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Penguin

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Posts posted by Penguin

  1. 2 minutes ago, Matryoshka said:

    OMG, Penguin, offering more drugs to the addict? 😉😂  Seriously, that looks really cool.  I was wondering whether to try Danish or Norwegian (with the Dane-like spelling) after I've gotten the latest two more under my belt, and then you show me this... 🤣

    I'm now halfway through the Chinese tree on Duo (remembering that it's only got 6 checkpoints; most languages have almost half that many), but I'm reasonably solid on the HSK1 level vocab.  Just starting on the HSK2 deck on Tofu Learn...

    I've been playing around with Norwegian, and there are more learning materials available for Norwegian than Danish. The populations are roughly the same (5 million). Norwegian is more popular or has better marketing...or something. Maybe because it is more phonetic, idk.

    But unless I can find a way to order Norwegian books, I'm not sure how much time I am going to invest in Norwegian right now. @wintermomDo you have a source for buying Norwegian books online?

  2. On 11/5/2020 at 8:21 PM, cintinative said:

    Duolingo is now forcing me to pay one lingot if I want to take a test to get out of a level of a particular module. I didn't know what to do with the lingots anyway, but this is new.

    BTW, do we have a November thread or are we just using this one?

    cintinative, I moved your post over here to the November thread. Sorry for the delay, but I just now saw it in the October thread. 

    @Matryoshka Just in case you ever want to learn Danish:

    udtale.de is a newly launched site for German speakers to learn Danish pronunciation. I saw it on Sproget.dk, which is a Danish language geek site. 

  3. @Violet Crown I hope that things are ok with you, and that you just feel the need to move on. I hope that nothing happened on the WTM forums that made it an unpleasant space for you. I hope you know that you have friends here, and that you will be deeply missed. I even selfishly dare to hope that you will change your mind, or feel inclined to return to this thread at some later point. I learn a lot from you and enjoy your presence. Many thanks for not just disappearing. 

    • Like 5
  4. I have two book reviews to add. I finished both of these last week:

    The Icelandic novel (2011) Heaven and Hell by Jón Kalman Stefánsson was excellent. Now I know that it is the first of a trilogy. I will definitely plan to read on. The writing was A++. Bonus points that it fits both my around-the-world challenge and my Non-Tropical Islands category. 

    Set in a remote part of Western Iceland in the late 1800s, life is hard, dangerous, and ruled by fishing. At times, the novel was very bleak and somewhat the Icelandic version of life-sucks-and-then-you-die. But it doesn't sink into despair. 

    A book about the history of the Greensboro sit-ins far exceeded my expectations: Lunch at the 5 & 10 by Miles Wolff. My expectations were low because this was written in 1970 by a guy who is better known for his writings about baseball and for owning the Durham Bulls in the late 1980s. But I learned a lot, and it was a well-written popular history. Some of it is dated, but the fact that it was written quite close to the actual events gave it a freshness that a later retrospective would lack. When I went looking for a book about the sit-ins, I found shockingly little. I even thought about writing an email to the International Civil Rights Museum in GSO for a recommendation. I still might do that, but I was quite pleased with this narrative.
     

    • Like 7
  5. I will have to finish Dracula first. I read multiple books at once, but I can't do two fantasy novels at once. Dracula is taking me longer than I thought it would. It doesn't help that I am reading Norton's annotated edition, which I have mixed feelings about. I really enjoy the sidebars about things like the history of blood transfusions and explanatory notes about archaic terms. I despise what the editor did by creating "gentle fiction" wherein he pretends that the story is true. I'm ignoring almost all notes now anyway, otherwise I'll never finish the book!

    • Like 6
  6. 42 minutes ago, aggieamy said:

    Does anyone remember my bold plans to read John The Witch Family last night? Show of hands who thought I was a little ambitious with that plan. Yeah. There was no reading to him last night, he was exhausted after trick or treating and passed out in bed before I could tuck him in. 

    Our neighborhood was light on kids trick or treating but lots of houses were participating in safe ways. Either people had a bucket of candy on their front steps or they'd have a card table setup with candy and the resident would sit ten feet back in a lawn chair so kids could help themselves to candy. A few people did it the old fashioned way (knock on door style) and those people all wore masks along with the trick or treaters. 

    I'm glad that trick or treating was a success for him 🙂 

    • Like 6
  7. I've loved reading about your language learning adventures. During the second half of October, I got behind on nearly everything. I am enrolled in a Latin class, and have struggled to catch up. And it reminds me of getting behind in math. Everyone else has moved on, and catching up is dreadful. Ugh. The good news is that this is just a for-fun class and the only pressure is what I put on myself.

    I'm continuing on with Danish and Dutch, and plan to give Norwegian some attention in November.

    • Like 4
  8. I used to tolerate people who only posted occasional distasteful (to me) political opinions, but no more. One post in that direction and I unfollow. It no longer feels like just politics but rather a completely different worldview. Hardly anybody writes anything anymore anyway. They just share what other people wrote. I might be interested in what they had to say, but I am not interested in their memes.


    I also decided to mostly take my politics elsewhere. I still don’t like FB but  it is better for me now. I have some groups there that are important to me. Otherwise I would only drop in rarely.

    • Like 2
  9. 1 minute ago, wendyroo said:

    Have you ever tried Lang-8?

    My son uses it for Spanish.  He writes all sorts of different things in Spanish and native speakers correct and critique his writing. To "pay it forward" and keep his entries near the front of the queue, he spend a little time each week correcting ESL writing submitted by others.

    At a glance, there do appear to be some active Dutch users. 

    I’ve not been there for ages. They had shut down at one point, if I recall correctly. I’ll have to give it a revisit -thanks.

  10. What I really want is someone to correct my Danish writing. I have no trouble finding people to talk with, but even paid tutors for writing are hard to come by.

    Saying this out loud to hold myself accountable: I am very embarrassed by my level of Danish writing. I have plenty of ideas how to improve it, but never follow through.

    And why do I have this mental block? As a lover of the written word, I detest appearing illiterate, and feel ashamed. With speaking, my mistakes disappear into the ether. And Danish is so famously mumbly that it is easy for me to just shrug off verbal mistakes. Written ones not so much. 

  11. 12 hours ago, Matryoshka said:

    Hey, thought I'd pop this thread back to the top, since it's been dead for over a week!

    How's everyone's language learning going?  I've been moving along with Chinese and Portuguese.  I've started using the Chinese/English dictionary I bought ages ago in the anticipation that I'd get back to learning it someday!  I've been sometimes a bit frustrated that I don't always know the exact meaning of individual characters when they're introduced as parts of larger words, but I've also been surprised how well learning in context with phrases is sticking better than learning characters in isolation, so maybe that's a stupid gripe!  I'm almost to the second checkpoint in Chinese and the third in Portuguese.  I'm thinking soon I'll break out my First 100 Characters book (this has been a longtime goal, that I never seemed to get to...) Penguin, this is all your fault! 😂

    I'm thinking at some point it would be good to get some conversational practice.  I know there are online forums to connect with native speakers - italki, and one that's something like byuub or something weird?  Has anyone farther along in their studies used one of those or others like it and have any suggestion as to which platform would be good to try out?  I'm most concerned here with Chinese.  I need waaaay more practice stringing words together and getting feedback on correct pronuncation/tones.  I'm a good parrot, but I need more than an App to parrot...

    I have a new idea for free conversation practice to share. Take a look at Meetup. Now that nearly everything is virtual everywhere, Meetups are no longer limited to our location. I belong to a Scandinavian Language Meetup group that went dormant when the pandemic hit, but we just had our first virtual meeting and we went into breakout rooms (Danish, Norwegian, etc.). @wintermom PM me if you want the info.

    I have a different group that I want to try out for Dutch but have not yet been able to participate. They say they host 20+ languages. Both Chinese ( Mandarin and Cantonese) and Portuguese are on the list. Whether or not every language happens every week must surely depend on who shows up. Search Meetup for World Languages Cafe with Washington DC as the location.

    The way these things work is there is normally one native speaker plus the learners. 

    • Like 1
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  12. 44 minutes ago, mumto2 said:

    I love Rebecca btw. But probably not perfect beach reading unless you are looking out over high cliffs with pounding waves.  Fog.....lots of fog.

     

    It got designated the beach read because it is one of the books I brought to my mom's place that could withstand getting sandy and wet. Nope, no fog. We are on the NC/SC border and it feels like summer. I'm here so I could see my mom, but I'm certainly not complaining about the weather 🙂 We got very lucky.

    My next beach read is a history of the Greensboro sit-ins: Lunch at the 5 &10 by Miles Wolff. I bought this used and it was already a beat-up paperback, so it can withstand the beach. 

    • Like 8
  13. Oops that was my fault for declaring VC at the finish line when she did indeed say she was on the last book. 
     

    @mumto2Did you end up in a Christmas mood? An animal park filled with giraffes is a great image.  I also felt incongruous this week as I am at the beach. Rebecca doesn’t exactly match up with sunny and 80 degrees. 

    • Like 6
  14. I finished three books since my last update:

    Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier. This was my first encounter with Rebecca, and I am glad to finally know what it is all about! Somehow I managed to go into it without any spoilers. I enjoyed the atmosphere, but the plot was blatantly obvious even to me, the most inept mystery reader on the planet. I always see this on lists of spooky books, but I didn't consider it spooky. I guess I prefer a bit of supernatural in my spooky. I'm hoping to read Dracula later this month.

    Our Malady: Lessons in Liberty from a Hospital Diary  by historian Timothy Snyder. To sum it up in one brief phrase, health care is a human right. I already believed that, but the book did give me some new ways to think about that concept. And I will be mulling over the commentary about the demise of local journalism, and how that hurts the health of our communities.

    Pirey by Petre Andreevski, translated from the Macedonian. This was one of the most relentlessly grim books I have ever read, but I am quite glad that I read it. Pirey is a type of grass that "is hardy and grows in impossible places. Hoe it as much as you like, dig it up, uproot it - it won't die...Nothing can destroy this plant" It was told in alternating chapters, husband and wife. This worked really well because the two main characters, Ion and Velika, were apart during most of their marriage. He was suffering on the battlefield while she was suffering in the village. I am eager to read more fiction from the Balkan region.

     

     

    • Like 7
  15. Bringing this over from the September thread so it does not get overlooked. 

    10 minutes ago, Matryoshka said:

    A big thank you to those of you who let me know the desktop Duolingo works differently than the App.  With the boards down yesterday, what else did I have to do but spend FAR too much time playing there, which I wouldn't have been able t do with all that heart/gem ridiculousness!

    It also appears that on the App, I have to pay gems (which I do not have) to test out of a level, or pay for Plus?  😒 Thankfully not on the desktop version - I've been happily testing out of Portuguese levels (it's similar enough to Spanish that I don't need that much repetition, especially at the lower levels.  I have been doing the first level or so of each circle through first, though, as the intro is good to have to get myself oriented).  Going a lot more slowly in Chinese!  I have had a tiny intro before, so it's still going reasonably quickly as I had some familiarity with some of the basics, but I will likely have to slow way down after the first benchmark or so.

    And, I think I've figured out how to add friends there if I know their names.  Anyone who wants to be my Duolingo friend, PM me your Duolingo username (which I think includes numbers after your name if it gives them to you by default), or I can PM you mine. 🙂 

     

    • Like 1
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