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I reviewed Assimil Dutch with Ease, lessons 8-10, and did a first pass over lesson 11.

Arabic

I went back in my Arabic alphabet book and reviewed baa, taa, thaa, and nuun, just to make sure they didn’t slip from my memory. I also tried to download an Arabic script deck in Anki, but it’s not displaying right. I assume it’s because I’ll need to install custom Arabic fonts on my computer (Windows XP). If anyone has any experience with this, please let me know in the comments.

I also received a copy of Hans Wehr’s Arabic-English Dictionary via OhioLINK at the university, and was surprised to find that short vowels aren’t marked in it. A transliteration for every word is provided, so you can work out the vowels that way, but I figured short vowels would be written in, considering it is, as far as I can tell, geared towards learners of Arabic.

German

I added some more cards to Anki, as well as reviewed all of the cards that were due. I also listened to a few episodes of ZeitZeichen, a wonderful daily podcast for those who love history.

Russian

All I did was Anki cards, as I’m still playing catch up; I had a Russian deck with around 500 cards that I let sit for quite a while, so I had a very large backlog of cards to get through. I’m down to around 30 now.

I added about 30 new sentence item cards to my German Anki deck; I’m still working on “repairing” my vocabulary. The fact that German was my first foreign language certainly shows; I’ve got holes in it all over the place.

Russian

I added lesson 43 to my Russian Anki deck, generally sticking to one sentence per card. I also reviewed around 120 Russian cards. Ideally, I want to have the whole book in Anki for review; I have lessons 1-15 in my deck already, but I’ll need to go back and add the lessons in between.

French

I went through 4 sets of exercises on the present tense of regular verbs in The Ultimate French Review and Practice book. I’m fine with recognizing conjugations, through New French with Ease, but my ability to produce said conjugations quickly is not where I want it to be. Hopefully by working through exercises like this, my speed will improve. I also like the UFRP because it covers a lot of basic vocabulary that wasn’t present in New French with Ease.

On the agenda

Things that need some attention soon: some more Arabic letters, a review of my most recent Dutch lessons, and a review of my most recent Spanish lessons.

Happy mother’s day!

In Assimil’s Dutch with Ease, I reviewed lesson 8, and went ahead and did lessons 9 and 10. I’m going to have to be careful as I go forward with Dutch, due to the great similarities to German. A lot of the words look and sound fairly similar, but have different spellings: Stadt, staat; neugierig, nieuwsgierig;mein, nijn, etc.

I’m thinking I may end up using Professor Arguelles’ scriptorium exercise to help me nail down Dutch spelling.

French

I’ve been neglecting French, so I pulled out Assimil’s Using French, which I’ve not yet worked through. I did lessons 9 and 10; I’ve done them in the past, but it’s been a while. I see a recurring theme here…

I also did some French cards in Anki (~40).

German

Just Anki for today, coming to around 30 cards reviewed.

Russian

In Russian without Toil, I reviewed lesson 43 and did lesson 44. 44 introduces the months of the year, which are strikingly similar to their English counterparts:

Январь
Февраль
Март
Апрель
Май
Июнь
Июль
Август
Сентябрь
Октябрь
Ноябрь
Декабрь

I read a few more pages in King’s Schwarz, and got up to speed on my German sentence deck in Anki (about 100 cards reviewed).

Arabic

I did a first pass over the letters ‘alif, hamza, waaw, daal and dhaal. Hamza in particularly is pretty odd to me, as it is actually a glottal stop, but counts as a full letter. It’s important because in Arabic, no word can begin with a vowel; if a word sounds like it begins with a vowel, it’s actually beginning with a glottal stop (hamza) followed by the vowel. Hamza and ‘alif have a close relationship, because if there is a hamza at the beginning of a word, it “rides” on an ‘alif, rather than standing alone. Pretty interesting stuff.

Russian

I reviewed lesson 43 in Russian without Toil again. When doing New French with Ease, I didn’t review lessons in the book nearly as much, but Russian vocabulary has a knack for not sticking to my memory. I started to do lesson 44, but got distracted by something or other, and never got back to it. It’s on the agenda for tomorrow.

All in all, not a whole lot done today, but most of my evening was taken up by going to the movies with some friends, so I suppose I’ll be content with what progress was made.

I reviewed lesson 41 of Russian without Toil, then went ahead and did a first pass over lessons 42 and 43. 43 introduces, among other things, the days of the week:

понедельник – Monday
вторник – Tuesday
среда – Wednesday
четверг – Thursday
пятница – Friday
суббота – Saturday
воскресенье – Sunday

I liked how some of these have very clear roots: вторник -> второй (second, adjective), среда -> середина (middle), четверг -> четвёртый (fourth, adjective), пятница -> пять (five).

I also did the “repetition round” for 70 Russian words I first started learning a few days ago, using Iversen’s word list method. In doing so, I’ve come to the conclusion that until I figure out a way to mark stress changes clearly without having to write out the whole word, the word list method just isn’t going to work for Russian verbs. Writing out the infinitive, first person singular, and second person singular to indicate stress pattern simply takes up too much space, not to mention too many brain cycles; I can work through a list of Russian adjectives or nouns fairly quickly, but the verbs with all of their permutations slow me down a lot.

Dutch

I reviewed lessons 6 and 7 in Assimil’s Dutch with Ease, and did a first pass over lesson 8. This is technically all review, as I started this course before and, along with Spanish, let it slide. But it’s been long enough that lesson 8 had some things in it I had forgotten.

I continue to be somewhat amused by the Dutch to German / English correlations. Dutch looks and sounds like someone mashed together equal parts of English, German, and funny; I say funny because at times, it sounds like someone speaking English with a funny accent (to me anyway). “Dat” for “that,” for example.

German

I took Stephen King’s Schwarz (book 1 of the Dark Tower series) to bed, and read about 7 pages before crashing for the night. I didn’t take a dictionary with me, so didn’t look anything up, but didn’t have any trouble following the story.

Arabic

I did a very quick look over the letters I’ve learned so far, so as to not let them vanish from memory, but other than that, I didn’t get in anything. I hope to get two or three new letters under my belt tomorrow.

I listened to Assimil Russian without Toil, lessons 37 – 51. I actually listened quite a bit ahead of where I’m at in the book. As for the book, I reviewed lessons 39 and 40 closely. I noted that I really need to open up all of the lessons with songs at the end (every lesson before a review lesson), and cut out the songs. Hearing them once or twice is fine, but when I’m wanting to put a particular lesson on repeat while cleaning around the house or something, after 4 or 5 times, I’m ready to pull my hair out. Russian folkish songs from the 50s (30s? 40s?) are just not my thing.

I shadowed lessons 8 and 9 of Assimil Spanish with Ease something like 6-8 times each. I wasn’t walking, as per the usual shadowing instructions, but driving. I’ve actually gone back practically to the beginning of Assimil Spanish course; I was much further ahead, but neglected it completely for quite some time, so a refresher is in order.

For Arabic, I reviewed the letters I know so far and started learning yaa. The writing of this one isn’t overly completely, but wrapping my head around what it can stand for is another matter:  it can stand for a long vowel (like ee), a consonant (y), or a dipthong (ei). This all depends on what marks are (or aren’t) put around it, such as short vowels on the preceding letter.

And finally, I listened to an episode of Schaflos in München.

I did not get done what I wanted to today. Better luck tomorrow, I suppose.

This morning, I spent around half an hour going through one page of the German translation of Stephen King’s The Gunslinger. King has quite a rich vocabulary, and it shows in trying to read a translation of his work: every sentence had something in it that I didn’t know. I found it somewhat humorous that I recently finished Tommy Jaud’s Voll Idiot (a book written originally in German by a native), and it didn’t give me as much trouble as King may. Among other things, I learned that die Kutsche means coach, carriage.

I listened to a French podcast while walking; it was an episode of 2000 ans d’Histoire, Le Climat. I will woefully admit that I understood very little of it; I simply don’t have the vocabulary for such a topic yet. I was able to pick out the occasional word or phrase that I knew, but it was mostly half an hour of “I know this is French, but I’ve no real idea what they’re talking about.”

I also listened to the first 8 lessons of Assimil Using French; I’ve read through the lessons in the past, but it’s been awhile. I’ll need to review them all in the book before moving forward.

I spent around 45 minutes practicing writing the Arabic letters I’ve learned so far: baa, taa, thaa, and nuun. I just learned nuun today. I practiced copying the words provided by Awde’s book for the letters I’ve learned so far. It’s quite rough looking, my writing, but I suppose that’s to be expected on one’s first go at it. Writing from right to left is in itself a weird sensation for me; it’s even more strange doing so in a wholly new script, in a language that is built on foundations that I’m unfamiliar with. (The consonantal root system seems pretty cool so far, at least what I know of it from the book.)

And, finally, I made a few flashcards covering the basic present tense conjugations of regular French verbs (-er, -ir, -re). I know the endings, but I can’t produce them as fast as I would like, and I figure the cards will help with that. They’re old fashioned paper cards, not Anki cards, which goes against my usual habits.

On the agenda for tomorrow: Russian (grammar, perhaps, but certainly some vocabulary); another page or two of intensive German reading with King; another letter or two in Arabic. If I’ve enough time, I would like to get in some other things as well, but I suppose that’s enough to get started on…

In the afternoon, I went to the library and checked out Awde’s The Arabic Alphabet: How to Read and Write It. I read for about an hour, and learned to recognize baa, taa, and thaa; I’ve not practiced writing them yet.

From left to right: thaa, taa, baa. Thaa is like th in three; taa is like English t; and baa is like English b.

Later, I listened to 3 Schlaflos in München podcasts, coming to around 45 minutes total. I’m not sure if it counted as an “epiphany” moment or if it was just due to the subject matter, but I understood a surprising amount, almost all of it. I usually struggle to keep up with Annik.

In the evening, I did the repititions for around 30 words (German). I still have a few lists floating around that need repetition attention, particularly the Russian list I did a few days ago.