Ani's 2018 Log

[Ani]

Icelandic full speed ahead!

I had a hard time sleeping last night so I spent an hour or so looking for Icelandic ebooks. It looks like Forlagid.is will sell ebooks to us without Icelandic credentials. Conveniently, all the books that THEY are the publishers of are also listed on Amazon as kindle books. I found their site actually a little easier to browse and had more success than with my initial searches on Amazon. Since I am looking for translated YA books, my best options for kindle seem to be..

Hungurleikarnir -- Hunger Games
Afbrigði -- Divergent
Eragon arfleifðin -- Eragon #4. Only book 4 for some reason?
Fjársjóðseyjan -- Treasure Island

I do wish I had HP, but there doesn't seem to be an ebook that I can find, and shipping a hard copy looks to be ~$80 all in.

So this morning I opened LWT for the first time in ages and added Icelandic. I imported Mjallhvít -- Snow White-- off Project Gutenberg. It broke nicely into 10 texts which was extremely satisfying. After that, I did something smarter than click around randomly, trying to decode in the most intensive way possible. I opened Clozemaster and started the Fluency Fast Track game that I'm using. As I completed sentences (Cloze Listening, multiple choice), I pasted the sentences into a new text. So far I've done two rounds in Clozemaster w/LWT. The first brought the unknown words in Mjallhvít down from 100% to 95% which I thought was a pretty decent reduction. The next brought the unknown words down to 91-94%. Since this is frequency based, I should keep getting good reductions to a certain point. Since MamaPata is a GENIUS and posted about how to add whole expressions to LWT, I was able to add in the better translations off Clozemaster as expressions in certain areas where the individual word translation still didn't make much sense.

It is my oldest baby's 10th birthday today, which means I've been a mom for a decade. Kinda crazy to think about and I'll be stereotypical and say "It feels like only yesterday" lol But it has been a REALLY great 10 years, best 10 years of my life so far, and I'm looking forward to another joyous 10 to come.

[MamaPata]

blushes

Honestly, I'm just so relieved that I wasn't the only one totally unaware that this was a thing.

Happy Birthday/motherhood anniversary to you both!

[IronMike]

It is my oldest baby's 10th birthday today, which means I've been a mom for a decade. Kinda crazy to think about and I'll be stereotypical and say "It feels like only yesterday" lol But it has been a REALLY great 10 years, best 10 years of my life so far, and I'm looking forward to another joyous 10 to come.

Congrats! Just wait till you've been a parent for 20 years, and your oldest is renting his first apartment and buying furniture. Yikes! Where'd the time go?

[neofight78]

It would be even more foolish to say that I'm considering another half challenge of Russian, right? Right ..

Do it, do it!

Listen to MamaPata... Heed the voice of wisdom...

[Ani]

It would be even more foolish to say that I'm considering another half challenge of Russian, right? Right ..

Do it, do it!

Listen to MamaPata... Heed the voice of wisdom...

Well so... I know I can do the film portion. That's no trouble. But realistically, do I have any hope of the reading portion? I'm pretty intimidated (which might be in general my problem with Russian). I'm starting to use LWT with Clozemaster for Russian the way I talked about it for Icelandic in my last post. But that will only give me like 50-100 words a day if I'm consistent.. pretty far from 37000 or whatever I need to read a book.

I guess I could study Red Kalinka's graded readers? Gather 100 pages of graded readers and read it... 25 times. :-p

[Ani]

First victory in Icelandic!

I actually could read one of my new clozemaster sentences in its entirety before looking at what it should say! Woohoo! Ok Ok... small victory. The sentence was "Ég sá fimm menn." I saw five men

My Clozemaster/LWT combo is seemingly going very well. Icelandic Snow White is down to mid 80's % unknown. I imported a Russian text of Snow White onto my Russian side and I've got that down to low 90's % unknown. So far, Russian % is decreasing at a similar rate to Icelandic which is encouraging. We'll see how they do as I keep adding blocks of text from Clozemaster.

Can't remember if I mentioned "Viltu læra íslensku?" -- a TV show type program for learning Icelandic. It's online and on YT and there is a full transcript. I'm working my way through that also. Thinking I'll work through each of the 21 videos over the course of a week, watching the week's video each day or about 5-6x before moving on. They seem to be quite a bit like FIA so far. Decently enjoyable study material.

[Ani]

I think I might be spreading myself too thin on Icelandic resources.. now I've got Drops, Viltu Lærna Íslensku, Alaric Hall's course, Icelandic Onlîne and Clozemaster w/LWT. Maybe it's ok just to enjoy the reinforcement?

I'm feeling pretty guilty about watching Merlin VF and counting it towards super challenge hours (haha my auto fill really wanted me to write "super late" instead of "super challenge" .. it knows me too well!). I should probably make myself watch harder shows but I really wanted to re-watch Merlin. Kind of on a King Arthur kick (re-reading MZB's Mists of Avalon & T.H. White's Once and Future King in English) Oh well. I also feel like I need to do more actual studying in French, but I'm definitely at a point where I don't feel any progress, nor am I really even sure that I didn't know the subject I just studied. I'm finding it hard to sort out mistakes which are lack of practice/ lack of paying attention -- I consider those categories close to the same thing because ideally grammar becomes habitual -- from mistakes that might be mislearning or lack of learning. I guess the solution is volume?

I like the idea of constructing a fake degree program for myself, researching and writing all in French, and hiring someone to correct my papers and presentations.. but realistically I'm not going to do that at this point in my life. Maybe I can motivate myself to do an extremely mini program this summer when we break from homeschool.

[Cavesa]

It looks like you need Kaamelott

[Elsa Maria]

Since you are a homeschool mom, I'm guessing that you have at least heard of Charlotte Mason (CM). If not, I can provide some links.

I have thought about giving myself a Charlotte Mason-style education in Danish. My reading isn't bad and I could have a go at using the method to improve it. My writing is terrible though. I could stand to begin with narration, dictation, and copywork.

Our homeschool year is (sort of) ending soon, too. It might be fun to come up with a CM plan for my summer.


Oh, and my youngest will be 27 this year. Yikes.

[Lawyer&Mom]

What would your fake degree be in? Literature, history, art? Lots of different subjects loan themselves to research and writing!