Three weeks of...

(not just non-blogging but) pure language obsession.

 

1)       My Italian course is coming along nicely. I showed it to the infamous BookReader last week and she was impressed… Pleased? Optimistic? Something like that. I’ve structured all of the verb vocabulary, the present tense conjugation, sentence structure, pronunciation, and am working on noun and adjective vocabulary. Email me for further details. I think I’ve really got something highly marketable here, and the next languages I’m going to do it with are Turkish, Indonesian, (maybe French, but more than likely not. Ça ne m’intéresse pas), and…

2)       Chinese. Since H’n’B has joined our excursion to Asia, she has been highly interested in Chinese- Mandarin. I had spent quite a lot of time with Cantonese, for a few reasons:  (a) I was told it was spoken in Hong Kong, where we would be for four days and have a free day to roam around, (b) because I was given the Pimsleur Cantonese as a gift and was thrilled to be able to use it, (c) because it’s arguably harder than Mandarin, with more tones, which makes Mandarin easier (relatively speaking). Anyway, she wants me now to use the current structure of teaching I’m developing to apply toward Chinese. There is many a difficulty surrounding this. Neither Chinese itself, nor the pinyin come naturally to the average English-typer on an English computer. This means lots of copying and pasting, and not so much confidence as to the exact translations of what I’m looking for. Tones don’t scare me, though. We’ll see.

3)       I have all but abandoned Turkish for the time being, which is sad. I’m working on getting back into it, but have all sorts of other deadlines with the Italian thing, and working on this Chinese one and other stuff that’s hindered my ability to spend lots of time with it. I’ve decided I’m learning Persian, though. I have three really promising calls in my area that are Persian, and I know of a solid dozen others that people (around here-ish) have that would develop really well in Persian, but there is no one handling it here currently. It would also be a tremendous aid toward my learning a good handful of other languages like Arabic, Urdu (and Hindi), and even Punjabi, if I so desire (and I probably will). It’s a strategic move, really.

4)       I’m teaching a Ukrainian (Russian speaker) English. We had our first pow-wow Monday, and she understands English enough to get the gist of what someone is saying, and she can read somewhat. I’m not sure how well she comprehends either of these, but wants to work mainly on her speaking ability. We’re going to use newspaper articles from the local paper, or from CNN something or other that I print out online. It’s more practical than using children’s books (which are easy to understand but offer no real practical vocabulary) or English literature (Steinbeck, Salinger, Joyce stuff, which is far too complicated to work simple translations off of). It’s pretty well rounded and will be a good tool to use to increase comprehension, vocabulary and an understanding of basic (and somewhat more complicated but practical) sentence structure.

5)       Also, I have some sort of an interest in Hungarian (refer to all the Finnish posts: same sort of thing, but it seems less of a pristine language to me) because I now have a call who is Hungarian and is responding very well. Yes.

6)       Vietnamese… a friend has some involvement and needs my assistance with some correspondence. Not my favorite language (still).

Nothing else for now, but more later (hopefully not three weeks later).

Viszontlátásra…