Russian16% of my third book done! I have now done 12 days of Russian reading of usually more than 2h every day and I'm definitely noticing that it's helping. I really like how binge-reading makes progress less straining because the brain starts to resist less. I also simply want to know how the story continues now, so I will continue reading until I reach the end of the series. The whole series must be between 2500 and 3000 pages long, so I will have made quite a bit of progress by the end of it. I'm on book 3 of 10, so still a bit to go until I have to think about what I'm going to be reading next.
Russian hours: 2.71h
SpanishAn hour of grammar study got me to 80% of GdUdE B. Right now the lessons take me 20min each, so it's going to take a little longer to finish, but I'm still already quite close to finishing. I'm also doing Duolingo on the side, which doesn't take much time yet, because I'm still at the very beginning of the tree. I'm also doing it as automatically as possible, no thinking, just typing the response as fast as possible so that I make sure I have the grammar down automatically. So far no real problems and I'm making only few mistakes. We'll see whether it becomes any more difficult soon. I also continued reading my Piglia book. It's not exactly easy reading before bed, but I think I'm starting to get used to the flow of it at least.
Spanish hours: 2.08h
ItalianAs always a bit of Star Trek TNG in Italian to cheer me up!
Italian hours: 0.75h
Total: 5.54h
GeneralIn case you ever wish to have nervous breakdowns, panic attacks or crying fits I recommend dealing with the bureaucracy of 3 different countries at once on a deadline, when all of them are trying to win the award for being the most incompetent and kafkaesque bureaucracy on this planet. Asterix' dealings with Roman bureaucracy were completely harmless in comparison. What happened so far? The German office A told us to start the process with the German Consulate in Spain. The German Consulate of course then said to start the process in German office A, because they are by law responsible for this sort of thing. German office A now might actually agree to start doing their job, but they need my birth certificate which was also needed for the bureaucracy in Spain, so I asked for an international one in German office B in another town. Surprisingly that actually went without a hitch, or so I thought at first. The only thing is, German office A will only accept the monolingual version specifically meant for only that purpose, so I actually have to request another piece of paper from German office B, because not all birth certificates are equal. Way to go Germany, not confusing at all! And for no apparent reason whatsoever the Germans also want certain documents from Argentina that are really none of their business, which already infuriated us to the extreme. But well, in the end we decided not to be stubborn, there is simply no other way than complying with their ridiculous request. But then since we don't have the Argentinian stuff yet, we can't start the process yet anyway.
So, Germany is already driving us to tears before we even started the request for the piece of paper we need from them, but Argentina is doing a really great job too so far. My father in law waited for 5 hours in a queue in Argentina only to be given the wrong document - he obviously requested the right one, they simply gave him a different piece of paper than he requested! On top of it this document, which is the wrong one anyway, also contains outdated information because one part of the Argentinian bureaucracy hasn't updated the data in another part of the Argentinian bureaucracy, yay for double incompetence! And of course we only realised that this piece of paper was entirely useless after it had taken 2 weeks before finally arriving here, yay for added postal incompetence! And all of it for nothing! Incidentally the right document might finally have arrived in Madrid in the Argentinian consulate, because we had already asked for it through a different channel ages ago and only requested it directly because it was taking forever. But now, so that we don't have to go to Madrid to collect the piece of paper we have to send a prepaid envelope to the embassy that they will then return to us with the document and additionally to that there has to be a fee deposited into a certain bank account. This deposit can only be done in person at the bank though, not via bank transfer, which of course can't be done today because, of course, today of all days is a bank holiday, naturally only in this particular region where we live and nowhere else!
Yes, the whole universe seems to align to make the whole operation as difficult and full of delays as possible! And of course, until we see the document we won't know whether German + Spanish bureaucracy will accept it or not, so we will be worrying and fretting for another few days, before we can start to worry and fret about another piece of paper coming from somewhere else. So, Argentinian and German bureaucracy are already being entirely useless! And the Spanish bureaucracy is actually the instance that set us the impossible deadline and that might in the end be the instance that makes this whole process entirely useless by suddenly requesting paperwork from Italy too, which wouldn't be too surprising actually for matters of double citizenship and all that. Of course, Italian bureaucracy on a deadline ain't ever going to happen, so this possibility is looming over us like some impending disaster that you can already feel in the air. What a nightmare!
And I haven't even mentioned the official translators yet who behave as if computers were still a thing of the future. The only one who replied to our email request at all DId so wIth aPParent ProBLems with the keYBOard - seriously, that's what the email looked like. Gives us all sorts of confidence in her work
I bet we'll be waiting for a week for the translation only to be entirely shocked by its apparent uselessness.
What's the relevance for language learning? Well, if you guys ever intend to move abroad, be advised that this frantic scramble to get paperwork together from 2, 3, 4 different countries on a simply idiotic deadline is part of the joys of living abroad. Bureaucracy is annoying enough when you're dealing with one country, but dealing with 2 or 3 is absolutely insane! And of course having to deal with all this non-sense and having one setback with it after another isn't exactly helpful when you're trying to make progress with your languages! Argh!