A Very Dead Language Log (Abandoned--Admin, feel free to delete))

[Cèid Donn]

I'm extra cranky this morning. I have been getting up earlier than usual to do my morning studies, because work crews on my street are....gawd, I am not entirely sure, they're just tearing up stuff and replacing it (granted it's probably needed, as this street is pretty busy since the entire neighborhood, nearby high school, nearest fire station and late-night suicidal motorcycle hotshots all use it as a short cut, to our annoyance) but the thing is, they start at 7 AM, which means the workers start arriving at 6:30 AM, although they got a late start today because of rain. It's the third week of this, too. I'm trying from hard this morning not walk outside and take out my frustration on the crew chief, who just parked his truck in front of our recycling bin on the curb (the recyclables truck as passed our house the past two weeks due to all this construction, and we've got a growing stockpile of to-be-picked-up recyclables in the garage now).

Lately I've been having regular dreams if not in one of my TLs then about them, or just languages in general. Mostly they have been about French or Gaelic, but one the other night was about Russian, which I haven't studied in years, although seeing other people studying it here makes me wanderlust for it a bit. But dreaming aside, I am not terribly happy with the quality of my studying lately. I've been good about keeping busy, but my studying overall has been quite the shambles. I'm not trying to beat myself up about it. I just want to be honest about my mood. My health is still not great, stress from my lower-than-usual income due to not being able to work is a constant, and most days I have to fight through depression and low energy reserves, which is draining in and of itself. My depression in particular is making it hard for me to keep track of what I want to be doing with my TLs, so some of them are getting more neglected, like Welsh, Irish and Breton, and aside from doing the book club reading, I've largely stopped with my German review. I'm feeling particularly fatigued today--the situation with my living environment being drowned in early morning construction cacophony not helping--and I'm thinking about how I can cut back on stuff until I feel less besieged.

That said, I do have some small amount of progress to record for my SCs:

French Films SC : 44 / 100 -- 3943 minutes (+219 minutes)

• watched 1 episode of Les Revenants - 55 minutes
• re-watched 7 episodes of Violet Evergarden - 146 minutes
• watched the short film, Respire, on You Tube - 16 minutes
  
  
  
  

French Books SC : 25 / 100 -- 1288 pages (+208 pages)

• still reading Les trois Mousquetaires -- 209 pages completed

Gaelic Films SC : 15 / 100 -- 1360 minutes (+88 minutes)

• completed 2nd viewing of Guthan nan Eilean Series 2: Outdoors -- 88 minutes

Gaelic Books SC : 14 / 100 -- 723 pages (+8 pages)

• completed 8 letters from Leabhar nan Litrichean - 8 pages
  
  After completing my last book, I didn't pick out a new one and I'm feeling pretty uninspired right now, so I'll probably just re-read a previously read book next.

***

The 2019 365 Day Language Challenge : 37 / 365

• Day 36 (Feb. 5) -- Gaelic: Worked for about 90 minutes on the student packet for "A' Bheinn Òir" and re-read chapters 5-9.
  
  
• Day 37 (Feb. 6) -- French: Did 14-6 and 14-7 in French Sentence Builder. Did Expression du Temps exercises I and II in L'expression française.

[Cèid Donn]

Looks like I've survived another week of 2019. Hooray?

Today I was looking at the FSI Swedish course that I downloaded a couple weeks back and haven't gotten around to yet. I am thinking of adding Swedish to my 365 day challenge, and while I'm technically not a beginner, I might do the next 6 Weeks challenge with Swedish. When is it? May? Seems far off, but in reality, May will be here soon enough.

I started watching Glacé (titled The Frozen Dead in English) on Netflix, despite not having finished the half dozen other series I have previously started watching for my French SC. I have no idea what's going on in this show. I don't think I would if I was watching it in English either. It's clearly modeled after Swedish style crime stories, but with that contemporary French narrative vagueness that I have a hard time penetrating sometimes. Or maybe it's just badly written.

But this is why I tend to watch a lot French-dubbed content on Netflix, because I just don't find a lot of original French TV and movies very appealing. I wish I did. French music, yes. French poetry, yes. But so much of what is being made for French TV and film right now isn't my cup of tea. This is true for me with English language content too--I think I'm just getting old and finicky--but perhaps because of the amount of content available to me in English, it's easier to sort through and find something palatable.

Something I just reminded myself of: my first memory of seeing any film is of watching Le ballon rouge. I was probably about 4 years old, and we lived in San Diego. The local library would have film nights in the summer, where they projected a film up onto the side of the library exterior after sundown and people could watch the film (for free, I believe) while sitting on the grass. San Diego of course has the kind of climate suitable for that. Le ballon rouge is such an indelible childhood memory of mine that I don't think of it as a "French film" even though it very much is. I don't think the idea of it being a "French film" really clicked with me until I saw a documentary about it not long ago, where it was mentioned that the film is one of the few surviving documentations of now-gone architecture in the Parisian quartier of Menilmontant.



I should remember this for a topic to write about in my French journal later on.

***


The 2019 365 Day Language Challenge : 38 / 365

• Day 38 (Feb. 7) -- French: Did Expressions du temps exercises 3 and 4 in L'expression française. Re-read through the first 3 chapters of TY Improve Your French--it's nice that my level is definitely above than what this text was designed for (B1-ish), but I still like the text a lot and I like going back and just reading through it from time to time. Did 7 review sessions on Duolingo.
  

[MamaPata]

Surviving another week is good, hooray!

I definitely share some of your French native content issues. Last time I read some original French books but the majority of what I watched was dubbing. So this time I am only counting native French content and it’s definitely a game changer. If I hadn’t suddenly gotten into podcasts, I would fail. I didn’t mind the first episode or so of Glacé (I am a big fan of snow and mountains) but it is so much of a type (and 80% of what is available on netflix in french). 6ish episode series based on a murder/crime, detective generally going increasingly mad, series gets overly convoluted to avoid an obvious fact explanation. They might be okay if they were one story to an episode but over a mini series, they end up reaching. I’ve now seen three or four in this super challenge and I can’t do any more. Pretty much all of the super challenge is going to be podcasts from here on (and hopefully some films, as I like a lot of French film!)

[DaveAgain]

I started watching Glacé (titled The Frozen Dead in English) on Netflix, despite not having finished the half dozen other series I have previously started watching for my French SC. I have no idea what's going on in this show. I don't think I would if I was watching it in English either. It's clearly modeled after Swedish style crime stories, but with that contemporary French narrative vagueness that I have a hard time penetrating sometimes. Or maybe it's just badly written.

But this is why I tend to watch a lot French-dubbed content on Netflix, because I just don't find a lot of original French TV and movies very appealing. I wish I did. French music, yes. French poetry, yes. But so much of what is being made for French TV and film right now isn't my cup of tea. This is true for me with English language content too--I think I'm just getting old and finicky--but perhaps because of the amount of content available to me in English, it's easier to sort through and find something palatable.

There's a thread where people have mentioned french language TV series they like: "French: your favourite TV shows".

Two films I've liked recently are: Meurtre en 45 tours and Pas de femmes.

[Cèid Donn]

Thanks. I've looked at the thread previously. Unfortunately, because of my extremely tight budget, if I have to pay to watch something outside of Netflix, it's off the table for me for the foreseeable future. I did find a playlist on You Tube of French films uploaded there, most of them probably not legally and a few of them are blocked for me because of my region. I know that at least one of the uploads in the playlist isn't legal, and that's enough for me to not link it here. But it does give me a few more options.

***

Un devezh mat eo bet. (Ça a été une bonne journée.)

That's a Clozemaster/Tatoeba sentence. And it has been a good-ish day for me. For starters, I did some Breton of Clozemaster--lately I've just been doing Irish. It's amazing how quickly my recall of Breton mutations gets rusty.

By the way, speaking of bonnes journées. did anyone else catch Jeopardy! today? They had a "Faux Amis" category and Alex Trebek was totally getting his French pronunciation on. Coin-coin ! It's certainly better than his Irish pronunciation...which we were treated to earlier in the week. Anyhow, I got all of them right except one where I guessed "manufacturing" but that wasn't the meaning of that particular word they were asking for.

For some reason, on Memrise, the site says my current overall streak is 39 days, but my streak for my French course is 42. I'm not sure how that happened. But I have been doing Memrise for French and Indonesian every day of the 365 challenge, yet I haven't been counting my Memrise time as going toward that challenge, only things like taking notes or practicing words from those courses in addition to doing the daily 15+ minutes. I'm not sure why I'm doing that--maybe because it's a "challenge" and so I got it into my head I should be challenging myself to do more than my regular routine. At this point, Memrise is just something that is just part of my normal day--aside from taking a break over the holidays I've been doing Memrise everyday since mid-June of last year.



(The main reason that the most recent days have been a steady light blue is because I'm doing fewer courses every a day than I was doing last year, so I can spend more time on other resources and media.)

***


The 2019 365 Day Language Challenge : 39 / 365

• Day 39 (Feb. 8) -- French: Did Expressions du temps exercise 5 in L'expression française. Did sentences in my journal using contrarier, mêler, bouleverser and gâcher, all from my Memrise course. Begin a new journal entry--will try to finish it tomorrow, because I want to get some work done on Duolingo before I go to bed.
  

[Cèid Donn]

Well, I finished Glacé. There were some small glimmers of hope between the 2nd and 4th episodes that it would improve, but it was all lies. The final episode was particularly awful. I pretty much hate-watched it for completion and to count the overbaked, ham-fisted predator/prey motifs. I'll add it to my SC total later when I have more stuff to update.

I also finally, finally got my Duolingo French tree to level 3 (all red or higher). It wasn't that hard to get the last 8-9 lessons up to red--it's just I was so sick of Duolingo that it took this long to find enough motivation to do. I also got the entire tree up to 100% strength. Now I need to do the same thing with the Irish tree.

Updates for now:


Short Story challenge

• Week 1: Gaelic -- "Top Twenties" by Michael Klevenhaus, from An Claigeann aig Damien Hirst, Leabhar 1
• Week 2: French -- "Les révoltés de la Bounty" by Jules Verne
• Week 3: Welsh -- "Côt Ruby" by Sarah Reynold, from Cawl: a Straeon Eraill
• Week 4: Gaelic -- "A' Bheinn Òir" by Iain Mac a' Ghobhainn
• Week 5: German -- "Vogelfrei" by Alastair Caimbeul, from Der Schädel von Damien Hirst. Band 1/An Claigeann aig Damien Hirst, Leabhar 1
• Week 6: Welsh -- "Dewis" by Lleucu Roberts, from Cawl: a Straeon Eraill
  
  For this week, I'm looking for another French short story on Gutenberg.org.

***

The 2019 365 Day Language Challenge : 41 / 365

• Day 40 (Feb. 9) -- French: Got my Duolingo French tree up to 100% strength (all decayed skills reviewed or leveled up) from 91% at the start of last week, and got 7 units leveled up from level 2 to level 3 and one other lesson from level 3 to level 5.
  
  
• Day 41 (Feb. 10) -- French: Leveled up the last three skills I needed to get my tree to level 3: Conditional, Present Subjunctive and perhaps the most annoying skill in the v3 French tree, Past Subjunctive. Afterwards I reviewed the subjunctive case and recorded a number of example sentences, and I also reviewed the ne explétif, and recorded example sentences for that too, as it comes up in the Duolingo subjunctive units without warning and I had completely forgotten about that.

Now I'm going to watch the Westminster Dog Show on TV and do some Memrise.

[Cèid Donn]

For some reason, on Memrise, the site says my current overall streak is 39 days, but my streak for my French course is 42.

I just noticed on my Memrise homepage that the site didn't record any activity on February 9 (yesterday), causing me to lose my overall streak, but I kept my streaks for my French course (44 days as of today) and Indonesian course (40 days as of today), because I did do work yesterday, just not at my usual Memrise time because I was doing Duolingo instead. The app I use on my tablet only tracks streaks for each course, so those streaks are fine. I think the main site isn't compensating for my time zone and is recording the overall streak by GMT. Given how far behind GMT I am (-7 hours), it is quite easy for me to do work every day in my own time zone but still manage to "skip" a day in GMT. Oh well. Streaks aren't vital, but they are nice records of my efforts.

[Cèid Donn]

Who's all watching the Westminster Dog show? I'm very happy that the Havanese won but the rest of tonight's winners--meh. With hounds I'm extremely biased toward sighthounds, and in particular, the Scottish Deerhound--this should surprise no one. My ACD is not impressed that a Bouvier des Flandres (aka the stinkiest herding dog ever) won her group. I am very amused by the number of other ACD owners who took to social media the say their ACDs weren't impressed either. We herding dog owners are every bit as stubborn and opinionated as our dogs. Aussie Cattle Dog Solidarity!

There used to be someone in my neighborhood who had a Bouvier des Flandres puppy. He used to bring it to the park by my house to try and train it and I'd watch from my living room, just face-palming because the guy was clearly out of his depth with this dog. I haven't seen them in ages. I hope that dog is well and safe. When I was younger, I rehabbed and retrained recused large breed dogs, in particular more challenging dogs like herding and sporting types, to be rehomed. Herding dogs definitely aren't for everyone.

Anyways, languages...

I'm not sure what's going on with the Book Club here. I'm on chapter 12 of the book, which is about half-way through it, so I'm reading. I just haven't seen anyone else posting any discussion. I tend not to much to say about a book until I'm finished, so I'm OK with this. I'm just not sure if we're suppose to be discussing it somewhere.

Yesterday night after I made my post, I went a little crazy with Duolingo and did a ton of test-outs to level up several units in my French tree from level 3 to level 4--all the units between the 2nd and 3rd checkpoints and few right after the 3rd checkpoint. I did some more this morning and will try to do some more again tonight, hopefully the rest up to the 4th checkpoint. It's kind of fun to see how quickly I can get through things, not letting myself think to much and rely on fast recall instead. I'll see how far I can get towards a completely level 5 tree before either I get bored with this or Duolingo converts my v3 volunteer-made tree over to the staff-made "Duo rides his red fox" tree.


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The 2019 365 Day Language Challenge : 42 / 365

• Day 42 (Feb. 11) -- Irish: In addition to doing some leveling up on my French tree, I reviewed 5 decayed level 5 skills on my Irish tree on Duolingo. Then I watched two episodes of Ros na Rún. I've watched all the ones on the TG4 site so I'm just re-watching them now, which it better than nothing. I wish there was some way to see past seasons. I also completed Unit 4: Relative Clauses II and Unit 5: Impersonal Forms in Intermediate Irish. Unit 5 was easy since that is one thing the Duolingo Irish tree covered fairly well.
  

[IronMike]

Who's all watching the Westminster Dog show? I'm very happy that the Havanese won but the rest of tonight's winners--meh. With hounds I'm extremely biased toward sighthounds, and in particular, the Scottish Deerhound--this should surprise no one.

If you've read my log you know I agree with you vis-a-vis the sighthounds, although I lean toward the basenji. Our breeder/vet had the basenji in this year's Westminster, so that was kinda exciting.

[MamaPata]

In terms of the book club, people can comment whenever (I’ve commented on stuff weeks after when I finally was able to finish the previous month’s book). And because this one is longer, I think that’s probably contributing.