IronMike's 2023 log: Fewer means better, right? (EO & RUS)

[Lawyer&Mom]

(last Monday in May, for my non-US friends)

And for your American friends who wonder "that's the one that starts summer, right? Not the one that ends it?"

I have to say it out loud every time: “MMMemorial Day is in MMMay.”

[IronMike]

365-day challenge: Week seven (week 7 already! Holy sh...) report. Totally forgot to post this yesterday as today (Monday) is a holiday here. Threw me off!

11.02: Italian class #3. Lots of work on definite and indefinite articles, genders of nouns. A little bit of asking questions and answering them at both the polite and informal levels.
12.02: Early day off of work due to the winter storm in-coming. Did the audio homework in Sentieri, mostly all on numbers.
13.02: Quizlet, created vocab cars for verbs and other words. Reviewed lessons 2 and 3 in Italian for Reading Knowledge. Assimil lesson 1 and 2 to the train in the morning.
14.02: Assimil again to the train this morning.
15.02: Quizlet vocabulary review, verbs and other words.
16.02: Chapter 2 of Schaum's Italian Grammar.
17.02: Quizlet and Schaum's.

No class today due to the holiday. Have already reviewed audio for lessons 1 and 2 in Assimil and will do some of the exercises for chapter two of Schaum's.

[IronMike]

Laughing my butt off...

I'm reading a book now called Melanesian Pidgin and the Oceanic Substrate. (Lucky find in an awesome used bookstore in Boston...PM me if you need the name/address.) The current chapter is covering the history of Tok Pisin and there are quotes from diaries of ship captains on conversations they had with pidgin speakers. In one such diary by Governor Solf (1895), he talks about meeting and talking with locals from various islands in the South Seas and, as far as he was concerned, they all spoke the same pidgin. Here's how he put it:

...in what way do the workers from such different places...communicate, when thrown together in Samoa? They use that Volapuk of the South Seas...Pidgeon [sic] English.

Absolutely awesome. By the time he wrote his diary, Volapuk had been around for about 16 years and Esperanto around 8 years.

[IronMike]

365-day challenge: Week eight report.

18.02: LR lesson 1 and 2 of Assimil. Even did L1 reading to L2 listening of the second lesson. That was weird. Did exercises 1-4 of Ch 2 in Schaum's.
19.02: Quizlet review.
20.02: Continued in Ch 2 in Schaum's. Did exercises 5-7. Did pretty good.
21.02: Duolingo, finished up Basics and Food. Lesson 4 in Italian for Reading Knowledge. Added more words to my Quizlet set, and added definite articles to nouns I had added earlier.
22.02: Lesson 4 again. Lots of verbs. Buon compleanno a mia moglie!
23.02: Added more verbs to my Quizlet verb cards.
24.02: Vocab review. And Lesson 4 and 5 in Italian for Reading Knowledge.

[IronMike]

Have no idea what Esperanto book to read next. I have many choices. The next Sumoo starts 17 March. Hmmm...

[IronMike]

365-day challenge: Week nine report.

25.02: Italian class. Lots of numbers. So much easier than Slavic languages!
26.02: Pimsleur 1 lesson 1 to the train twice today. Duolingo tree plurals.
27.02: Pimsleur 2.
28.02: Pimsleur 2 & 3.
01.03: Pimsleur 3.
02.03: Continuing through the Nouns and Articles chapter of Schaum's. Read through it but haven't done any of the exercises yet. Italian for Reading Knowledge, lesson 5.
03.03: Picked my course I'm gonna go through: Living Italian, A grammar-based course. I had already read through the first 3 lessons and done the exercises unofficially. But now I'm writing them down, so today did all the exercises for lesson 2. Also did the homework for class, which was to watch a fotoromanzo and answer questions about it.

Still haven't decided on which book to read for the next Esperanto-Sumoo. But I've got it down to two: one by Istvan Nemere and one by Mikaelo Bronsxtejn. I've read a book from each and they both were great.

[IronMike]

No class tonight. Had a big snowstorm over the night, about a foot of snow. Trains are running late, schools are closed, work snow day. Just gonna stick to my Italian books, get ahead in class. Tired of repeating noun genders and plurals. Ugh...

[IronMike]

365-day challenge: Week ten report.

04.03: Italian for Reading Knowledge, lesson 5.
05.03: Duolingo, all animals.
06.03: Pimsleur lesson 4.
07.03: Pimsleur lesson 4 and half of 5.
08.03: Pimsleur lesson 5, then repeated.
09.03: Living Italian, lesson 3 and exercises. Not too badly done.
10.03: Living Italian, lesson 4 a couple times through.

Quite a bit ago I put a hold at my local library on an easy reader in Italian: Andreuccio da Perugia. Figured I'd have the vocabulary by now to manage an A-level Easy Reader (basata su un vocabolario di 600 parole). I was sorely mistaken! I can't even make it through reading #2 in Easy Italian Reader yet! Therefore I will give this one back to the library and wait until I am done with the course, or at least closer to the end. And now I will search the interwebs for the list of 600 words that are the basis for these easy readers.

I wrote that last sentence on Saturday. Guess what? I didn't find a list. But I did find someone who compiled the "language museums" of Bodmer's Loom of Language, and copied it into my Google docs.

[lingua]

The Italian Clozemaster has 1-100 most common words followed by 101-500, 501-1000, etc. These are broken down under the Fluency Fast Track section. You might consider starting with that.

[IronMike]

Today starts the Esperanto Sumoo, whereby one commits to reading a certain of number of pages for the next 15 days. I've selected Spomenka Stimec's Kroata Milita Noktlibro (Croatian War Journal), written during the breakup of Yugoslavia in the early 1990's. Got a healthy start on it today with about 10 pages read in the chapter "Introduction to the Croatian Devil Mars," a play on a famous Croatian writer's book The Croatian God Mars. So far so good. It's a short book (103 pp) so I think I can actually finish the entire book during this Sumoo.