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

[jeff_lindqvist]

I am feeling even less positive about this than I was last night, and am toying with the idea of just not doing Duolingo for a while, to see if they reverse this update.[...]

Yeah, I think I'll be taking a break from Duolingo for a bit.

Yeah, yesterday I realized that they had made some changes since the app said that I hadn't earned enough XP to keep my streak. Not that the XP matters, not that I care about the points, or the lingots (which I can't use since I've bought everything...), but still... It has gone a lot worse during the past six months. I'll do something else as my daily mini reviews.

[Cèid Donn]

Yeah, yesterday I realized that they had made some changes since the app said that I hadn't earned enough XP to keep my streak. Not that the XP matters, not that I care about the points, or the lingots (which I can't use since I've bought everything...), but still... It has gone a lot worse during the past six months. I'll do something else as my daily mini reviews.

Yep. I understand. I left a comment on one of the popular threads about this, expresses how I as a veteran user have simply gotten tired of the needless readjustments I have to make to keep using Duolingo in a useful way, because updates like these aren't an improvement. The XP itself doesn't matter--it's how this most recent change, which does nothing to improve our user experience or our learning progress--throws off the momentum that users like you and me have going where we are expecting to be able to log on and be able to do X amount of review/practice in Y amount of time and have a little token in the way of XP or maintaining our streaks to show for it, just as part of our daily study routine. And we're not the users who were causing the problem that motivated this change, so it's just a pointless disruption.

I had a streak freeze in place yesterday but I'm not going to log on and re-new it today. I had a 244 day streak, which for me is great. But I know the only thing they want from users is for us to use their product regularly so to generate data for them, and so the best way to let them know we're unhappy is to just stop using their product. It stinks, but at least both of us are experienced language learners who can adjust and use other resources if need be.

Speaking of which, time to adjust:

• Get my Duolingo Irish tree to a level 5 tree
• Finish Intermediate Irish
• Complete the Clozemaster Irish course
• Focus on improving reading skills

From Clozemaster practice it seems my Irish spelling and grammar are pretty decent for my current level, but I do lack in vocabulary knowledge, so reading more would probably do me some good. I'll probably be adding the Sgéilíní na Finne to my Irish workload--I know they are pre-spelling reform, but I'm really very comfortable with both Scottish Gaelic and Irish orthography so I don't think this will be a big issue. I had started working on them once before but never completed them. For something smaller for daily reading practice, I have the Talk Irish Proverb a Day list. They're charge a small amount for the MP3s+PDF now, but I think I got my download free and then never used it. I only remembered I had it when I was digging through some old Celtic language files on my external harddrive looking for more Irish stuff to use.

And there is of course online articles a plenty. I don't think I'll be hurting for materials for this.

Late night edit:

I didn't think I need to make a new post today just for this, so I'm tagging onto the end of my earlier post.

The 2019 365 Day Language Challenge : 65 / 365

• Day 64 (Mar. 5) -- Irish: Continued with Unit 2 of GgS. Did 100 sentence on Clozemaster and finished Unit 9 in Intermediate Irish.
  
  
• Day 64 (Mar. 5) -- Irish: Went through and shadowed all the audio in Units 1 and 2 in GgS. Did 120 sentences on Clozemaster. Read through the first reading in Sgéilíní na Finne and listened to the audio first without the text and then with.

[Cèid Donn]

Another insomnia-riddle night. I tried watching some French videos on You Tube as I do often on nights like this, but I got sidetracked by this charming channel, Yourway2Norway:



Really, Americans are a lot more like Norwegians than might be apparent at first.

For some reason after watching about 4 or 5 of Ronald's videos, You Tube started recommending Steven Kaufmann videos to me and I quickly informed You Tube that I wasn't interested. You Tube polyglots just fatigue me. None of them ever say anything that isn't either common sense based in a little experience or isn't already widely understood or is just subjective opinions that I'm not looking for. They just serve it up with a manufactured aura of authority, and pfft, I don't care. If anyone else finds these people's videos useful, cool, but I would recommend this tidbit of Philosophy 101: Don't be a fan. Fans aren't thinkers. And if you're really going to progress in learning a language, you are going to encounter problems that you will need to be able to solve on your own, which means you will have to think critically about all the advice and information you've been given along the way so to gauge whether it's useful for you or not.

Doing French like a boss

Dix pour cent isn't growing on me--I'm just not terribly fond of fictional TV/films about the entertainment industry as a rule--but I am getting the hang of understanding the cast. I find my French listening comprehension has really improved beyond my own expectations since I returned to language learning last May...that is, if I make the effort to actively listen. Oh, that dreaded effort!

To fill the void left by Duolingo in my daily French routine, I'm using the FSI Basic course. It is indeed very basic, at least the first volume. I am very tempted to just skip to volume 2. The audio quality is not the best, but it's nice to hear real speakers rather than TTS, which seems a little too commonplace with French these days. I think TTS is very useful and amazing technology, but I feel it's becoming overused thanks to the ubiquity of language learning apps.

I'm allowing myself a little break from more focused French grammar work so to do more reading. I will start Les Hirondelles de Kaboul soon, hopefully this weekend. My copy is sitting here in between my keyboard and monitor, so I can't ignore it. But I want to finish my short story for the week before I start. I also need to finish Les Trois Mousquetaires. For my next SC book, I toyed around with reading Tom Jones in French. I should get SC credit just for reading the French Wiki page on it. But I don't think I will do that any time soon. Somewhere in my books I have a copy of Camus' Le Peste that I never read (I've read it in English, just not in the original French), but I suspect it's in a box that is far back in the mess in my garage. So I will need something else to read until my copy of Le Peste surfaces. I don't really want to read another Gutenberg e-book so I may hunt around Amazon for a cheap used book of some sort.

Pour moi, la semaine a été difficile et je suis heureuse que ce soit terminée. Voici une chanson pour le weekend:



My Big Fat German Review

I really enjoyed reading Metro 2033 in German, and now I'd rather just read more in German than go back to studying grammar. I'm a hot mess when it comes to writing in German, and it'd be nice if I could improve on that. But it's just not a priority for me right now. So I think I'll just focus on reading in German for the foreseeable future with my German review. I will however make a modest effort to do some German on Clozemaster though, as that's pretty easy and convenient to do.

***

The 2019 365 Day Language Challenge : 67 / 365

• Day 66 (Mar. 7) -- Irish: Started Unit 3 of GgS. Did 120 sentences, both review and new, on Clozemaster and watched 2 episodes of Ros na Rún.
  
  
• Day 64 (Mar. 8) -- Irish: Finsihed Unit 3 in Ggs and looked over Unit 10 in Intermediate Irish. I'll write out the exercises tomorrow when I (hopefully) will have had a better night's sleep. Did 100 sentences, both review and new, on Clozemaster--I'm about 28% through the course now. Re-read the first story, "Teach Mhicheáil Ruaidh"," in Sgéilíní na Finne and listened to the audio of the second story, "Thuit sé ins an Eabar," 2 times without the text before reading through the text.

[Brun Ugle]

The Norwegian grocery store video was depressingly accurate. They wonder why everyone is getting so fat, but the foods that can be found in abundance and variety and at a reasonable price are all heavily processed and mostly things like frozen pizza, potato chips and sweets. They always have new kinds in the stores. But unprocessed fresh food is much more limited in variety and very expensive. It’s getting slowly better though. Now it’s possible to find things like lentils in an ordinary grocery store. It wasn’t when I came here.

[Cèid Donn]

Americans as a whole have become dependent on processed and pre-packaged food, so that video was depressingly relateable for me. I can't find affordable fresh ingredients to make my own beef or fish stock here and struggle to find good collards or other less popular vegetables, but every grocery store in town has aisles full of frozen pizza and beer! As for lentils, yep, I can get then here, but I have to go the specialty grocery store here where they are sold in bulk, because the regular chain store nearer to my house doesn't carry them at all.

I taught myself to cook while in grad school to save money and to stop eating foods I am allergic to (I have both soy and corn allergies--just try finding processed foods that don't contain one or the other here in the US!). But in reality, most Americans my age or younger largely don't even have basic cooking skills and living entirely on food that's processed or pre-prepared (including restaurant food) is common. It's become a social media joke in US culture about how dishwashers are used for storage, since people don't cook at home and thus never need to wash very many dishes.

***

Short Story challenge

Week 10! I wonder how other people are doing with their Short Story challenges. I don't think I've seen anyone else mentioning it in their logs. I haven't met the 5 stories per language goal in any of my languages yet, despite dropping Indonesian and Japanese from my goal. I'm way behind Irish though--still need to find more stories (Sgéilliní na Finne are way too short). That's the only language I don't have enough stories to complete this challenge, and it's weird that I'm having trouble finding stories that would be suitable because Irish literature is suppose to be known for its short stories.

• 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
• Week 7: Irish -- "Madra na n-ocht gCos" (from oral tradition)
• Week 8: Gaelic -- "Tha Adhaircean Mòra air a' Chroadh a tha as Cheò" by Màiri Anna NicDhòmhnaill, from An Claigeann aig Damien Hirst, Leabhar 1
• Week 9: French -- "Boule de suif" by Guy de Maupassant
• Week 10: German -- "Das Navi" by Pàdraig MacAoidh, from Der Schädel von Damien Hirst. Band 1/An Claigeann aig Damien Hirst, Leabhar 1

***

Edit: meant to add this funny little German video. It's not related to the short story I read this week beyond the title, but the story's title reminded me of it so here it is:



***

Edit 2: In other news, the Kervaker (Breton) site is back up!

[Cèid Donn]

I hate Daylights Savings. Just wanted to say that. Anyhow...

I've been listening to Radio-Canada almost non-stop when I'm at home. I've been listening to it right before falling to sleep and then when I wake up. It's really something I needed for my overall French studies. I think passive listening is much more useful than a lot of other people think, because in my experience it's really the best way to develop one's intuitive sense of prosody. I honestly don't think I've met a L2 speaker who had really good speaking skills who hadn't spent a lot of time passively listening to their TL, whether it was via deliberate attempts to include passive listening into their learning like I do, or from spending a lot of time in environments where they are passively exposed to the spoken language.

The accents on Radio-Canada haven't been too difficult for me to follow, since everyone seemed to be speaking mostly standard French, mercifully. I was particularly amused when I walked out of the room to refill my water and came back to Acadia Hour on Radio-Canada (not the actual name of the show, which I had missed). I had no clue what they were talking about, although I heard Halifax mentioned a couple of times. I felt like I had been flung across to continent back to Nova Scotia with flashbacks of being stuck in a minivan shuttle tearing around the winding roads of Cape Breton on the way to the Gaelic College on an very hot July day with an extremely chatty Acadian dude yakking in my ear the entire way because he was so excited to meet a Franco-American.

I went to You Tube to see if I could find a good video of Acadian French speakers and came across this silly video. I'm sorry but having dealt with Quebecois gamers in my MMO past, this made me laugh out loud.



Lianne wasn't kidding when she said the Radio-Canada site had a lot of content--I was browsing through it today and found free audio books! Vive Radio-Canada!

***

The 2019 365 Day Language Challenge : 69 / 365

• Day 68 (Mar. 9) -- Irish: Worked on Unit 4 in GgS. Did exercise 1-3 in Unit 10 of Intermediate Irish, and did 75 sentences on Clozemaster. Watched one episode of Ros na Rún and watched 6 videos on the BlocTG4 channel, all pretty short ones, and not all of them entirely in Irish.
  
  
• Day 69 (Mar. 10) -- Irish: Took a break from GgS today to finish up the exercises for Unit 10 in Intermediate Irish. Did 75 sentence on Clozemaster. Read through the 2nd and 3rd story of Sgéilliní na Finne.

[Cèid Donn]

I still hate Daylights Savings. I overslept this morning because when I woke up the first time I thought it was still the middle of the night, because it was so dark, and forgetting that I live in a country that is stupid enough to still being doing the DST nonsense, I rolled over and went back to sleep.

I started listening to the audiobook De Synthèse by Karoline Georges that is available for free on Radio-Canada. I love the reader on the recording (Magalie Lépine-Blondeau) and am able to understand a lot of it from listening, but not enough to feel confident that I'm really following the narrative--it seems to get pretty artful and abstract. Lovely prose, but a tad confusing. I broke down and bought the cheapest copy of the book that I could find--after the exchange rate it came to about 15 USD with shipping from Canada to the US. I suppose that's the best I can expect for a recent non-English title from a small, out-of-country imprint.

After I has done my Irish studying for the morning, I was in the middle of organizing files I had downloaded from Ranganna.com and somewhere got distracted by some Irish book search rabbit hole that ended with me buying An tIriseoir after learning there's a free audiobook of it online. The free audiobook online is, of course, on Soundcloud, without the option to download (ugh), so I spent the rest of the morning with my good, good friend, Audacity. So I actually listened to the whole audiobook (just over 150 minutes) in one sitting this morning, but don't ask me what it is about, because my Irish listening comprehension isn't that great beyond Ros na Rún and young adult You Tube vlogs so I haven't a clue. But I got the Kindle ebook, so I can work on that, perhaps do some intensive reading to get my listening skills up a bit. That Soundcloud channel for Cois Life seems to have other audiobooks on there so I will look into those once I'm done with An tIriseoir.

So the month's not even halfway over and I managed to spend all of my tiny monthly budget for "extra expenses" on language learning materials. Like a boss. I had already spent some of it buying a super cheap used copy of Atemschaukel by Herta Müller to read next month as part of my German review. I guess a blu-ray of Moana will have to wait for another day.

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The 2019 365 Day Language Challenge : 70 / 365

• Day 70 (Mar. 11) -- Irish: Finished Unit 5 of GgS and then reviewed Units 1-5. Worked on the third Sgéilliní na Finne story, "Ar Fasgadh in a Shúil," again. Read the first half of Chapter 1 of An tIriseoir after sitting through the audiobook. Highlighted words to begin a word list for the book tomorrow. Listening to the audiobook took up most of my time this morning, so I will have to do my Clozemaster Irish sentences later today.

[Cèid Donn]

I miss studying Japanese. I'm neglecting Welsh and Breton. I wish I could work on some Swedish.

I'm able to make just enough time for Gaelic in between my French and Irish stuff, plus I am keeping up with Indonesian on Memrise (71 day streak on my main course), but anything beyond that makes me feel overextended at the moment. Part of it is I'm trying to do a lot every day with French and Irish so that's taking up a lot of my scheduled study time. I think I need to try again to set aside two or three study times during the week for Welsh at least. I'm reading a Welsh story for the SSC this week and it is harder than it should be, and that's only because I haven't been working of Welsh for a few weeks. I hate that the Welsh Clozemaster course was so short--that was a nice way to get in a little Welsh every day. Hmmm, I need to think about how I can fit in more Welsh.

***

French Films SC : 62 / 100 -- 5588 minutes (+808 minutes)

• 8 episodes of Dix pour cent - 416 minutes
• De synthèse (audiobook) - 300 minutes
• Paul dans le Nord (audiobook) - 92 minutes
  
  I managed to get through the first 2 seasons of Dix pour cent. I still don't like any of these characters but the show is overall tolerable. Both audiobooks are free on Radio-Canada. I really did not care for Paul dans le Nord. It's part of an ongoing series by that author that apparently is popular enough in Canada, and I liked that it was acted out by different voice actors, but , it was a very dull 90 minutes that didn't not reward me nearly enough for sitting though its slangy dialogue and gratuitous profanity. De synthèse was lovely (and confusing) enough to make me break down and buy a physical copy.

French Books SC : 29 / 100 -- 1443 pages (+67 pages)

• still reading Les trois Mousquetaires -- 297 pages completed (+67)
  
  I'm using a Mobi copy from Gutenberg and I keep losing my place. It's maddening. The Kindle app doesn't properly support Gutenberg's embedded chapter markers, but other e-reader apps for Android that I've tried that do support the chapter markers don't have adjustable font, which I need because I have so much trouble reading small fonts on screens. Who makes an e-reader app for mobile devices that doesn't support adjustable fonts??? I really want to read Le Comte de Monte-Cristo sometime for this SC but I can't deal with this e-reader situation and my local library does not have a French copy of it. Spanish, yes, but not French.

Gaelic Films SC : 22 / 100 -- 1976 minutes (+528 minutes)

• Completed first viewing the Guthan nan Eilean Series 2: Generations You Tube playlist - 86 minutes
• "A' Bheinn Òir" (audiobook) - 112 minutes
• An Creanaiche (audiobook) - 182 minutes
• Fo Bhuid (audiobook) - 148 minutes
  
  I enjoyed this Guthan nan Eilean series a lot more than the previous one, Outdoors. I will be watching them with the transcript next. Since I remembered we can use audiobooks after my last SC update, I've been focusing on listening to the ones I have for Gaelic. All of these I listened to without the text specifically for this challenge, which in the case of "A' Bheinn Òir" meant listening to it again, which it fine, as it's very amusing to me to hear a story about the American wild west told in Gealic.

Gaelic Books SC : 19 / 100 -- 940 pages (+118 pages)

• completed 6 letters from Leabhar nan Litrichean since last update - 6 pages
• Ann an Glac Ghilleasbaig - 112 pages

***

The 2019 365 Day Language Challenge : 72 / 365

• Day 71 (Mar. 12) -- Irish: Worked on Unit 6 of GgS. Reviewed 160 sentences on Clozemaster. Read chapter 1, from the start, of An tIriseoir.
  
  
• Day 72 (Mar. 13) -- Irish: Reviewed Unit 6 of GsS and started Unit 11 of Intermediate Irish. Reviewed 146 sentences on Clozemaster. Copied the words I highlighted in An tIriseoir so far--18 words--into my Irish notebook with definitions and a few extra notes. Worked on ther fourth story on Sgéillin na Finne. With these very short pieces, I like listening to the story first, then reading carefully for comprehension and then listening 2x with the text.

[Cèid Donn]

I went back to the Say Something in Welsh site--haven't visited in quite a while since I had downloaded all the content I wanted to use that didn't require payment--and apparently they have reorganized the site a bit. For starters, the North Welsh course appears gone and now there is only one course, the one that had been the South Welsh course. I don't mind this, as I was using the South one anyhow, but I am curious why they decided to do this. I couldn't find anything on their forum there. I wonder if the North course just wasn't being used as much as the South one.

The SSIW admin assures people that regardless of what dialect they learn, they will be understood anywhere in Wales. I appreciate this. I haven't ever encountered anything with Welsh that suggests otherwise. This is the same attitude I encountered when learning Scottish Gaelic. Irish--and to a much lesser extent, Breton--requires a bit more navigation through the issues and politics of the different dialects and it gets fatiguing.

This where I say to myself, I'm so glad a learned Scottish Gaelic first.

Anyhow, I will work through the free SSIW stuff again--that will keep me busy for at least the rest of this month and I certainly can use the speaking practice. After that I think I should shell out for the sub, at least for a couple of months.

While I was looking around the SSIW site. I checked out their Manx content. There isn't a lot there, but I immediately recognised the speaker in the files as Adrian Cain. He's sort of the Manx guy--he's the Manx Gaelic Development Officer for Culture Vannin, the main official organization behind Manx education and revival in the Isle of Man. This is his Twitter account, for anyone interested. Adrian is a really great guy in the world of Celtic language revitalization and preservation, because he's so positive and eager to educate people on the cultural, social and individual benefits about preserving and learning these languages.

[Cèid Donn]

It's the windy season here and the weather over the past few days has been awful for anyone with lungs. While technically not dust storms, the winds here have been very strong (gusts up to 60-70 mph) and blowing a lot of dirt and dust along the way. Even with every window closed, the air in the house tastes faintly of dirt and fine dust seeps in through any crack and gets on everything. I just picked up a book I was reading last night and had to dust it off, even though my room's window has been closed. It's just miserable.



***

I've been reading a lot this past week so I thought I'd update my Goodreads account. I tidied up my long-neglected account there for the Short Story challenge back in January and never really went back until yesterday. I had signed up for the yearly Goodreads Reading challenge there with 40 books, but some of the books I'm reading aren't on Goodreads yet. I would need to verify my email to be able to enter the books myself, but I can't get the email Goodreads is suppose to send you to verify you email. It just doesn't show up in my email, anywhere. I even tried using a different email. I've been trying for 2 days, and I just give up. I wasted so much time on this last night that I lost track of time and then, when the news about the mass shooting in NZ broke, I was following the news rather than thinking of what language stuff I still needed to finish, and I ended up losing my Memrise streaks for my Indonesian and Gaelic courses. Oh well.

This issue with being unable to get the verification email from Goodreads must be a problem with how I created my current account through Amazon 3 years ago. I had deleted my first account when Amazon bought out Goodreads, and I'm regretting that now. Anyhow, now with some of the books I've read this year or am reading, like Ann an Glac Ghilleasbhaig, An tIriseoir and Cawl: a Straeon Eraill, I can't give myself credit for towards the Goodreads Reading Challenge. It says I'm one book behind, and I'm not.

***

By the way, I am reading some books in English too. Right now I'm reading The Black Tides of Heaven by JY Yang, a queer, nonbinary Singaporean author who writes in English (sadly, there are no translations of their work yet). They write "silkpunk" speculative fiction--like steampunk, but rather than drawing from Victorian era culture, silkpunk writers draw from earlier eras of Asian cultures. So if you're looking for something in English that is a little different, check out JY Yang. I find their writing very accessible and lively with a lot of natural humor. If you want a taste, one of Yang's older short stories is free to read on Uncanny Magazine's website. (Uncanny magazine is a great place to find new writers of speculative fiction outside of the mainstream.)

This book is part of a 4-part series, and yesterday Tor Books put the whole series on sale in the Amazon Kindle store to promote the fourth book (that's available for pre-order). So I bought The Black Tides and the second book, The Red Threads of Fortune. I hope they stay on sale long enough for me to get the third one when I get my next paycheck.

***

When I bought the two book by JY Yang, Amazon gave me two $5 credits towards another Kindle purchase. I don't know why--maybe it was a separate promotion from the Amazon Kindle store. But I carefully read all the fine print before accepting them to make sure Jeff Bezos wasn't going to be charging my credit card for some service down the line (Amazon has gotten so bad about that--be sure read everything before accepting any offer from them), and then immediately used the credits to buy a new Gaelic e-book, Saoghal Eile, and a new French e-book, L'Univers expliqué à mes petits-enfants. The audiobook of the latter, read by the author and his granddaughter, is available on Radio-Canada. I've been listening to the audiobook the past couple of nights--the author's accent takes some getting used to but it's on topics I'm somewhat familiar with so it's not too bad.

***

Speaking of things that are not too bad, I'm really enjoying Les Hironelles de Kaboul, as much as one can "enjoy" a story about such awful things. Yes, his vocabulary ia pretty broad and I'm learning some new words, but I'm not finding it unwieldy. I find Jasmina Khadra's prose to be very easy to follow--he writes very impressionistically when he's not writing dialogue, so I find it quite easy to get the gist of what he means without understanding every single word--granted, if I did understand every word, I could immerse myself more in the story, but for my level of French reading, I'm not having any problem understanding the characters and the story. I'm not sure how deeply I would want to immerse myself into this novel, though, as the story is very difficult, emotionally and psychologically.

My copy of Les Hirondelles is a used copy, and when I got it, it seemed clean. But yesterday,when I got to chapter 8, I found not just someone else's underlining, but someone else's badly done underlining. Ugh. I don't know what's worse--florescent highlighter ink or this sort of bad underlining:




Well, this copy was dirt cheap so I guess I can't really complain. Oddly, it's only in chapter 8. The rest of the book is clean. It's like whoever owned this before just read that one chapter and that's all. Very weird.

I was reading up on Khadra, whose real name is Mohammed Moulessehoul, and it seems the reason he choose a female pen name was because when he started publishing his work, he was in the Algerian army, and his writing would have been subjected to military censorship. So to circumvent that, he published under a female name.

***

While I haven't been posting about this. I am doing the French FSI course, about 30 minutes every other day. Yes it's a tad boring, which is why I'm not being intensive about it, but one thing I wasn't expecting--that no one else seems to mention--is how tired my mouth is after doing these drills. I think it must be the pace of the drills because I don't have this problem with SSIW. SSIW is paced nicely to give people a chance to keep up, but I can barely speak in any language after 30 minutes of those FSI drills--my frontal lobe feels fried and my mouth just feels like rubber. Jeezus.



***

Short Story challenge

I am admittedly getting a little tired with this challenge and may wrap it up soon. I think I've accomplished a lot, even if I didn't met my goals of reading 5 short stories in each language. At the start of the year that seemed like a reasonable goal, but now, 11 weeks later, it seems kind of ridiculous and I'm wanting to spend the time I'm spending on this challenge on other things.

• 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
• Week 7: Irish -- "Madra na n-ocht gCos" (from oral tradition)
• Week 8: Gaelic -- "Tha Adhaircean Mòra air a' Chroadh a tha as Cheò" by Màiri Anna NicDhòmhnaill, from An Claigeann aig Damien Hirst, Leabhar 1
• Week 9: French -- "Boule de suif" by Guy de Maupassant
• Week 10: German -- "Das Navi" by Pàdraig MacAoidh, from Der Schädel von Damien Hirst. Band 1/An Claigeann aig Damien Hirst, Leabhar 1
• Week 11: Welsh -- "Cawl" by Mared Lewis, from Cawl: a Straeon Eraill

***

The 2019 365 Day Language Challenge : 72 / 365

• Day 73 (Mar. 14) -- Irish: No GgS. Worked on Unit 11 in Intermediate Irish. Did 100 sentences, new and review, on Clozemaster. Watched on episode of Rós na Run.
  
  
• Day 74 (Mar. 15) -- Irish: Started Unit 7 of GgS. Did 100 sentences on Clozemaster. Listened to chapter 2 of An tIriseoir and then read through it. I will copy the highlighted words in my notebook tomorrow