(no subject)

[fadeaccompli]

I'm never quite sure how to treat my DW account, especially with how silent the place is compared to LJ of old. Not quite a ghost town, but certainly not the neighborhood coffee shop either. A suburb sidewalk, perhaps? We wave to people we pass when we see them outside, watering the lawn or checking the mail. Sometimes we wave from a window as they pass our house, walking the dog. It's quiet. Fairly amiable. Such is.

Well, since my day-to-day chatter is on Twitter, I suppose I treat this as a very broad kind of diary. Thus, recently:

1) I became less sick. Go me. Very much appreciated.

2) I went to Minneapolis for a week, where I:

2a) Met up with professors, picked up a lot of books from the library, saw some classmates (coworkers? what do you call fellow grad students in your department?), and figured out a better direction for the Catullus paper;

2b) Went to Fourth Street Fantasy, as I have apparently been doing for six years now, and had a marvelous time, especially because I was on anti-anxiety meds and carefully using my time, which meant I didn't get to everything I wanted, but I was able to really enjoy all the things I went to, and;

2c) not only enjoyed the panels I attended immensely, but ended up on the traditional impromptu But That's Another Panel at the end of the con, which was on happy endings, wherein I got to argue with people I like and have a great time;

2d) and then headed back home, as it's pretty eerie to be in Minneapolis over the summer, with the office empty and my dog somewhere else;

3) I've been picking up on German on Duolingo again, which is reassuring, in that I still have the basic syntactical structure and simple forms down, even if my vocab is lousy and thus I need Google Translate to get through an academic paper in German, yeesh;

4) I am working valiantly on my Social Services of the Damned project, and finally making the progress I've been wanting;

5) I'm mulling over the Catullus stuff, and about to go to UT and turn my TexShare Card (derived from my Austin City Library card) into a UT Some Title Here Card that will let me check out academic books I need from them, which, y'know, will be helpful, because JSTOR will only get you so far in the research grind, especially in classics, since JSTOR doesn't really do much in the way of non-English resources and I damn well need to pick up some stuff from other languages;

6) ...shit. I need to learn Italian. Should be easy, right? I've got Spanish, I've got Latin, I've got the French basics, how hard could it be?

7) Back to Duolingo it is.

8) Also I've read all the (modern) Squirrel Girl I can find and you guys, it's GREAT, it is ABSOLUTELY FANTASTIC, I'm turning into an evangelist for it, and you should read it. The graphic novel collections, the YA novel, anything you can find that's from the last few years. (Prior to that is...iffy.) Seriously. It's great.

Comments

[archangelbeth]

There's a few communities which are "hey, follow me!" or "this other community is cool; check it out" which are linked off of... hm, the "oh, hi everyone who came over after the Russian TOS!" news post. I have picked up a few cool new people to follow here and there! ...I also need to figure out which RSS-name to drop to follow the Bujold Goodreads blog. >_>

...GOOD LUCK ON ITALIAN! (No, seriously, how do you manage to hold all those languages in your head? I am a monoglot! I pick up stuff and add it to my Borg Collective but it's, like, only a word or five! Yikes. You are magic.)

[fadeaccompli]

My secret for multi-language acquisition?

Not speaking any of them!

No, seriously. If you want to be FLUENT in a language, you want to speak it and listen to it all the damn time. But I just want basic reading comprehension, with dictionary at hand. Thus I aim to recognize declensions/conjugations to help me work out a sentence's structure when its syntax isn't very English-like, without ever memorizing them well enough to produce them by hand, much less fluently in speech; if I recognize what a word means when I look at it, it doesn't matter if I have trouble remembering that it's "libro" in Spanish and "livre" in French and "liber" in Latin and--well, I remember it's Buch in German just fine, sure. I can be fairly unclear on the specifics of a lot of prepositions if I can figure out what they're doing from context, or look up that particular phrasing if context isn't enough.

It's a lousy way to become widely or conversationally fluent. But it's a great way to be able to get basic comprehension of texts as fast as possible.

[archangelbeth]

1: Ha! A trick!

2: You are still magic. >_>

[lizvogel]

What archangelbeth said.

I have a novel idea for which I need to learn Russian, and, coincidentally, another for which I need to learn Italian. As I am absolute pants at foreign language acquisition, this presents an obstacle. I am somewhat in awe of people who can attain even basic competency at multiple languages.

[fadeaccompli]

Oh, gosh, Russian. That one's terrifying. But Italian isn't too bad if you want to just read for comprehension (and not, like, appreciate the beauty of a given sentence or get lots of word connotations) so long as you've had Spanish or French (or maybe Portuguese?) before, I think.

[lizvogel]

I actually found Russian not too bad -- the different alphabet was a challenge, but I felt like I was getting the hang of it -- until I encountered the thingy denoting a part of speech I never knew existed, at which point I rather ran aground.

I have technically had Spanish, but (a) that was in high school, which was, um, not recent, and (b) I was terrible at it. Granted, that was partly due to not studying (this was before I learned that subjects came in gradations between "easy" and "impossible"), but I also seem to have no facility for absorbing vocabulary. Which is weird, because I pick up slang and jargon effortlessly. But put it in a foreign language, and it slithers out of my brain as fast as I can stuff it in.

The Russian I need to be able to read source material for "feel", but the Italian I'm afraid I need to be able to compose luxuriously overwrought poetry in. There are reasons that novel will not be the next novel I tackle.

[fadeaccompli]

Oh, I know why foreign language slithers when jargon/slang doesn't! Or at least, one of the reasons why. If you don't already know a language well, it doesn't hook in to existing patterns nearly so much. It's one thing if I hear "That's so fleerb!" and "My boyfriend says that fleerby punk had it coming" and "Gosh, don't be fleerbish about it, Susan" and work it into the vague memory of all those statements; it's another if I hear "Illud tantum fleerbum est!" and "meine Freundin sagt, dass ist das zu fleerbung" and "Sancto Dios, no seras tan fleerba, Susana!" and I'm still trying to remember what "illud" and "Freundin" mean, or match them against words in English on a vocab sheet. It's a lot more "drinking tea while climbing a ladder" instead of just drinking the tea.

[lizvogel]

That does make a certain amount of sense!

It would certainly explain why I bounced so very hard off the "immersion" approach in language classes. Drinking tea while climbing a ladder backwards in the dark! I wonder if I would do significantly better in a setting where I could insert $language words (and eventually structure) into English sentences, until $language gradually took over?

(I am absurdly pleased that I sorta-kinda-almost understood the German example. Or at least, recognized it as an understandable thing.)

[carbonel]

I am doing Hebrew on Duolingo. I think getting started would have driven me nuts if I hadn't already had a solid grounding in the basics, but I'm slowly progressing with new vocabulary and reviewing the old stuff. It drives me nuts how hard it is to get new words into long-term memory, but occasionally I realize I've added a new word that I didn't know before I started, and that's gratifying. I currently have a 96-day streak, though that includes a few 10-lingot preserve-the-streak payments.

[fadeaccompli]

I used to have a glorious Duolingo streak, but I was derailed by, somewhat ironically, actual language classes. Over the summer I'm slowly dinking away again. It's not doing much for getting useful vocabulary in me--I have the super-basic stuff down, and it prioritizes 'tourist' over 'academic' for obvious reasons--but it helps me keep the structures of sentences in mind, and convince my brain that German isn't ominous every time I see it.