My original hopes and plans were:
- doing one or more courses in Norwegian and/or Norwegian as a Foreign Language (for teachers): this is not going to happen, those courses are too popular. The only available course was the one I did last term. Highest on my wish list was a course on Norwegian grammar from a contrastive point of view, comparing Norwegian grammar with some relevant immigrant languages like Turkish and Vietnamese. This was in fact part of the reason I did Turkish for the 6WC last time, and I was planning to do Vietnamese for the next one. I'm still planning to take these courses, but I have to postpone it until the fall (meanwhile, I'll get the chance to apply for a program). When I do get around to studying Norwegian, I will have to relearn how to write Nynorsk, and get used to reading Swedish.
- continue French with the three available courses at my level. I managed to get a spot at two of these: Grammar 2 and Literature 1. The one I missed out on was History and Culture 1. The Literature course has an oral exam, so one of my big goals for this spring is to start speaking. A lot!
- The introductory Russian course was full last fall, and most Russian courses are only open to students who have taken the previous courses, but there is a literature course that doesn't have that requirement, and I managed to registered for it. We will be reading Chekov's play "Three Sisters" and some poetry and short stories, in Russian of course.
So, French and Russian will be my main focus at least until May.
In French, as mentioned, I need to start speaking. I've registered for the output challenge, and I have to projects I want to start out with: 1) read something aloud every day, to begin with from my graded readers, and later from the texts I'm reading for the literature class (I want it to be mainly familiar vocabulary) 2) writing a little bit daily, mainly about what I have been reading for class (this will prepare me both for speaking in class and eventually for the exam).
In Russian, apart from reading the curriculum, I want to get through as soon as possible the textbook used in the introductory course. This book constitutes the background most of the other students will have, so when I'm through it, I know I am at the level I should be for the course. Hopefully, I'll find the time to do, or at least start on the next course book as well, which is what most of the other students will be using this term in their other courses.
My parents invited me (and my brother) for a trip to Lisbon and Madeira in the middle of February, for a week. Since there is no urgency to do Vietnamese now, I'll probably do Portuguese instead for the next 6WC and postpone Vietnamese until later. I already started a little bit on Portuguese - just before Christmas, I bought a CD course with some vocabulary and sentences aimed at tourists, which I am in this case, and copied it over to my phone, only to find out that the 3rd and last CD didn't work. I still started using it over Christmas, and a couple of days ago, I returned to the bookstore to get a replacement for the non-functioning CD, only to find out that the course is out of production, and that I couldn't get a replacement, but I did get a full refund (and I had to return the whole course to get it, of course, but I had copied all the sound files anyway
). Anyway, I got it mainly to get used to the sound of Portuguese and practice pronunciation, and for that it works fine, but I'm not really surprised they took it out of production, because it teaches you how to ask for a phone directory and where you can find a phone booth, and as far as I know, you can only find those in a museum nowadays. My next main resource, probably in February when the 6WC starts, will be Mondly, which has a separate course for European Portuguese (which my CD course is too). As usual, I will probably use Duolingo some too, though that one is Brazilian Portuguese only. I also have a grammar book and a couple of workbooks, which just jumped into my arms when I was at the University bookstore buying curriculum books on Friday. Oh, and a book on the History of the Romance Languages, which similarly just jumped into my arms during my last visit to the University bookstore just before Christmas.Which brings me to my final point in this introductory post: I buy too many books, I can't read them at the speed I'm buying them, and I've been like that all my life (though at least I don't spend money I don't have, so that's a limiting factor, in some periods more than in others). My New Year's resolution this year is to read more books than I buy, I'd like it to be twice as many. I'll keep a post below for keeping track of that. I also need to get rid of some books, and my goal for that is to match the number that I read (they don't have to be the same ones, of course). I have so many books I want to read - not all of them are language books, of course, but many are language related in some sense - like translations from languages I am learning or want to learn, books on the history and culture of the associated countries, etc, as well as actual course books in Irish, Czech, Arabic, Vietnamese and Hittite, and novels in French, German, Russian and Italian, and a book on the Turkish language reform as well as a number of linguistics books, etc, etc.
