Language Geek

Over the past few days, I’ve been focusing some more on Dutch. I’m up to lesson 31 of Dutch with Ease. I realize I’ve said it many times before, but: I love how Dutch vocabulary corresponds so clearly to English and German vocabulary. We in Dutch; we in English. Eenvoudig in Dutch; einfach in German. I’m getting better at understanding the spoken language (at least the Assimil version of the spoken language…), but reading is still much, much easier.

I’ve also done a tiny bit of Russian recently, working a bit on lesson 54 of Russian without Toil, as well as on some of the exercises in chapter 12 of the New Penguin Russian Course. Nothing overly exciting about either, however. I want to sit down for a few hours and plow through a bit of my Russian history book soon.

And, finally, I’ve been trying to decide on how I want to rearrange my language learning schedule. While I’m making progress, certainly, I’m not entirely happy with my haphazard way of hopping from one language to another. Some languages tend to get lost in the mess, and as of late, French has been suffering quite a lot – not to mention poor Spanish, which seems to have wholly vanished from my studies. I’m not frustrated enough to slash any more from my current list, but I’m going to have to put my current list into some sort of overall structure to please myself. I’m just not entirely sure how I’m going to do that. I know some people insist on sticking to one or two languages until they’re mastered them (whatever that means), but I don’t see myself doing that. I’ve also read of some people spending a few months on a couple of languages, then switching to other languages for a few months, etc. Again, I’m not sure I could do this.

Hrm. I’ll figure something out.

Today was largely a Dutch day. In Dutch with Ease, I reviewed lesson 24, then went ahead and did the passive wave for lessons 25 and 26. I’ve decided that, seeing as I’ve not exactly had much trouble with Dutch, I’m going to try and push through the passive wave of Assimil fairly quickly, rather than going slowly and meticulously. Once I’ve gotten through the first pass I’ll go through it again most likely, in a slower manner.

Later in the evening, I took my copy of Russisch ohne Mühe to bed with me, and reviewed lesson 24. I’m not sure why, but my bookmark was on that lesson, so it seemed as good a lesson as any to review.

I’ve been a bad student as of late, having not done a whole lot of language learning and having not posted much about it here.

For German, I’ve been adding vocabulary to Anki; nothing new there. I did another copying session with French with Ease, and today, I did two Assimil lessons, one for Dutch and one for Russian.

For Dutch, it was lesson 24; for Russian, it was lesson 54 of the 1951 Russian without Toil. Not a whole lot to note about either, I’m afraid, except for one thing: in the Russian lesson, the English translation refers to telephonic robots. I have absolutely no idea what they’re talking about. All I can think of is something like today’s autodialers which call people for advertising purposes. At any rate, telephonic robots sounds hilarious.