Good evening friends,
I finished my third week at my new job, and seems to be a decent fit. It is an orthopedic hospital, so no emergency rooms and OB/GYN. I work in a small lab, with probably less than 20 people counting all per diems. Currently I am training in blood bank, and since (most of) the surgeries are planned, it isn’t hectic as it would be in most hospitals. I think I would have loved working at a such a hospital when I first got my degree and was starry-eyed, but after working in a clinical lab during the pandemic and getting burnt out, I am slightly cynical--”the older and wiser girl”. I am familiar with American hospital dynamics, and again I’m finding again that the medical technologists are the “black sheep” of the hospital staff. However, the stress if lower, and employees will greet each other in the halls (at first I thought “am I still in Boston?”), and all of the lab members are more or less harmonious and close. It definitely has a small-hospital feel.
And I can say that I’ve been making language learning progress—just not the progress I expected.
DanishIt appears that Danish is staying for the meantime?
Before I went on the Scanditrip in August, I anxiety-purchased a (student) membership to SpeakDanish.dk, and then did not do a whole lot with it. I got back on it in December, and despite my purchasing it in July, the membership lasts until December 2023. Fint!
More regularly I have been putting sentences into Anki. I found a book + audio of Routledge’s Colloquial Danish, and that’s what I’ve been using for sentences. It seems like a good fit: dialogues aren’t too fast but also not sluggish, and the content is engaging and challenging. I would not recommend this for a brand-new beginner, but for someone with Norwegian experience, this fits the bill.
Recently I tried to find local Scandinavians in Boston. Tandem has not been fruitful—quite possibly because Scandinavians don’t feel the need for language exchanges. So I looked on Meetup: no luck, and it appears that it costs $$ a month to get a new group going. No thanks. Then I searched for nordmenn, dansk via my blank Facebook account: no hits for nordmenn, but there is a Danish Boston group. Okay, so I joined. Last week they had a once-a-month get together, and this is what I expected to experience, mostly based on past Spanish and general language exchange:
--I would feel a bit lost as I would try to find the group, and ackwardly tell them how I found them. The group would be surprised, but politely welcome me anyway. We would all get drinks, and I would sit silently in the group, mostly ignored as the members would chit-chat in Danish. I would leave after a couple of hours, and feel like I got some listening practice, maybe?
--What I experienced: I was outside the pub when I saw a group approaching, and “Denmark” reached my ears. I followed the group, and asked “Er dere dansker? Jeg hedder Xenops”, and the first dude seemed welcoming. Then the rest of the group noted my appearance, and they welcomed me and introduced themselves. We all got drinks. One part of the group spoke in Danish, and the other part included Danes but also a French and Brazilian lady, and they chatted in English. Everyone was curious about me and included me in the conversations, ranging in topics from “what physical activity should I get into?” to environmentalism. After arriving at 17:00, I finally left at 21:00, and two members asked if I would return next time. I hope I can say a few more things in Danish the next time we meet.
JapaneseI realized why my Japanese studies, possibly, feel more sluggish than they have to be: I have a difficult time ignoring kanji in practice exercises. The theory behind the Genki textbooks is that you would be exposed to many kanji, but you would only “study” kanji incrementally—say maybe 20 per chapter. I can’t do this—I need to look up and practice every kanji before I move onto the next exercise. This results in my taking forever to finish a single set of exercises, and feel like I’m not making progress.
So this lead to the decision: to really tackle Japanese, I would need to spend a dedicated amount of time to just kanji and vocabulary. I’m pretty happy with my cloze-deletion format for Anki cards, so this would be my weapon of choice.
Until then, however, something else came up…
KoreanThis language has been haunting me for at least two years, maybe longer. I keep putting if off, because I don’t feel like I have a really solid reason to study it:
I like Korean guys, possibly because they have excellent hygiene? Maybe not.
I think Webtoons is the future of comics, and Korea is spear-heading this? Stronger, but not super strong.
Those are the strongest preference-reasons I can think of. I’m not a huge fan of K-dramas or music, or most of their pop-culture—actually, I’m pretty ignorant of such things. My little reasons didn’t seem to warrant the toil of learning this level-5 language. And yet as I mentioned
here, I wonder if God is calling me to study this language. Using my logic, I have fought off this calling for months--”this doesn’t make sense”. And yet I recently had a low point in my life, and willingly submitted to His will, including Korean. Shortly after, I found myself wanting to study Korean. I have been using TTMIK’s Hanguel book and the (thick) pronunciation book. I know the rumor “you can learn hanguel in an afternoon”, but I’d rather focus on correct pronunciation rather than approximate. So I’m working on writing and listening right now. And something that I an only appreciate after working on kanji for so long, is the absence of kanji. I can read the text! I know spelling conventions have quirks and unpredictable sounds, but an approximate is still easier.
So that’s my unprecedented update.