There are a few things I've been looking to post recently but time has conspired against me getting any of them out yet. However, I don't want to go too long without a progress update so here it is.
Mandarin
I finished lesson 42 in Chinese with Ease a few days ago. I haven't done more since because I wanted to bring my latin studies up to par with my Chinese ones and also because I don't do as much on the weekends normally because I don't spend as much time in the car, and when I do, it's with my family, so listening intently is right out. I find some lessons much much harder than others. I think this is a combination of just certain features causing me problems and the way I approach particular lessons. My "ideal" day in the early stages of German when using "German with Ease" was to listen several times to my new lesson in the morning while making breakfast, then reading the dialogue a couple of times so that I had some idea of all the new words and to then spend the rest of the day re-listening and trying to shadow, and reading more where necessary. However, these days I make my breakfast the night before work to speed up my departure in the morning and eat it at my desk at work, which takes away that opportunity. I try to do as much reading as I can before leaving for work and the rest I do while stuck in traffic, but still, it's not as "ideal".
Anyway, I managed to get the last few words from the first 14 lessons into my Anki list (this process is a long way behind for both Latin and Chinese because it is SOOOO slow) and have reviewed them a bit. In general, since it's become harder to do Anki reviews on my phone thanks to the new version not working well on my phone's browser anymore.
As for conversations, I've started trying to say a few sentences in the morning to one of my co-workers. We had a short one recently where I learnt how to say that I hadn't slept enough, or that I had slept well, or at all. Pretty useful! Obviously, I need to work on tones and vocab to make these conversations stretch out
somehow beyond a few seconds!
By the way, I still don't have any good sources for chinese podcasts for either various levels of stuff or the news, so any suggestions here would be greatly appreciated!
Latin
I just today finished lesson 42 of Assimil's "Le Latin". Lesson 41 was actually a reasonably close quote from a work by Cicero. Pretty exciting day! It's going OK, although I don't have all the tenses clear in my head. The forms as well as the actual usages. I need to work on this more. I am at least getting to know the noun declensions a little "by assimilation", so that's a good start. Although I've only done 42 lessons in each language, I just worked out that today is the 84th day of the year which means that I've managed to average one lesson per day across the two languages which is an effort I'm pretty pleased with. I'm starting to give them both better focus when I do them which is helping. The year started out pretty horribly for me in other ways, so I like to think that at least I'm making some progress in some sort of goal this year. I also listened to a recent news podcast from Radio Bremen. I didn't really understand any of it except for the name of the previous pope, so it was a bit of a waste of time, but I enjoyed it anyway.
German
No real formal study, but I have found a tiny bit more time to read "Das Todeskreuz" and am now up to page 195. Also, without really trying, I managed to pretty much memorise Hitler's rant from that famous scene in Der Untergang. I think it might come in handy as a party trick some day. I did feel a lot more relaxed and flowing in my last Stammtisch which might have been a result of listening to the above rant and the spilt coffee scene from Mädchen Mädchen 2. Or I might have just felt relaxed that day and tomorrow I'll go backwards again. Who knows! If anyone else has an experience of using the above mentioned parallel translations, let us know in the comments.
Bininj Kunwok
No, I haven't officially added this one to my learning list for the year, but it keeps calling me all the same. I'm talking to the guy running the site for learning it that I mentioned before and hoping that I can help out in some way because I really believe in it, and I actually hope that I can help spread the word and make it used beyond its original target audience of people working in the areas of the northern territory where the language groups are spoken. WHY AREN'T AUSTRALIAN SCHOOLKIDS LEARNING SOME ABORIGINAL LANGUAGE? I just don't get it. I love european languages and I'm learning Mandarin myself, but we could really do with learning some more about our homeland's cultural heritage and making its original inhabitants feel that what they have is valued more widely. But like I said, I haven't added this language for now. I did however learn their word for goodbye: bobo. It's often been pointed out that Australians have at least a very basic knowledge of a variety of european languages but can't even say hello or goodbye in a single Aboriginal one. Let's change that now, hey?
bobo.
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