2017 - Summary of week 45What's this - an update and the week has barely ended? (In this part of the world, at least.) Yes, this has been decent week for languages without too many things in the way.
Anki: Still 50 new words per day for Esperanto and Portuguese (+ ~250 old cards each as of today). Will it ever end?
Duolingo: Another week with vocabulary that doesn't feel all that familiar. I really don't know how the algorithm works, because every week (it seems!) I'm tested on German sentences like
Die Gäste zeigen einem Mann die Küche and
Das Baby zeigt einer Frau ein Kleid.
CS: Finally some Czech! (And it was worth the wait.) I grabbed one of the outdated courses from the library -
Grundkurs i tjeckiska, and spent a half hour on the first lesson (verbs), and another half hour on the second lesson (nouns). Not my ideal cup of tea, but it was written a long time ago (1966), for slavists at the university. The approach reminds me of the older TY courses, with one grammar concept per lesson. In this textbook, the actual concept is introduced (with tables galore), then a text (thank God!), a word list, and some additional grammar notes. This is probably not a textbook Steve Kaufmann would have liked. Anyway, it feels great to be back.
ES: In another thread (
Bex's Spanish log 2016/17), Tofu suggested the Youtube channel Español Automático. So far, I've only watched the short intro clips.
YUE: Another film - Tai Chi Master. I liked this a lot when I saw it the first time(s) some twenty years ago. Not so much now - maybe due to the dialogue which was very much out of sync (I don't remember that it was
that bad). Maybe they all just read the lines afterwards (as is said to have been a common practice in HK and Mainland China). Maybe Jet Li did his lines in Mandarin (he's from Beijing) and someone else dubbed him in Cantonese. I don't know.
I reviewed CSS and started reviewing Javascript again. I also had some fun with a couple of Irish tunes in all twelve keys - it's not just moving your hands one step and starting from there - the two-row button accordion is
bisonoric which means that a pull gives one note and a push gives another. So any note sequence can have entirely different bellows movements in another key. Doing this in the keys we use in the Western Hemisphere is somewhat similar to going though verb conjugations in a dozen tenses.
I also listened to a 20 minute
radio podcast (in Swedish) about polyglots. According to the researcher there are 100 in the world.
Adults can learn languages. Mostly males are polyglots, and it possibly relates to a collecting behaviour. And some were able to learn (some) Chinese in just seven minutes.
At the moment I'm just doing the free courses they throw at me. I'm fairly new to all this programming stuff and got into it just for fun less than a year ago. Apart from HTML and CSS (which I've known nearly since I started using Internet some twenty years ago), I've only had a brief look at ASP around 2000-2001. Anyway, it's fun. 