ITALIAN:Grammar:I did a little bit more in my
Practice Makes Perfect book; this chapter is on present tense verbs, which I thought I would just blow right through until I realized that the makers of the book decided to sneak in CONGIUNTIVO (subjunctive) in this chapter. This is a monster and I knew I'd have to deal with it at some point, I just wasn't expecting to deal with it right now. When I started going through all the verb patterns for congiuntivo in present tense, I really felt some serious despair.
But, rather than give into it, I decided to take things way slower than the way the book was doing things and only focus on
-are verbs in present tense congiuntivo. I studied the pattern and realized that it wasn't too bad; I can definitely handle this in small doses. I found this very useful site
https://www.idiomax.com/italian-verb-list.aspx which has a huge list of common verbs that you can click on for instant conjugations. I'm in the process of conjugating ALL of the
-are verbs on that list for regular present tense and congiuntivo present tense, then confirming that my work is correct using the site.
I've got about 6 pages worth of conjugations done and I think I can do this form in my sleep at this point (and I'm still on verbs that start with the letter "c"). I could probably move on to
-ire or
-ere verbs, but I want to really nauseate myself with these
-are verbs to reduce the risk of confusing myself once all the verbs are in play.
Reading:I'm up to page 142 of my Italian novel. I was about to get excited about the fact that I'm 1/3 done, but then I realized that I should really go back through the whole thing and take some more notes; there is a ton of new-to-me colloquial expressions and vocabulary, and it would really be a shame to just move on and not try to get more out of it. Since I'm not looking forward to rereading this, I'll probably take a break and do something else before circling back to it.
I have been jotting down a few things here and there when something really stands out, like:
mi ha tirato il bidone = s/he stood me up, s/he scammed meavere i mezzi = to have the meansfare quattrini = to make some dough (money)essere drogato/a di... = to be really obsessed with something, to really, really like it (lit: to be drugged by...)Transcription:-I'm halfway through the second episode of Lucifer. I have the vague impression that it's getting slightly easier, but it still takes me about an hour to transcribe 6 or 7 minutes of dialogue.
POLISH:I won't be officially returning to Polish for another week, but I find myself feeling more and more excited about resuming.
LATIN:I've been meaning to ask this question for a while. The Cambridge book uses pronunciation markers over some vowels, just like in the example sentence Elsa Maria quoted:
Elsa Maria wrote:Statua nāsum frāctum habēbat.
but, as far as I can tell, they don't seem to correspond to any particular way of pronouncing those vowels, so clearly I must be missing something. I was expecting that they would indicate a hard vowels (like the "o" in boat) but they seem to also be over soft vowels (like the "a" in cat). What the heck are these markers trying to tell me?