Systematiker's attempt at a log

[Ani]

Congratulations!! This is your first girl?

[Systematiker]

Congratulations!! This is your first girl?

Thanks, yeah, this is our first girl - our second overall.* Depending on how birth and birthdays fall, we might even spend a few days with "two under two" haha.

We're on the fence if one of each gender is where we stop, or if we want more - we've never been able to stick, and when one changes their mind the other has flipped as well. Right now, though, even in the midst of a much tougher pregnancy, my wife is already saying "but three would be nice, too..." so it's not just forgetting the pains of pregnancy that causes it...



*I do have to be honest: I have two daughters from a previous relationship. I was not a wise young man in college. I missed out on a lot of their early life, mostly due to their mother moving and my having no idea where they were a lot of the time. It's a long story.

[Systematiker]

Trying to get all the necessary tasks done before I go away for a week next week means taking time out of the normal routine of language learning - can't take it from anywhere else, after all. All in all, though, not a terrible week, just not up to my usual standard. I honestly could have done more this week - I've spent at least five hours this week being so frustrated that I haven't done anything at all in any respect (and probably twice that trying to solve problems on the phone, and around the same five driving needlessly back and forth because people can't be organized or regulations are needlessly byzantine). That was all lost time, and it's mostly the languages that lost it, since I can't really cut time from anything else.

Spanish
ES Reading: 3189 / 10000 ES Film: 131 / 200
ES NT: 70 / 89
Moving along here still. I'm on unit 22, I think, of FSI, so I'm still forcing myself through that. I don't have any trouble with it, it's just so very dry. Fewer podcasts than normal.

French
FR Reading: 2128 / 10000 FR Film: 79 / 200
FR NT: 17 / 365 FR Bible without Pent: 33 / 90
I think I've made some gains reading since the last time I posted bars, I'm not sure - but it wasn't from this week. Things have been pretty stagnant in French this week.

Portuguese
PT Reading: 0 / 10000 PT Film: 12 / 200
PT NT: 19 / 60
Portuguese has benefited from some new short podcasts and an email exchange, which is more than I can say for other things. But that's been all I've done.

Catalan
CAT Reading: 3 / 10000 CAT Film: 5 / 200
Nix. But, I can understand Els Amics de les Arts songs way better, for some reason. I don't even know how I got introduced to them.

Swedish
SV Reading: 460 / 10000 SV Film: 31 / 200
SV NT: 21 / 365
I'm going to catch up the couple of missing days in the NT this evening. I've only done Facebook dabbling and music beyond that, though. Oh, I have a picture, I have to log back on on my tablet to share that.

Danish
DK Reading: 72 / 10000 DK Film: 5 / 200
DK NT: 14 / 168
Nice and regular Morgonandagten. Not every day, but some. Facebook posts and articles.

Latin
LAT Reading: 50 / 10000
I had to use Latin some for research work, but it wasn't much, really.

Ancient Greek
GK Reading: 45 / 10000
I'm not sure I tracked what I read this week. Anyway, still just doing the Gospel for the week. Oh, this is stream of consciousness, sorry - yeah, I did do a bit of work, because it's the passage with the whole "fishers of men" thing, and I wasn't sure if there the fishing/angling distinction in ζωγρῶν, and looked it up, and got sidetracked on classical usage (turns out the fishing thing is an English play on words, it's more "catching alive")

Hebrew
I should be doing more in Hebrew, and it's one of the easiest things to drop when I get busy.

Korean
Whoops...I'll make up for it once the study starts?

Czech
Nothing, waiting on the study. After becoming aware that I am going to have to have video with subtitles, I made sure to get subtitle files for the one film I have. I ain't spending money on this - and I might as well play to my strengths. So 1979 Jesus movie it is.

Dutch
NL Reading: 66 / 10000 NL Film: 20 / 200
A couple hours of podcasts.

[Systematiker]

IMG_4914.JPG

There it is.

[Brun Ugle]

I always say that you can tell the Bible wasn't written in Scandinavia because if it had been, the forty days and forty nights of rain wouldn't have even gotten a mention, but a whole week of sun would have been worth an entire book, two or three psalms and an annual holiday.

[Systematiker]

I'm gone for 10 days, and my log disappears. It was even on the second page of "your posts" - y'all went nuts while I was gone.

In Seattle I managed to use German, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Hebrew (!), and Swedish, as well as using Latin and Greek in the course I was teaching. Well, the Swedish was me trying to speak Swedish while my interlocutor was speaking Norwegian, but it worked OK. What a multicultural area - I heard at least 10 more languages, some I couldn't place at all.

It was a fun time, but exhausting. Aside from conversation in the above languages (Spanish the only extended conversation) and a bit of reading in Spanish (and a prayer service in Spanish! I sang the vespers liturgy in Spanish and wasn't too bad!), I did nothing. I took a redeye back so I've still done not much. Today is the first day I really feel human again (I took a redeye back Friday night-Saturday morning and didn't get home until about noon, and I still went to do the service Sunday. I was so dead yesterday it wasn't funny).

I need to get materials back to Rick about the study group, I'll hopefully do that today. And it's back into the swing of things. Today with small bits of dabbling, and then I'll be back to normal tomorrow. Oh, and I did my Greek for this week already today.

[Systematiker]

What happened to last week? What happened to this week?

I can't even adequately answer that for myself, for some days. I am very much looking forward to some slower living (as soon as I'm done traveling this week and next week).

I'm supposed to be starting up with Czech and the Korean for the study group (i.e. being more systematic) and maybe that will even happen today. At least Czech, I know I can do some of that.

I'm trying to find more hidden moments, since I don't have my normal pattern available at the moment, but it's been rough to keep up the engagement that I've had before. It looks like many of us are in a summer slump, though, so I guess it's not too bad.

[Systematiker]

The last post mentioned two weeks with travel obligations, and on top of that was "oh wait, just because you were gone, things didn't stop" of all this week. But I am back to what passes for normal around here - as of tomorrow.

And in all that traveling, I managed to use a surprising number of languages. In upstate NY (two weeks before this one, now) Spanish, French, German, Latin, and Danish (met some Danes at breakfast! I didn't suck!), and in the Shenandoah (last week) Spanish, French, German, Latin, Greek, Hebrew (can you tell there were a bunch of clergy there?), Portuguese, Catalan (!!), and Swedish.

So for not doing much, I managed to use a lot. I've done at least something in every language this week (even Dutch!), though sometimes it was just a little news reading or a short podcast - and that's encouraging, since I've not had the normal downtime.

I've even been taking small bites of Czech and Korean (though not as much as I had hoped by this point). Czech, at least with my leveraging my strengths, is not giving me too much trouble for parsing when read, so I'm actually pretty hopeful about how this whole thing will work out.

And in stories of unwisdom, (that's a word, because I say so), I've dabbled again in Gaelic and am memorizing a poem that struck me, have had a few chances to stumble around in Russian, and got talked into learning Telugu (but at least I'll have a native speaker as a teacher, I've kind of got some of the alphabet and I understand how the grammar goes together in copula-stuff). Wasn't I supposed to be weeding stuff out?

[DaveBee]

And in stories of unwisdom, (that's a word, because I say so), I've dabbled again in Gaelic and am memorizing a poem that struck me,

I was reading an article about Anki the other day. Memorising poems was one use case suggested: line 1 front of the card, line 2 back of the card etc.

EDIT
What method are you using to memorise your poem?

[Systematiker]

And in stories of unwisdom, (that's a word, because I say so), I've dabbled again in Gaelic and am memorizing a poem that struck me,

I was reading an article about Anki the other day. Memorising poems was one use case suggested: line 1 front of the card, line 2 back of the card etc.

EDIT
What method are you using to memorise your poem?

Brute force - continuous repetition, adding a line each time I can get through twice without error. Hey, you'd think I'd actually figure out that some of the stuff about language learning is transferable to memorizing a poem, but no, until I read this from you, I had never thought of doing it any other way. Sometimes I am a smart man. This is not one of those times.