Tristano's log 2017: Wanderland in the Netherlusts

[Tristano]

Romanian
I'm flying across the Duolingo course. I have a good chance of terminating the Romanian course in about a week.
My listening skills seem to improve every day. This morning I was listening to the SBS podcast about political and medical stuff and I was able to follow everything effortlessly, losing just some details here and there. Maybe I was just lucky though.

Up to my first posts about my Romanian adventure (may 26th), I basically already reached the desired level (in 3 months). Unfortunately, now I want to continue improving and activate the language.

Danish
Nothing interesting to say, besides that I'm coming across sentences that I understand completely without needing to read the translation, and that knowing English (for structure and some vocabulary) and Dutch (especially for the vocabulary) are of great help here.

[Tristano]

I conquered the Duolingo Romanian tree!
Yes, I said the it was going to take me a week... but I decided to speed things up. And yes, it was a ridicolous productive day. And yes, I'm tired, very tired.
And yes I said that I would have made the tree completely golden and that I would have done the reverse tree.
Well cough cough, I decide that I actually don't want to do that.
It's time to start the Danish tree. And to start reading extensively in Romanian.
(but tomorrow. or Monday)

[jeff_lindqvist]

Congratulations! It feels great, doesn't it?

(BTW, I've never seen the point in doing a reverse tree - skills rust all the time no matter the direction)

[Tristano]

Congratulations! It feels great, doesn't it?

(BTW, I've never seen the point in doing a reverse tree - skills rust all the time no matter the direction)

Thanks! It feels indeed great.
The point of the reverse tree is that you're prompted more for l1 -l2 translation, so forcing me to write more Romanian.
I decided though that exposure and tutoring are enough and that I don't have to push myself with the reverse tree. Writing is also a skill that for most my language learning I don't particularly need, and languages full of accents or weird characters don't particularly push me to write them haha (except Icelandic. Icelandic rules)
I must say anyway that Duolingo has been very useful to internalize the language, in tandem with clozemaster.
That's why I'm going to test this combination again with Danish.

[jeff_lindqvist]

The point of the reverse tree is that you're prompted more for l1 -l2 translation, so forcing me to write more Romanian.

OK! I just do a couple of "Strengthen skills" sessions each day, and based on the sentences, I assume that you're tested on the rustiest skills (the other day I got tested on sentences mostly from Basics 2 in Portuguese). Even if I started a reverse tree and finished each skill before going to the next one, the previous ones would still need to be reviewed.

Anyway - good luck with Danish!

Addition: After some googling, I realized that it's not about doing the tree in reverse but rather doing the languages in reverse - English through Spanish (instead of Spanish through English). That makes sense!

[Tristano]

Yes - that's what I meant before

--

While I enjoy listening Romanian in the car, I also enjoy being a total beginner on a new language - or a sort of a total beginner with an advantage over a complete total beginner. Danish in its written form looks to be a wonderfully easy language to learn. The syntax looks very closed to the one of English and the grammar looks like a piece of cake, even in comparison to Dutch, which isn't very hard. Plus I get a lot of vocabulary for free thanks to English and Dutch, and the latin words present in Danish. Reading here and there looks like the language has the very germanic feature to be quite irregular, but ok. Up to now I'm having less problems with Danish than with Romanian even though I have much less free vocabulary. I'm much more likely to feel encouraged to write it than Romanian (urgh, all those weird Romanian letters, the three a and the seemingly random shifting across cases. I did the whole Duolingo tree not writing them. Hopefully the tutoring will help me here), while I won't even attempt to speak Danish (I'm Italian, I have 5 vowels up to 7 used in Italian - I speak the northern variety - I got an additional 3 or 4 speaking other 5 languages, how can I pronounce the 32 vowels of Danish? hahahahaha. not. and no, I'm not going to study the IPA. My tongue is simply not made to pronounce them, nor I want to show any possible sign of sofistication).

In this moment I feel a great urge of conquering all the main germanic languages. Starting from next week I'm going to work in Friesland, and I don't want to risk going to a bakery in a lost village and not getting served some delicious cake only because I don't speak Frysian. Plus I received a fine that I gained in - hear this - Germany (many facepalms for this one) and yes: it is written in German. And it is clearly stated that if I refuse to pay it I have to write a motivation in German. And it is the second time that I receive it because... I actually already payed it. And I failed three times writing the right email address to complain about this thing because it's super long (it must be a trick). And still I hope they are going to answer me because my English and Google translated German are probably not conform to the rules. lol.

But after all I think I can skip studying Faroese, even though I would love to understand what the lovely Eivør Pálsdóttir sings about.

Dura, la vita.

[Tristano]

Hej! Jeg hedder Tristano. Jeg har to katte: den ældste er en Maine Coon og hedder Enzo, den yngste er en hellig byrman og hedder Tzatziki. Ja, Tzatziki, præcis som yoghurt saucen. De kan lide at kæmpe! Blijkbaar vind ik in het Deens schrijven gemakkelijker dan in het Roemeens. Probabil ca nu mai voi invata limba romana foarte bine, ma fortunatamente la capisco abbastanza bene. Come l'inglese. Il mio inglese fa abbastanza schifo ma a nessuno sembra importare piú di tanto. Volgens mij eist Roemeens trouwens veel meer werk om de taal te activeren vanwege conjugaties en declensies. Nu jeg kan tale om kattene, hundene, ænderne og hestene (tak Duolingo ), men ikke om alte tingerne som liv, videnskab, medicin og filosofi. Eller, det er ok i øjeblikket.
French and Spanish are in the back of my head. I can use them but I wouldn't venture to write in it in this specific moment. But maybe I should.

[reineke]

And pronto

And "chao". Cazzo... Wait, that one's not Spanish... I'm ready for another round of 800 hours in listening-only mode. A couple of days ago I started a Spanish interior monologue with "allora".

[Tristano]

And pronto

And "chao". Cazzo... Wait, that one's not Spanish... I'm ready for another round of 800 hours in listening-only mode. A couple of days ago I started a Spanish interior monologue with "allora".

It can be worse, like talking with monolingual Italian people and filling sentences with "wait" and "even kijken hoor".

[reineke]

And pronto

And "chao". Cazzo... Wait, that one's not Spanish... I'm ready for another round of 800 hours in listening-only mode. A couple of days ago I started a Spanish interior monologue with "allora".

It can be worse, like talking with monolingual Italian people and filling sentences with "wait" and "even kijken hoor".

You could also have Scottish people when you let that one rip although I'm sure they would not mind.

Hago + faccio = haccio

This is gonna be fun.