look on my works ye mighty, and despair

A meme, because hey, why not. I'm a language nerd, this is my jam.

1. What’s your native language?
2. How many languages do you speak?
3. What language(s) are you currently studying?
4. How many/which languages would you like to know in the future?
5. Do your friends speak other languages?
6. What’s the most difficult word for you to say in your native & target languages?
7. How do you call your favorite animal in your target languages?
8. Write your favorite color in all the languages you know it in.
9. How long have you studied your target language(s)?
10. What’s your favorite word in your target language(s)? Least favorite?
11. What’s the funniest word in your target language(s)?
12. What’s the prettiest word in your target language(s)? Ugliest?
13. One thing you dislike about your target and/or native language?
14. Do you have any international friends?
15. Why are you learning your target language(s)?
16. Do you ever want to live somewhere where you’d speak your target language(s)?
17. What was/is the first language you want/ed to learn?
18. Have you ever made a friend speaking your target language(s)?
19. Do you listen to music in your target language(s)? If so, who are your favorite artists?
20. Opinion on duolingo?
21. What’s your favorite method of studying?
22. Have you ever played pokemon in your target language(s)?
23. Favorite blog in your target language(s)?
24. Do you ever speak to yourself in your target language(s)?
25. Ever speak to your pets in your target language(s)?
26. Do you ever feel like your target language(s) is(are) under appreciated? Why/why not?
27. How do people usually react when you mention that you’re studying your target language(s)? Do their reactions annoy you? Make you happy?
28. How do natives react when they hear that you’re studying their language?
29. Do you have any advice for someone who’s never studied a language before?
30. Where are you from? What are popular/”useful” foreign languages in your area?
31. Are there dialects in your country? Do you speak one?
32. Have you ever tried to learn a dialect for your target language(s)?
33. Do you ever want to have a career in languages?
34. How has learning languages impacted your life?
35. Do you have any big travel plans for the future?
36. What’s your least favorite language? Why? Favorite?
37. Do you know any obscure/useless words in your target language(s)?
38. Was there ever a word you pronounced incorrectly until someone corrected you?
39. What’s the most embarrassing thing that’s ever happened to you while studying your target language(s)?
40. Have you ever eavesdropped on people speaking your target language(s) in public?
41. Have you ever had a negative experience with a native?
42. What’s the most positive experience you’ve had with a native?
43. Tell me about your best friend in your target language(s)
44. Have you ever put sticky notes all over your house before?
45. Do you ever think in your target language(s)?
46. Are there any cognates between your native and target language(s)?
47. Have you ever met a stranger in public with whom you spoke your target language(s)?
48. Have you ever had an “I understand it now!” moment with your target language(s)?
49. Do you have any language pet peeves?
50. Is there a language that you’ve tried to learn but could never stick with it or just weren’t interested?

Yesterday was much like Saturday, except we also re-bleached Pez's hair and re-darkened mine. I also struggled with trying to translate the shop-closage notice into various European languages; many thanks again to fourcoffees for making sure that at least the Italian and German make sense. Today we have packed lots of parcels to send out. Our reward for getting them all to the post office in one go was cake and coffee in town, and we also have fancy biscuits to treat ourselves with just because.

We haven't packed yet, so that's the plan for the rest of the day along with general tidying-up and cleaning. Tomorrow morning I have to take our kitty to the cattery (it's okay, she's very happy there) and hope that P4G turns up in the mail before we set off.

Today we have mostly watched more Bakuman. Yesterday we watched a lot of Kuroshitsuji. I have also read a bunch of HP fic, read through a bunch of Remembering Kanji, and tried to work out exactly how out-of-practise I am at German and Welsh (thinking in German for me tends to slide into Welsh when I can't bring a German word to mind, annoyingly).

And now I need to go remind myself how to make welt pockets.

We have mostly spent today on one street in Paris, shopping for clothes. I don't have any regrets about this; we wanted a low-on-the-sightseeing-y sort of trip and this has been epic in a non-sightseeing-y way. French fashion is currently in a very Japanese-influenced stage, and the merging of the two styles makes me giddyhappy even if the prices were terrifying. I have immense urges to sew my own epic clothes with amazing necklines and pleats and voluminous pockets and all the layers.

I now fit--rather snugly, but I do fit--into a 'small' size in clothing in high-end stores in Paris. Holy shit, exercise: it works. Also got jokingly offered a job in one of the shops, because I was advising another customer how to accessorize the dress she was trying on.

(Also I got to speak both German and French today, which apparently is impressive--though I'm appallingly out of practise at either--and in both cases seemed to make people very uncertain as to where I am actually from. I guess my accent isn't very English in either language.)

We had drinks with my aunt and her girlfriend, who both remain some of the most lovely people I know. Pez and Isa bonded over how awkward and possibly alcoholic the Winfield women are. It was a very nice meetup, and we should visit more often.

Then Pez and I went for very French sushi. The end of the meal involved some rose-flavoured liqueur in a little cup, the base of which had a picture of a naked man (I have no idea why. Perhaps they figured we needed to be more heterosexual). When the cup was emptied, the picture went all blurry. Also the liqueur burnt our throats. I can't help but feel there's a metaphor here somewhere.

Home tomorrow! But first, more crepes!

I've not made *that* much progress since my first post or the update I made not long after that.

huskyscotsman sat through the introduction and first unit of the tape with me a few days ago, and did the tonal-guessing test. From this, it's obvious that his relative-pitch-identification skills are *way* better than mine, which I could have guessed. He did manage to point out some problems, however.

I find it nearly impossible to do falling pitches - when I think I'm lowering the pitch, I often actually raise it instead, which is terrible. I need to work on that, but it feels unnatural when I do achieve it. Sigh.

( things I *have* learnt )

I've also learnt that I suck at recalling vocabulary. Ah well.

Edit in 2012 for later readers: I didn't persevere with Cantonese - I got massively distracted, and didn't have much Cantonese material to practise with anyway. And now I'm marrying someone from Hong Kong, so it would have been stupidly useful. Oh well. I went back and looked though these posts for hints as to what I did *wrong* here before I started learning Japanese. Primarily I think my issues were not having any practise material and also focusing so much on tones. Also it would have helped to not use romanised words, probably. Let's hope I do better in Japanese!

I miss being able to aspirate my voiceless plosives at the end of syllables.

'Ng' at the beginning of syllables is a difficult sound to produce? Welsh has precisely the same sound, also used at the beginning of syllables. Muahaha.

Mmm, tonal language. Relative pitch, rather than absolute; excellent, so I don't need to squeak like the demo woman does. These tones are totally going to confuse me, though.

Hey! I've used tones to distinguish between a pair of homophones in Cantonese before! Hooray for those little Cantonese finger-games I used to play at school with the girls from Hong Kong. And, I suppose, hooray for 'five' and 'not' being the same syllable in different tones. Doesn't help me except as a brief ego-boost, though.

We have guest, so I'll go be social and stop hiding with the stereo. Tomorrow I'll go over all of this again, so I probably won't bore you with an update. For now, I shall continue quietly muttering 'sap kat sik ngaam baai deui tim mou syun' to myself at random points.

Hmm. Since I'm intending to keep updating about learning this, would people rather I made a filter for the posts?

Books bought today:

Wee Free Men by Terry Pratchett
Mother Tongues, by Helena Drysdale
A Short History Of Nearly Everything, by Bill Bryson.

Terry Pratchett and Bill Bryson are authors whom I adore, and I happily re-read everything they write over and over. I wasn't even aware that Bryson had a new book coming out, which probably shows how little time I've spent wandering around the places where such things are advertised recently. Sigh. Still, hooray, new books.

Mother Tongues is something that I'm sure I had recommended to me, but I totally forget by whom. Subtitled Tribal Travels Through Europe, it's kind of a linguistic and cultural travelogue through small and dying 'tribes' in Europe. Exactly my type of thing, so if you're the person who suggested I read it, well done. The one thing I am unsure of is whether I will be able to handle listening to the author's continuing angst about uprooting her children for the journey, and I've only read about a chapter so far. Oh well.