THURSDAY, 28 JUNE 2018Okay, against my prediction, I'm visiting the forum quite often at the moment and I'm writing quite a lot in this log. Well, I hope you don't mind, but the reason is simple: I'm bored out of my mind and I spend a great deal of time on languages right now. Why am I bored? Well, my part-time job doesn't challenge me at all, so I try to do just as much as necessary and, also, I can't work on my thesis, because I'm waiting for feedback from my supervisor. What's more, I don't really feel like singing and making music at the moment. Instead, I'm buying tons of books (in German and in foreign languages) about history, art, language, and literature, read a lot, and study languages. So, here it goes, another update for this week!
РусскийI received my Russian edition of
War and Peace today and now I must admit it won't be easy. The language is, well, what you would expect of a highbrow work of art from the 19th century and then there's a lot of French passages among the Russian, which doesn't necessarily make it easier. Well, yeah, my French is better than my Russian, but I'm not as at ease at reading and understanding French as I am with English, so this will be quite a challenge. Also, there are no annotations, so it's just the Russian text, which doesn't help either. Maybe, I'd be better off reading something simpler first? But no, I resolved to read
War and Peace, so I shall read
War and Peace! I've never said I'd read all of it though...
ἙλληνικήI've almost finished my textbook! I'm on lesson 49 of 50 right now and I've already worked through the grammar for lesson 50 (plu-perfect). Lesson 49 mainly deals with the formation of the perfect tense for
verba muta (i.e. verbs ending in p-, t-, and k-sounds), which is a little bit more complicated than for other verbs. Anyway, the Greek perfect tense does have its quirks, so it's not as easy as it looked like at first. Most of the time, it's reasonably straightforward to recognize though.
After completing
Kairós 1, I'll continue with
Kairós 2. I decided against
Learn to Read Greek, because I like
Kairós better. For the second volume, there are translations of the texts available on the Internet, so there hopefully won't be any problems with that.
עבריתI'm still chewing on lesson 44 in the Lambdin textbook. The excerpts from the Bible are getting tougher and tougher and it takes time to crack them. No particular problems with
hif'il verbs though.
संस्कृतम्I'm taking a short break from Sanskrit. I'm ahead of the online course anyway, so I'll have some time off this week. I'm still to do the exercises for ī- and ū-stems, but there's no rush. Next week, the course will deal with
visarga sandhi, so I'll repeat the rules then.
Om shanti...日本語And yes, I'm back with Japanese! Just as with Russian, I had to come to the conclusion that native materials are way over my head right now. Well, we're not talking about un-annotated classics of literature here, but annotated graded readers for beginners. So, it's back to kindergarten in the form of
Genki I. I repeated the first units and, probably, I should do the exercises this time, so things really stick. It's not like I had forgotten everything, but my recollection is very limited at times, grammar as well as vocabulary. So, there's enough work to do...
Oró, sé do bheatha abhaile! Anois ar theacht an tsamhraidh.
The last lesson dealt with the plu-perfect, which isn't really difficult once you know the perfect tense. However, recognizing it in a text takes some practice, especially for "irregular" verbs.
In fact meat is vey appreciated here... I know a couple of vegetarians, but I'm not sure how long their determination will last.)