Thank you, aquarius. That was helpful.
Ser wrote:Oh, I guess the punctuation is confusing you. The prefix "non-" is attaching to both "masculine" and "personal" ("non-[masculine personal] plurals"), so that term refers to everything that is not inside the "masculine and personal/human" category, which would include masculine animals, masculine objects, and anything with the feminine or neuter genders.
Yes, I think it was the punctuation confusing me. It's clear now, thank you!
POLISH:I've decided to completely ignore plurals at the moment, and I may just decide to pretend they don't exist forever.
I'm now 50% through my Preston book (pg 80), and moving on to other topics has been just what I needed to get out of the funk I was in about Polish.
As I'm going through the book, I keep remembering what it was like to start with grammar rules, word lists, declension tables, etc... when I initially started trying to learn Polish ~10 years ago and what a complete nightmare that was. Now that I have a good amount of CI, I'm finding that most of what's in the book makes me say, "aha! so that's what's going on!" It feels like I can absorb most of it relatively well (except for the whole pluralization nightmare). I don't know why it keeps shocking me just how much better it is to learn grammar once I already have a grip on vocabulary and sentence structure and common phrases. I know some people do really well with learning grammar first (so I don't want to debate anything), but I really just don't get how they do it.
Right now, my routine looks like this:1) 4 pages of the Preston book, writing out the rules/points in a notebook, then doing the translation practice, checking my answers against the book, and rewriting anything that I didn't translate 100% correctly. This has been taking me ~1 hour.
2) Watch 1-2 episodes of Rodzinka.pl (they are ~20 min each) and occasionally jotting down notes, but often writing nothing. A few of the recent things I've learned from the show:
nie pali się = there's no rush (there's the "się" at the end!),
akurat teraz nie = not right now. "akurat" is one of those slippery words that keeps showing up with slightly different meanings and I feel like I can never get a grip on it.
3) 1 new level of Memrise with some speed reviewing (~15-20 minutes)
4) time permitting, something relating to my audiobook; either relistening to an older chapter, reading a new chapter in Eng, then listening+reading to it in Polish, or intensively rereading a chapter with a lot of note-taking OR watching/rewatching Ultraviolet w/ subs.
Once I'm done with the Preston book, I think I'll try to incorporate more writing into my routine, because that is sorely lacking and possibly taking some lessons with the tutor that PP mentioned.
ITALIAN:I've listened to another 2 episodes of the Alle Otto della Sera podcast
La Società dei Ghetti. Each episode is 20 minutes long, so it's easy to fit one in while I'm doing something mindless.
I'm currently testing out some new Italian podcasts to see if I can find anything interesting. The podcasts I'm currently test-driving:
100 Cose Belle;
Fottuti Geni;
Milano, Europa;
Radio3 Scienza.
I finished episode 7 of
Lucifer in Italian. This last episode felt exceptionally easy to understand. I wrote down a bunch of useful phrases/sentences as a reminder, like:
quello che mi pare = whatever I want and
mi metto sempre nei guai = I'm always getting myself into trouble. And I learned that
la cauzione = bail, so:
Lui ha già pagato la cauzione = he already made bail. There was a point where Lucifer said, "
sono andato fuori del seminato" which I've never heard before. From context, I think it means something like "I was really out of line" but I'll have to find out about that one.
No
LATIN in the past few days. Was extra busy + headache. I could have probably figured out a way to make it happen, but I'm doing this for fun, so I don't want to stress about fitting it in.