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Monday, 2 May 2022 11:11![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
walhiskaDialann
March was nice. April is the most beautiful month of the Irish year. We have cherry blossoms, apple blossoms, pear blossoms, budding ash and oak and beech, good cold crisp weather in the morning and evening, and a chance, at least, of some warm sunshine in between. I am growing again, I mean growing plants: sage, rosemary and garlic to start off with. The wet weather has been excellent for the rhubarb, I have frozen 8 bags of it and I still can't see that the orchard has noticably less of it growing.
Today we have a bank holiday in Ireland, so I'm preparing for class tomorrow, doing laundry, looking after my mother, and planning out my language targets for the next few months. I also need to investigate so much about like, what I'm going to do with my life, because I like what I'm doing now but it's not sustainable for ever - I really would like to move countries; logically I should go to France (or I guess Belgium is also a possibility).
Language:
Irish - I want to improve my dialectical knowledge of Irish. I don't necessarily like how people who only speak the standard dialect are seen among some groups of Native-Native speakers, which always made me reflexively proud of my very standardised Irish but I am also interested in the Kerry/Munster dialect for it's own merits, so I would like to learn some. I think reading some Maidhc Dainín O Sé will definitely help, but I'll also need to seek out some TG4 material for aural/oral work.
French - I'm relatively happy with my French, I think that if I had had the time to study properly for the C1 exam I did, then I may even have been able for the C2. I'm reading Mémoires d'Hadrien at the moment, and it's excellent for unusual and poetic vocabulary, as well as having a great sense of the Material ... I'm finding it easy but still learning something, which is a nice happy medium. I have also restarted a vocabulary notebook, although I didn't get to use it over the last week, and kept my notes in the annotations instead. I think I will have to find a good French news-source as well, to keep up with Affairs, and learn good little turns of phrase that I might have missed so far.
Danish - HMMM it's going well. I suppose I managed to get by alright with it in Copenhagen, and my reading is really really getting there. I visited a museum and found I could understand maybe 60% of what was written on the information plaques. I can even sort of write okay, if I do it slowly and simply. But my oral production SUCKS. I signed up for Duolingo again for Danish only, and the placement test put me 75% of the way through the course ... this is not true really. Oh well. It's really not a difficult language for a English-speaker, and I hope to keep learning it.
ITALIAN - over the past few months I have neglected my Italian, but I have bought a grammar workbook and a dictionary and I'm going to seriously seriously apply myself to it. My comprehension is already o-kayyy, I can usually understand what my mutuals write on t. for instance, but like ... these are short texts for which I have a lot of background knowledge. I can also understand most newspaper-type writing, reading very slowly, if only because the vocabulary is so similar to French. I'm not really sure why Italian is often perceived as a relatively easy language for English speakers though! Yes it's Indo-European and is broadly familiar in many ways etc. but it's not necessarily that quick to reveal its secrets ... I wonder if I need to think about dialect in this case as well (I certainly am not going to worry about that in Danish!). Anyway, ESC Turin 2022 is coming up in the next couple of weeks and I hope to get plenty of listening practice in. I already can sing along to (and understand) 98% of Brividi by Mahmood and Blanco. Progress progress dhdhdh
Russian - idk what the hell I am going to do with this language. I studied it! I took intensive grammar classes! And it's still so hard! There's so much of it - not only grammar but an abyss of vocabulary, with so many synonyms, so many word-variations! My knowledge of cases (via Irish and Latin) helps 33% of the way. Then there's aspect. Maybe Nabokov was right, most students of Russian are just not going to be able to get beyond basic phrases. I really don't know. I hate to give up, I have never stopped learning a language, but Russian is an uphill struggle for real. Sometimes I just see a mile-long word that I don't understand and just think I should forget about all of it. It's not like I really want to move to Russia - I also considered picking up Belarusian (fell in love with Uladzimir Karatkievich's writing) but I mean, the grammar would have all the same challenges, wouldn't it? ... Russian is certainly is on pause.
Arabic - oh, I actually gave up on Arabic, not that I really started in earnest, but wow. It's like maths, you take one glance into the machinery and it you're not awed and terrified, you're missing something. It's very beautiful but basically I think it would be impossible to learn unless you dedicated a few years to it, and to Arabic exclusively, ideally in an immersive environment. That's what T. E. Lawrence and Ronald Storrs did. It's the only thing that seems to work. I just can't do that right now.
.
If I got to the stage where I had fluent English, Irish, French, Italian and Danish I think I would be foolish to not be pretty happy. I don't know if there are any other languages I particularly interested in learning actually, except maybe Czech. A few touristic phrases in modern Hebrew to travel there to see my friend. Maybe when I get to around 50 and I want a pleasantly unfinishable project, I would look at Lithuanian, for fun. Of the ancient languages that I'm a bit familiar with, I prefer Latin to Greek ... would love to pick some up again. But that's 7 tops, for my whole life; I think it's achievable.
Sorry I need to work through this kind of thing in my head occasionally. Wish I had the same amount of thoughts about my career lol
March was nice. April is the most beautiful month of the Irish year. We have cherry blossoms, apple blossoms, pear blossoms, budding ash and oak and beech, good cold crisp weather in the morning and evening, and a chance, at least, of some warm sunshine in between. I am growing again, I mean growing plants: sage, rosemary and garlic to start off with. The wet weather has been excellent for the rhubarb, I have frozen 8 bags of it and I still can't see that the orchard has noticably less of it growing.
Today we have a bank holiday in Ireland, so I'm preparing for class tomorrow, doing laundry, looking after my mother, and planning out my language targets for the next few months. I also need to investigate so much about like, what I'm going to do with my life, because I like what I'm doing now but it's not sustainable for ever - I really would like to move countries; logically I should go to France (or I guess Belgium is also a possibility).
Language:
Irish - I want to improve my dialectical knowledge of Irish. I don't necessarily like how people who only speak the standard dialect are seen among some groups of Native-Native speakers, which always made me reflexively proud of my very standardised Irish but I am also interested in the Kerry/Munster dialect for it's own merits, so I would like to learn some. I think reading some Maidhc Dainín O Sé will definitely help, but I'll also need to seek out some TG4 material for aural/oral work.
French - I'm relatively happy with my French, I think that if I had had the time to study properly for the C1 exam I did, then I may even have been able for the C2. I'm reading Mémoires d'Hadrien at the moment, and it's excellent for unusual and poetic vocabulary, as well as having a great sense of the Material ... I'm finding it easy but still learning something, which is a nice happy medium. I have also restarted a vocabulary notebook, although I didn't get to use it over the last week, and kept my notes in the annotations instead. I think I will have to find a good French news-source as well, to keep up with Affairs, and learn good little turns of phrase that I might have missed so far.
Danish - HMMM it's going well. I suppose I managed to get by alright with it in Copenhagen, and my reading is really really getting there. I visited a museum and found I could understand maybe 60% of what was written on the information plaques. I can even sort of write okay, if I do it slowly and simply. But my oral production SUCKS. I signed up for Duolingo again for Danish only, and the placement test put me 75% of the way through the course ... this is not true really. Oh well. It's really not a difficult language for a English-speaker, and I hope to keep learning it.
ITALIAN - over the past few months I have neglected my Italian, but I have bought a grammar workbook and a dictionary and I'm going to seriously seriously apply myself to it. My comprehension is already o-kayyy, I can usually understand what my mutuals write on t. for instance, but like ... these are short texts for which I have a lot of background knowledge. I can also understand most newspaper-type writing, reading very slowly, if only because the vocabulary is so similar to French. I'm not really sure why Italian is often perceived as a relatively easy language for English speakers though! Yes it's Indo-European and is broadly familiar in many ways etc. but it's not necessarily that quick to reveal its secrets ... I wonder if I need to think about dialect in this case as well (I certainly am not going to worry about that in Danish!). Anyway, ESC Turin 2022 is coming up in the next couple of weeks and I hope to get plenty of listening practice in. I already can sing along to (and understand) 98% of Brividi by Mahmood and Blanco. Progress progress dhdhdh
Russian - idk what the hell I am going to do with this language. I studied it! I took intensive grammar classes! And it's still so hard! There's so much of it - not only grammar but an abyss of vocabulary, with so many synonyms, so many word-variations! My knowledge of cases (via Irish and Latin) helps 33% of the way. Then there's aspect. Maybe Nabokov was right, most students of Russian are just not going to be able to get beyond basic phrases. I really don't know. I hate to give up, I have never stopped learning a language, but Russian is an uphill struggle for real. Sometimes I just see a mile-long word that I don't understand and just think I should forget about all of it. It's not like I really want to move to Russia - I also considered picking up Belarusian (fell in love with Uladzimir Karatkievich's writing) but I mean, the grammar would have all the same challenges, wouldn't it? ... Russian is certainly is on pause.
Arabic - oh, I actually gave up on Arabic, not that I really started in earnest, but wow. It's like maths, you take one glance into the machinery and it you're not awed and terrified, you're missing something. It's very beautiful but basically I think it would be impossible to learn unless you dedicated a few years to it, and to Arabic exclusively, ideally in an immersive environment. That's what T. E. Lawrence and Ronald Storrs did. It's the only thing that seems to work. I just can't do that right now.
.
If I got to the stage where I had fluent English, Irish, French, Italian and Danish I think I would be foolish to not be pretty happy. I don't know if there are any other languages I particularly interested in learning actually, except maybe Czech. A few touristic phrases in modern Hebrew to travel there to see my friend. Maybe when I get to around 50 and I want a pleasantly unfinishable project, I would look at Lithuanian, for fun. Of the ancient languages that I'm a bit familiar with, I prefer Latin to Greek ... would love to pick some up again. But that's 7 tops, for my whole life; I think it's achievable.
Sorry I need to work through this kind of thing in my head occasionally. Wish I had the same amount of thoughts about my career lol