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[MamaPata]

Sounds like things are tough! Fingers crossed for both your health and the renovations. I am very impressed by how much you are achieving despite the challenges!

[Neurotip]

IS: So close to finishing with Unit 1 of Colloquial Icelandic. 32% through Alaric Hall's mp3 course. He's confessed that he's not going to teach "the long journey" construction, and instead get around it by teaching "the journey that is long" construction. I'm disappointed. But I understand why he's choosing not to teach this. In Swedish, the adjectives change based on which of the above two constructions are used. I can imagine it's much more complicated in Icelandic. And in any case I'm sure I'll get to it in any of the other resources I am now using or will eventually use.

It is indeed much more complicated. Icelandic adjectives are by some distance the most complicated inflectional paradigm(s) I've ever tried to grapple with. I can see exactly why Alaric didn't tackle it, but part of me wishes he had at least tried. Twelve months into seriously studying the language, I'm still very much 'getting them lined up'.

If I could make a suggestion: once you feel comfortable with weak nouns (skóli, kona, etc.), have a look at 'the long journey' at that stage, since the inflections are essentially the same and it's a very common construction. Indeed this is arguably the easy bit!

[jeff_lindqvist]

I bought Teach Yourself Complete Ukrainian earlier in the month. Even though the Amazon page says it comes with an mp3 CD, it in fact does not, but instead directs one to the Teach Yourself website to download the audio "for free" The website is missing the audio for Unit 15 entirely. Without Unit 15, the audio for the course comes out to just over 72 minutes (1h 12m). Maybe that's standard for a TY course? It feels really light, especially when the audio is not 100% target language. Even my Colloquial Icelandic comes out to 135 minutes (2h 15m), however there's a lot of English on those files.

Whatever the current format, the content of a reasonably "modern" course is based on 2 CDs (which in turn is probably based on the idea that older courses had one tape with material on both sides). That rarely means 2x80 minutes. Maybe your course originally had two CDs with between 30 and 40 minutes each? I agree about the amount of target language - the other week, I listened to a few (Colloquial) tracks online, and it took quite a few tracks before they even got to the first real lesson. Depending on the language, you may get many tracks with nothing but pronunciation.

This being said, I still think that TY and Colloquial has something to offer.

[LunaMoonsilver]

Anybody who only reads ebooks, how do you work out page counts?

I use Goodreads to find out the overall page count for the book in question, then I either wait until I’ve finished the book and tweet the whole page count at once, or I work out the % as I go (e.g. 2% of 240 = 4.8 = 4) and then when I finish, add up all the pages for that book I’ve already sent to the bot and send whatever’s left (e.g. if I’ve already sent 200 pages, I then send 40 to finish it off).

[renaissancemedici]

(I am a serial language quitter. This is my deep dark secret.) Knowing me, I’d get all perfectionist about something or feel like I’m Not Doing It Right and quit, again.

You just described me as well. You are not alone

I was thinking about that exact thing last night. The languages that I had no pressure learning (I never had to be perfect) went on great. The ones that made me want to learn "properly" (see: German...) never seem to happen. That's why last night I decided that I'll get rid of all my pressure for perfection, enjoy the ride and whatever happens happens. I'm sure results will be better this way. I already do better this morning.

[smallwhite]

Excuse the out-of-context quote from Xenops’ log, but does this ever make me want to give French a 5th try.

I make it sound so easy I'm constantly tempted by wanderlust myself

[Chung]

Swedish: 9% of Odinsbarn read. I "took" 3 days off last week, otherwise I'd feel more disappointed about only covering another 3% since the last time I updated on my progress.

Icelandic: 27% of the way through the Alaric Hall mp3 course. Also finished copying out the consonants table from the orthography page on Wikipedia. I don't know why I wanted to copy it out, but I did.

Colloquial Icelandic sure has a lot of English on the audio clips, so I'm editing them. The dialogues also get right into it, which I expected, and thankfully I can actually parse out some of what's going on (thank you Alaric Hall mp3 course, and thank you Swedish). I've never done a Colloquial (or TY) course before, but I've never been enthusiastic about them because they just seem so brief compared to how extensive Linguaphone or Assimil are. Hopefully it won't feel that way as I go along.

Ukrainian: I brought it back about a week ago. I will refer to Stelle's post here, because it has some overlap with how I feel about Ukrainian. It's not at all serious.

I'm working with Duolingo, lesson 2 from the Peace Corps Survival Ukrainian course, and another Peace Corps course recommended by the Duolingo people (scroll down for the Dropbox link). That last course is doing a great job of teaching the alphabet. It's also a lot easier to get my tongue around the (limited) vocabulary than anything in Icelandic so far.

Lastly, I want to mention the Ukrainian language profile on HTLAL again, and thank Chung for compiling all that info, because it helped me decide on some other resources. I also want to reference Message 191 of 541 from Chung's log on HTLAL. Having this insight into the Comprehensive Grammar, and, consequently, the Colloquial course, is much appreciated.

Прошу! It's nice to see that those profiles get a hit now and then.

It's still slim pickings when looking for a serviceable course in English to learn Ukrainian on your own from scratch, but it's not quite as bad as it was when I started studying the language several years ago. TY Ukrainian is still the best of a mediocre lot (but see below). I've seen Яблуко but it's meant for the classroom (which explains why it's all in Ukrainian). That's no error in the audio of TY Ukrainian as you see with the absence of Chapter 15. A lot of the dialogues in the later chapters aren't included on the CDs, and the CDs themselves contain only about 45 minutes of audio. It's an obvious holdover from the first edition with two cassettes where each cassette held less than 25 minutes of audio per side.

You could try Beginners' Ukrainian by Yuriy Shevchuk which is meant for beginners and has freely downloadable audio and answer keys. It's not a bad course even though I hesitate to say that you'd reach intermediate ability (something like B1) since it doesn't cover quite as much in grammar as TY Ukrainian. A quirk is that Shevchuk lays it on really hard about teaching cursive Cyrillic handwriting in this course. The first few chapters are full of exercises in learning to write the symbols. You don't get going properly in my view until Chapter 4 (out of 15). In a way, it's not that bad that he does this since the reality is that children whose native language uses Cyrillic still learn cursive much like how we learned cursive writing until it was pushed out of the curriculum in the 1990s. Ukrainians (nor Russians or any other educated people whose native language uses Cyrillic) do not do their handwriting in block letters (or block letters with a thin leavening of cursive) as is more usual among speakers of English. At the same time, Cyrillic handwriting is best learned by simply using it. After doing a few tutorials and exercises in the introductory section (more like what you get in "The New Penguin Russian Course" or Teach Yourself Ukrainian) I take it as a matter of course that my answers to a Ukrainian textbook's exercises are to be expressed in Cyrillic cursive.

Anyway, it just slipped my mind to include this book when I drew up the latest version of the Ukrainian profile. I should revise then since there are also a few useful video supplements/blogs for Ukrainian which weren't around before.

[tarvos]

I always use Cyrillic when writing Russian (or Bulgarian) by hand because it's how it works and I write cursive.

[Chung]

I always use Cyrillic when writing Russian (or Bulgarian) by hand because it's how it works and I write cursive.

Yeah, and that's the way it should be. I couldn't quite believe it when a teacher of my Ukrainian class allowed us to write assignments using block letters, and to accommodate the slowpokes, wrote stuff on the chalkboard in block letters well into the second term.

When I was studying Serbian, I always wrote the answers to my homework in cursive Serbian Cyrillic even though I could have just used nothing but BCMS/SC Latinic (anyway I already had got my practice of writing in Latinic when using "Introduction to the Croatian and Serbian Language" and "Teach Yourself Croatian") Even now, it makes me smile to compare all of my Russian, Ukrainian and Serbian homework in flowing Cyrillic script to my homework for other languages done in Latinic script. The former still looks purdy...

[smallwhite]

The third dialogue of unit 2 got way more difficult than anything before it. It’s twice as long as previous dialogues, with at least twice as much new vocab. I’m coming up with ideas for how to approach it, ...

So if you chop it in half, it would be just as long as previous dialogues, with about just as much new vocab?