Croatian, but the language situation in the former Yougoslavia is so complicated that even this trick isn't always enough.

Because I was worried about my troubles with the Avarian text I produced a new micro-anthology with - among other things - some excerpts from the homepage of the BeoZoo (the zoo of Beograd), which is housed in a corner of the immense Kalemegdan fortress. And once I was back into pure Belgradian Serbian I could again read it without much ado. Hurray.

Then a bit of Indonesian, where I still keep the long text about the history of the Earth around because there are so few other really interesting texts in the language on the internet. But I know that it is an edited machine translation because of a number of untranslated words (like in the passage "The Devonian nenek moyang ikan yang hidup saat ini milik dua kelompok nonarmoured utama"), but also because of certain suspicious mistranslations. But in spite of this I learn a lot of words which I wouldn't otherwise have seen anywhere.

And quite frankly, now ye Anglophones have had your part of the fun. So...

DU: Gezien hoeveel mensen in Europa Nederlands of Vlaams spreken, is het een schande dat de taal niet vaker te horen en te is. Maar het is ook belachelijk dat het bijzonder moeilijk is om teksten te vinden in de variant van het Nederlands die werd gesproken toen het land door zijn gouden eeuw ging. In plaats daarvan las ik op Wikipedia een reeks teksten over schilders in modern Nederlands, te beginnen met Vermeer - en nee, niet Rembrandt, maar een reeks minder bekende schilders. Ik heb enige teksten voor later gebruik uitgedrukt en studeerde toeerst het artikel over Pieter de Hooch, die blijkbaar niet veel verdiende aan zijn kunst. Hij woonde eerst in Delft, waar hij in dienst was bij een rijke kledingwinkel, daarna in Amsterdam, waar je op zijn schilderijen tijdelijk de huizen van iets meer welvarende klanten kunt zien. Maar dan gaat het bergafwaarts. Er bestaat een enkele gedateerde schilderij uit 1684, maar verder is het laatste levensteken van hem dat zijn zoon Pieter in 1679 in het gekkenhuis in Amsterdam werd ingeschreven. Niemand weet wat er de volgende vijf jaar met hem is gebeurd.

AF: Ik produceerde toen eerst een nieuwe zameling teksten op het Afrikaans, maar ontdekte toen enkele ongebruikte artikelen in een vreemde tekst op mijn beroemde nodenstand. De nieuwe set bevat een test over paleontologie door een Rosalind Franklin, maar dan ook haar afscheid van het internetuniversum. Ik heb de eerste gekopieerd / bestudeerd, maar haar zwanenzang nog niet. Maar in die voortsetting van hierdie tekste het ek 'n baie lang afrikaanse aard-verhaal vanuit Wikiwand gevind, waar alle periodes van die Kambrium tot die Kryt genoem word. Suid-Afrika is 'n goeie land vir paleontologie, want die het 'n groot gebied genoem die Karoo met neerslae van Perm en Trias die is baie vol van oue bene - insluitend bene van soogdiere-voorouers, voordat hierdie groep op die agtergrond van die dinosourusse gedruk werd.

In die tweede versameling tekste - die een wat ek op my musiekstand gevind het - bestudeerde ek 'n teks oor die verskil tussen ekstroverte en introverte mense. Kwotasie:

Ekstroverte is minder sensitief vir dopamien, en het meer nodig om gelukkig to voel. (...) hoe meer dopamien word vrygestel en hoe gelukkiger voel hulle. Introverte, aan die ander kant, is sensitief vir dopamien en (...) Wanneer hulle lees of konsentreer skei hul breine egter asetielcholien af, wat hulle rustig en ontspanne laat voel.

EN: And in continuation of this I have to say that being somewhat introvert during these sad corona days isn't a bad thing. Personally I don't miss all the hugging and kissing and noisy drunk partying that the extroverts crave. But we all have to suffer the consequences of the stupid behaviour of at least some of the extroverts. Like the pedagogy students in Odense who started their study time with a gathering that included hugging exercises. HUGGING??? In this dire situation? The result was that at least 36 of the participants went home with a fresh covid infection.

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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Iversen » Sun Sep 06, 2020 6:13 pm

Last night I used the Russian translation of the penultimate Potter-book, Г.П. и Принц-Полукровка ('The Halfblood Prince'), as goodnight reading, and it functioned admirably - I fell asleep after the first chapter. Apart from that I have continued the archeological excavation of my notestand, but actually Russian was one of the languages that weren't represented there any more. Then I looked back in my archives and found a couple of text sets which were so old that I still used the interspersed format where each sentence in Russian was followed by its translation in English or Danish (not one line below another as in interlinear editions). I have later realized that this wasn't necessary - it is much faster to use a layout with two columns, where you can use column width and font size to make the two versions stand side by side.

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RU: Первый и самый длинный текст написал Вадимом Чернобровым, и он описывает его мысли по пути через сибирские болота к Тунгуске, где когда-то произошел огромный взрыв, но кратера так и не было обнаружено ... и так что-то, что может быть? Объект, как бы было, очевидно взорвался в воздухе (и я не верю, что это бы был корабль пришелец). Однако до того места в той части текста, которую мне удалось изучить, автор не дошел - возможно, позже. Кстати, есть здесь еще одна загадка: очевидец так описал происшествие: " Большая яранда на неба тогда летала, однака". Перебодник Гугла предполагает, что это летающая веранда, но это маловероятно, и этого слова нет в моем русско-датском словаре. Так что если кто-нибудь знает, что-либо имел в виду сибирейский соплеменник, то мне будет приятно услышать...

EN: Another language that was missing from my notestand was Polish, and lo and behold, here I found another interspersed old text, but of a rather special kind: the interspersed translation is in Russian, and I have added a column to the right with a Danish translation. I am fairly sure that I produced the interspersed part by using a clever trick: if you took a Google translation of a whole page and copied it 'as text' into an older version of MS Word then the original version popped up as interspersed sentences. So maybe my 'Polish' text originally was written in Russian - but then it should be possible to see telltale signs of this procedure in the Polish text. Anyway, the first article is about supermassive black holes, and I'm going to study it tomorrow later this evening.

I did also find text collections in Icelandic, Slovak and Albanian in the bottom layer of my notestand, but I have studied all the items in those so they went straight into the archives, and I'll find replacements later. I didn't find a collection in Romanian, but here I nevertheless made a new one about the castles in the town Sinaia which I visited 15 years ago - at a time where I hadn't yet ressuscitated my undead Romanian. That only happened one year later, when I visited Romania and Moldova ... and happened to find the forum HTLAL during my preparations.

RO: Castelul Peleș în Sinaia a fost construit de primul rege al României la timpurile recente, Carol I, care a fost convocat din Germania după ce România a fost eliberat de turcii (se pare ca nu s-ar putea găsi un descendent direct al lui Vlad Tepeș). Este muzeu din 1993 și se-l poate vizita și în aceste timpuri de corona, dar cu precauții stricte: va fi luate temperaturele vizităților la intrare și nu trebuie să fie peste 37,3 grade, și trebuie să purtați o mască pe parcursul întregii vizite. Mă bucur că am călătorit atât de mult înainte de pandemia, deoarece acum nu este atât de atrăgător să călătorește.

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Iversen
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Language Log: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=1027
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Iversen » Mon Sep 07, 2020 9:07 pm

SP: Estoy en este momento echuchando un video de Youtube sobre Paco de Lucía y el flamenco. Al comienzo pensé que era un video musical puro e duro puro, peró resultó ser más bien un boceto biográfico de 52 minutos con un montón de charla en español con motivo de la muerte del maestro.

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EN: Yesterday I wrote that I had found an old text collection in Polish about astronomical topics, including supermassive black holes, and I did manage to study it in the evening. But then it occurred that I also once made one where the first article told about the asteroide Cruithne, which in the quiz QI erroneously was proclamed as the second Moon of planet Earth. But it isn't - it just takes almost the same time to circle the Earth, and because there still is a small difference it looks from Terra as if it ran around us like a dog around the legs of its master. In reality it circles the Sun, not Earth. OK, I succeeded in locating this somewhat newer printout in my archive, and I even found out that I have mentioned it in Januar 2019 on page 106, where I wrote that I hadn't time to study the text right now because I just had bought a new camera. And somehow I forgot about it until yesterday, where I spent most of the evening studying astronomy in Polish - that doesn't happen very often.

POL: Nie chcę tutaj pisać długiej dysertacji o astronomii - mój polski jest trochę zardzewiały. Ale można przynajmniej przypomnieć, że nazwa Cruithne odnosi się do legendarnego irlandzkiego plemienia, prawdopodobnie pokrewnego szkockim Pictów. Już to wszystko napisałem - po prostu nie pamiętam kiedy.

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EN: OK, beam me back to Terra, Scotty. I also have some less celestial things to tell about. Like for instance that I have been to the weekly Language Café at the main library today, and at last it seems that the attendence has started to rise.

GER: Heute haben wir zuerst Deutsch gesprochen, weil es dort eine junge Dame aus Lübeck und eine australischen Seefahrerin gab, die auch etwas Deutsch konnte. Später kamen ein paar Teilnehmer zu uns, die kein Deutsch sprachen, und dann haben wir abwechselnd Englisch und Dänisch gesprochen. Das Dänisch der junge Lübeckerin var übrigens ganz gut - ehe sie hier kam, hat sie offenbar ein Kursus in Lübeck genommen - ich wußte gar nicht, daß es so was dort gab. Sie konnte auch Französisch sprechen, aber dazu kam es heute nicht.

EN: The lady from the seas had learnt her German during a short landlocked pause - normally she would be spending all her time at sea on a tall ship. Actually she was raised the northwestern part of Australia, which is almost deserted. I teased her with the claim that it is so quiet there that it is the only spot on Earth where you still find 3-4 billion year old living stromatolites in the ocean - because it is so peaceful there.

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IT: E quando abbiamo finito ed io stava in piedi vicino alla fermata dell'autobus a casa, ho incontrato a caso la dama italiana dal lunedì precedente - lei che parlava anche francese e portoghese (e inglese e danese). Ma oggi abbiamo parlato soprattutto in italiano.

EN: So today was actually a quite propicious day, languagewise.
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Dagane
Orange Belt
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Dagane » Mon Sep 07, 2020 9:33 pm

Iversen wrote: un video musical puro puro

"Puro y duro".

As always, a deliciously interesting account of your daily life :).
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