Week 6 : the stray kitten update
Ok, so for the past two days my life has been hijacked by a 3 month old kitten that I have to keep until Monday morning, which is when there will be space available at a local no-kill shelter to take her in. For people who don't do animal rescue, summertime is "kitten season" and shelters are overflowing with kittens (the small no-kill that agreed to take her currently has 30 kittens, not counting all the other animals they have), which means no-kill shelters have to turn many away. But this kitten, who someone callously abandoned at the park near my house, is too cute and friendly and socialized to hand over to Animal Control, and so she's hanging out here until there's room for her. That would be OK if it weren't for the 2 adult cats who
really aren't happy about this interloper, as well as the dog who needs a lot of attention and has to be walked twice a day, and the elderly parent who lives here and also needs my time and assistance, not to mention all the usual adult stuff. Oh, and since the kitten loves attention, and she is a tiny kitten in a big human house, she
hates being left in a room alone and cries insistently and very loudly if she is, even if it is for a few minutes.
So, here I am, exhausted from lack of decent sleep and trying to get some studying done despite constant interruptions thanks to this ridiculous situation. So let's see how I made out for this week:
I'm trying to get back into my routine of doing a Duolingo French story a day and redoing the previous day's story, but Duolingo had to go fiddle with things and reordered the stories, so now stories I've competed are scattered across the different tiers and I have to go back to unlock the tiers I had previously unlocked. And this completely threw my Aspergers ass off. Thanks, Duo.
I watched more episodes of
The Hollow and I started watching another show in lieu of
Lost in Space (I am just having the worst time with trying to understand the French dubs for the adult leads). The Netflix show I'm watching now is
Free Rein. It's a really cheesy show for tweens (I think, idk
) with girls and horses. But it has the benefit of having better French voice actors--by better, I mean, I can understand them more readily.
For grammar, I am so very close to finishing this chapter of prepositions. I think after this I will focus on verbs.
I'm on chapter 9 of the novel I'm reading,
Les lecteurs de pensée. That's about 1/3 the way through. I think my reading comprehension is good enough to read fiction without the crutch of an English translation but there are still a number of more complex sentences that I come across that I can understand from context but wouldn't think to compose on my own at my level so I like having the English there to check if my parsing of the sentence is correct.
I did manage to keep up with Memrise this week although it has been very hard the last couple of days to find the time. I have a 47 day streak on my main French course although I've only learned a few new words this week, so it's mostly be all reviewing which is better than nothing, right?
Oh, and I've been on a Stromae kick lately, so allow me to share with you this rather creative if not disturbing video (which sadly has non-optional English subtitles added to it):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UKftOH54iNUI read a couple more chapters in
An Taistealach and I went back to
Nigheanan Mòra and started making a list of the words I highlighted in that. I also began
Sguel du Latha, finally. This will be a big project, though. I'm going to read a bit of it and then decide on what approach I should take with it.
(Sidenote: I recently saw that on Amazon the price for this book has seriously skyrocketed. When I bought mine, I thought it was massive indulgence at $100 for a new copy. Now people are asking $500 or more for a used copy. Jeesh.
This is sadly one of the downsides of advancing in a minority language--books in print are scarce and when they go out of print, they end up beyond the reach of most learners. I really need to take care of my copy, huh?
)
Likewise as with French, I didn't make a lot of progress with my Gaelic Memrise course beyond reviewing terms and keeping my streak.
I did some writing in my journal but nothing complete or coherent enough to post. I will try to put together something more presentable in the next couple of weeks.
I have gotten through Units 1-4 in Colloquial Japanese and have started on Unit 5. Now that I have a better grasp of reading in Japanese, I'm doing this a bit more like how I went through Teach Yourself Gaelic--read a unit, look over the grammar, vocabulary and exercises to make sure I have a general knowledge of the stuff and then move on, and returning to those units when I need to. I don't see a lot of benefit in being "perfect" with a lot of this material, as the pieces for me are starting to come to together and I want to keep up my interest and motivation rather than drill specific things until I'm bored.
I discovered that a You Tube user,
NihonGoal, has made some good videos that cover vocabulary, grammar and kanji in Minna no Nihongo, and I have watched the grammar and vocabulary videos for Units 1-4. I don't have the book, but I find these videos to be a very good supplement to my other resources.
I'm a little on the fence on how I should be learning kanji at this point. I think I will continue for now just learning them in context of sentences and phrases that I can use at my level and worry about learning all the readings later on when I am more advanced. It's just very hard for me to remember different readings for a kanji when I am only seeing it used in one way with the materials I am using.
I have been doing listening practice with Memrise and some of videos on You Tube. From this video I learned the word 帰国子女
kikokushijo for a Japanese person born and educated abroad and has returned to Japan and that the word for "generality"--般性
iappansei--is used to describe "regular Japanese people," here meaning Japanese born in Japan and who have received a typical Japanese education. (Note that there are quite a few of spelling errors in the English subtitles, and since my Japanese isn't very advanced I can't attest to how accurate the translations are.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJkCA_0zCfYDabbling: Because I needed to take a break from French for a couple days, I did some review of Irish and Navajo. I have continued with my daily 15 minutes of Indonesian, and I reviewed some more Welsh. I almost, kind of, very nearly got sucked into doing some Finnish but nope, I resisted!
And I watched this very interesting Langfocus video on Wolof when I was suppose to be working on my Japanese:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AUhvSeqFB6w&t=407sMemrise Goal: I'm now 571k away from my goal. Seeing when I started I was 2.48 away from my goal, that's a lot of progress! This week I did 283k points.
The Memrise app is not running very well on my Kindle app now--I think my Kindle is pretty much dying but it'll be a few months before I'll have the money to replace it, since I want to get a good Android tablet instead of another cheap Kindle. So, my finger crossed that this Kindle can last that long because I hate doing Memrise and reading ebooks on the PC.
OId Irish/Sanskrit: Aside from some irregular script practice for Sanskrit, nothing. I just didn't have either the time or energy this week. Since these are just side projects, that's OK.