Didn't mean to stay silent for so long, but the Polyglot Gathering was upon me before I knew it. But before going to Bratislava for the Gathering itself I had a brief
Czech course over in Brno. The course was organized on coaching principles, meaning that we were asked a lot of questions on what we're expecting from the course, what our learning styles are and what feedback we can give on every stage. There were both topical and grammar-based modules, as well as challenges out in the city and general sight-seeing. Overall we did end up learning quite a lot given the short amount of time, even those of us who aren't native speakers of Slavic languages. Still, I don't feel like learning to speak Czech any further, as it's way too inconsistent and variegated compared to Slovak. I think I'll stick to reading in Czech, which is apparently an essential skill for a Slovak speaker anyway
At the Gathering itself I tried to attend as many non-English talks as I could, although due to having a somewhat busier evening program (i.e. going out to pubs more often) I ended up often being tired and attending fewer talks overall. Nevertheless I did listen to talks in French (about Belgian French), Czech (about the Sorbian languages), Yiddish (about the Kiribati language; the speaker would immediately translate nearly all the words absent from German into English, so it was pretty easy to follow), Spanish (about a certain learning style applied to learning Spanish) and Portuguese (about the history of the Tupi language).
Oh, and I got second place in the
Hindi challenge. There were six participants in total and the tasks included writing the answers to five simple questions, discussing your answers with the jury and reading a few sentences off a tablet screen. One of the questions was "Why do you want to study Hindi?", and in order to keep it simple I wrote "Because I like Bollywood films". Naturally I got asked to elaborate, so I named all of the Bollywood films I had seen by that point; I didn't fully understand the followup questions, but I think I did eventually manage to establish my credibility by saying that Aamir Khan starred in Lagaan. I also struggled a little when asked about possible plans to visit India in the future; in the end I chose to say "I want to travel to India, but I can't at the moment" and I was a bit worried that the only way of sayin "can't" I could think of at the time was मुमकिन नहीं - literally "not possible", using the Arabic word
mumkin. I was worried I'd get called out for using an "Urdu" word instead of a "Hindi" one, but I actually got complimented for knowing advanced vocabulary. But the most embarrassing moment was at the very end when they asked me how long I had been learning Hindi for. I tried to say "three months" - only to realize I couldn't remember the word for "month". I tried to restate it by saying "twelve weeks", since I knew that the word for "week" is the same as in Persian - only to realize I couldn't remember the word for "twelve"
In the end I had to give up on answering that question in Hindi. Who knows, maybe that's what made the difference. Oh well, second place is also good I guess
After having come back to Russia on Monday I've spent the week trying to get back into my routine, which I guess I've sort of managed to do since I've finally completed a lesson each in both
Syriac and
Chechen. Next week I'll try to start preparing for the Polyglot Conference in Fukuoka by adding
Korean into the mix.