I've been back from my trip for almost a week now. I was fine for about a day and then I got sick. Today is the first day I'm feeling marginally less shitty.
The trip was amazing though! (Except for seasickness and that bad weather mishap on the Hurtigruten - absolutely not setting foot on another boat for the foreseeable future
) I especially loved our time in Finnish Lapland. I would love to go back to Norway in some season other than winter though, as we literally couldn't see much due to the darkness.
Some language updates:
NorwegianLanguage-wise of course Norway was most interesting to me during the trip, but I didn't have as many opportunities to use Norwegian as I would have liked. I spoke a bit here and there and was generally understood (everything I said was super basic though), so that made me happy. People were generally friendly and indulged me when I said I was trying to learn Norwegian
I tried a more complicated conversation in a book store, asking for recommendations for Norwegian (children's, but not childish) books I could read. Failed miserable at that one haha. One woman panicked, another helped me out wonderfully so now I also have a YA fantasy title that I'm hoping to try to read later this year.
On the whole I am making good progress with Norwegian. I have no doubt that I will manage to read that book just fine within the year, even if the level is quite high. During the trip I didn't have any trouble understanding 99% of written Norwegian and am slowly getting used to spoken Norwegian as well (which is clearly much harder). Of course context is still everything, also when it comes to written Norwegian, but I'm starting to incorporate a little more into my daily life (mostly random social media accounts). I just have to be careful Norwegian isn't going the way German went: excellent passive understanding but terrible at stringing together a grammatically correct sentence.
I'm still doing Duolingo. It's surprisingly useful (also: easy). They updated their Norwegian course over night. From 9 checkpoints to 12, and it's completely messed with my progress
So many random gaps now! I was almost at checkpoint 5, but now I'm well into 9 but with tons of unlocked yet unlearned skills. I was doing the pyramid method, so this is really annoying
RussianNot much to update here, but we scheduled our classes for this semester. Happy to continue!
I also started reading
Short Stories in Russian for Beginners. I'm trying to stick to a chapter a day. The level is fine, it's mostly gaps in vocab that are bothering me, including words I know I learned at some point but just forgot. Reading and understanding from context is useful though - I'm just happy it's much easier to do so with Russian than it ever was with Japanese. I refuse to go back to flashcard hell, even though it would help me