Things have been a bit hectic since I got back. Various activities and organizations have had parties and things to mark that they were over for the summer, plus I had a bunch of appointments, so I’ve been a bit busier than I’d planned for. In addition, I caught a cold in Bratislava and that took it’s time to get better. One of the activities that is officially over for the summer, the evening Norwegian training, we have decided to continue with on an unofficial basis. We can’t use the library since it closes at 16:00 during the summer, but there are a bunch of tables in another part of the culture-house where we can sit and talk, so we’ve been doing that. A couple of people asked me if we could also meet up to speak in English and I agreed, so we might be starting up “English training” in a similar manner. However, I haven’t heard back from them, so I don’t know yet when or if it will happen. I wish there were some groups for some of the languages I’m learning. That would be loads of fun.
While most of Europe is suffering a blistering heatwave, we’ve barely cracked double digits some days, so it’s very comfortable weather for studying, I just have to get on with it. I had a pretty good routine started, but it keeps getting interrupted by other activities, appointments that take far too much time, illness and my recurring exhaustion. I think most of the start-of-summer parties are over and I only have one more appointment left – to get new eye-glasses (I need progressive lenses and they cost about three times what my old glasses cost. Getting old is expensive!) – so the only things likely to interrupt my studies now are my own exhaustion and laziness.
Japanese:Since the introduction of Polish, Japanese has been suffering some neglect. I don’t get to it every day anymore. Part of that has been because of appointments and parties though, so it might get better. I’ve hardly done any new cards in Anki since I came back and some days, I even miss my reviews. I think I might also be suffering a bit of Anki-burnout, so I should probably try to just keep up the reviews and not worry about new cards for a while. Maybe I should try to get back to watching Polar Bear Café to reignite my enthusiasm. Japanese is the one language that always seems to break me. I love it, but I tend to get stuck in the study routine and forget that I love it. What I need is a good dose of enjoyable TV, like I get with Spanish, but I have trouble finding TV shows I like, that are available here and that I can turn off the subtitles on. Maybe I should look a little harder. I haven’t even looked lately. I really enjoyed watching Polar Bear Café on Animelon because I could have English or Japanese or no subs as I wished, but then it stopped working for me.
PolishI’ve not got in nearly as much Peppa Pig as I’d hoped. Polish is also suffering from me having too much else to do. I’ve only done about four hours so far. Even so, I’ve noticed a big difference. At first, Polish seemed very shushy and mumbly, but now I’m much more able to distinguish the sounds and even recognize words. Sometimes I can parse several sentences in a row if they are short. I wouldn’t say that I know all the words in those sentences, but that I can recognize what they must be. I have also learned a few words and phrases, but mostly to recognize them rather than to produce them. I keep feeling like I’ve almost got a few cases figured out too, but then I get confused again. I assume Polish has three genders and an animate/inanimate distinction in the masculine, and possibly some irregularities, so I suppose I shouldn’t be too surprised that cases are a little hard to figure out just from Peppa Pig. I’ll keep going with just Peppa for a while, but then I think I’d like to add in some textbook work. I think that will really speed things up. I actually like Peppa Pig a lot, but I’ve found that the official channels are not always that good. It’s not just the Polish one, because I’ve tested a few others too. For some reason, they frequently cut up the episodes and then paste them together again. So, you get two minutes from one episode, then two minutes from another. Why would anyone do that?! The episodes are only five minutes long to begin with and it makes it very confusing when they are chopped up. It doesn’t always help to look for videos that claim to be complete episodes either. Sometimes they lie! I found some unofficial channels though, so I might just stick to those for a while rather than trying to search through a mass of videos looking for one that actually has complete episodes.
YouTube has apparently noticed that I’m learning Polish due to my watching Peppa Pig and subscribing to several Polish learning channels for later use. It also knows I like telenovelas since I watch one almost every day in Spanish. And it just put two and two together and now I’m being inundated in recommendations for Polish telenovelas or soaps or something. So, it looks like Polish has the potential to be lots of fun once I get to a level where I can enjoy native media.
GermanI’m still continuing to work my way through an A2 level textbook. I don’t think I’ll manage to squeeze in more than one unit per week, though I’d had hopes to go a little faster. I could do it if I didn’t write out all the exercises, but then I wouldn’t get as much out of it. I find writing everything out longhand really improves my learning. A2 is far below my actual level, but at the same time, I feel I need to really drill the basics and overlearn them to overcome all my doubts and uncertainties, and to keep myself from relying too much on Norwegian. I’ve read a bit more of my novel, but that’s going pretty slowly. It’s a teensy bit too hard. Some parts are no problem at all and some bits are just a little challenging, but then there are bits where the main character is talking to some working-class people, or worse, eavesdropping on them, and then the dialogues are written in dialect and I struggle with those parts. If he’s eavesdropping, it means both sides of the conversation are in dialect and then I sometimes get confused. I’m nearly halfway though, so I think I’ll try to finish and then maybe choose something easier for my next book – either another Agatha Christie translation or perhaps a Michael Ende children’s book.
I also got distracted by a different novel, in Norwegian, but I’m finished that now. If anyone is learning Swedish, though, and likes Agatha Christie style mysteries, I would really like to recommend the Swedish author, Maria Lang. She’s obviously been translated to Norwegian and maybe a few other languages, so maybe you can enjoy her works even if you aren’t learning Swedish.
SpanishAfter a lot of procrastination, I finally bought a C1 textbook. It should come early next week. I’m looking forward to getting started on it. I haven’t really seriously studied Spanish in ages and now I’m feeling very enthusiastic about the next step. I think all my TV watching and novel reading has paid off and I’ve learned a lot from it, but I haven’t done enough production or grammar study lately and now when I try to talk or write, although I can manage pretty well, I find a lot of doubts creep in. I start questioning whether I’m using the right word or the right tense and mood. I’m also just very eager to improve and get over that hump from “mostly pretty fluent” to “sounds reasonably intelligent”.
Yesterday, I had a Skype language exchange with someone I met at the Gathering. Generally speaking, you don’t meet a lot of people at the Gathering that are interested in working on their English, but I was very lucky to meet a young Spanish woman who is still working on her English and we decided to practice together. It went pretty well considering I’ve barely used Spanish other than passively for a month or so. I seemed to manage OK, but every time I noticed I was speaking Spanish, I would suddenly forget the entire language. I need to work on that a bit. I suppose it will never be perfect since I still have that problem sometimes in Norwegian, but it could be better.