work weekend

my work weekend extends to Monday this week - and it will probably be a long day... still just working on a few things here and there, want to do more yarn work, crochet, weave or knit - but I don't have a lot of energy after doing other things - water garden, feed animals, cook dinner (often they make their own but then I'm still poking around finding something for me and asking if anyone else wants something) and doing laundry.. I've also fallen asleep for three hours a day nap several days in a row here because the heat really gets to me out on the route, come home, drink and eat, and then try to work on language but end up drifting over and going to sleep until actual dinner time, feeding animals etc.

Am at about 40% on the A1 Russian course I've been taking.  It says I've been working on that for six weeks now.  My Cyrillic reading is doing much better, and I can understand the Bulgarian things I was trying to learn a little better.  It sends me a daily word in Cyrillic and often I can read it and guess what word it is before I click it and look at the picture and hear it.   And yet, Russian sounds so much like Czech in so many places, which helps - because I have gotten pretty far along in Czech over the past few years.  Playing babadum vocabulary though, I realize how limited the vocabulary I've learned is - lots of grammar words and verb words, but a limited amount of nouns - and that needs some extension that babadum is perfect for.  I've stalled a bit on the Latvian and Lithuanian just because I haven't had as much time and have been tired with the heat.

Mark has been working on a Scrabble type word game player that pulls word lists from multiple languages and can play the words.  He's talking a lot about statistical linguistics and occurrence and distribution of alphabet characters in the word lists ... I get some of that, but when he gives me the word lists I'm looking for meaning first.   I've been able to recognize his word lists of Welsh, French and Czech, and some Romanian (although fewer of the words that his program pulled up were ones I knew there).  I am quite interested in him making a Czech spelling set for me, and maybe Greek and Cyrillic as well, but he wants to do this first so he knows how many of each letter is required for every language.  Also, reminder to myself that he is waiting for a replacement part for his printer, so he's working on this while he's waiting for that.  For study, I've been doing mostly French, Russian and either Czech or Spanish lately, a little Greek thrown in.


the main profile on Duolingo

French        L 25 XP 51194 21194 XP beyond Level 25
Welsh          L 25 XP 30004 4 XP beyond Level 25
Spanish       L 23 XP 25020 +980 XP to next level
Japanese     L 19 XP 14335 +665 XP to next level
Czech          L 19 XP 13734 +1266 XP to next level

Romanian    L 17 XP 11143 +857 XP to next level
Portuguese  L 16 XP 9632 +868 XP to next level
Italian          L 15 XP 7625 +1375 XP to next level
Greek           L 14 XP 7141 +359 XP to next level
German        L 14 XP 6046 +1454 XP to next level
Finnish         L 13 XP 5515 +485 XP to next level
Catalan (es)  L 12 XP 4052 +848 XP to next level
Swedish        L 11 XP 3689 +211 XP to next level
Russian         L 11 XP 3299 +601 XP to next level

 I downloaded a two dollar pattern with a lovely crochet camisole in it (among other things).  I don't know if I can ever finish something like this - although, without a pattern, once upon a time, I had started one.  I normally find the typical crochet threads itchy to wear - but I hold out some hope that I can find something that would wash well and not be itchy.

link for later, similar creature and a good blog to revisit : https://www.crochetology.net/2015/05/camisole-exercise-no-1.html

bit

We did those two flea market days in a row, and that was a bit much for us, social introvert wise.  I did some gardening yesterday, and will go out there again in a little bit to look everything over.   And today we did some shopping, and glad to be home.  

I've studied a little less of the Lithuanian the past day or so, give myself some time to see how much I've soaked in.  I did a bit more today than yesterday, and found myself getting about 1 in 8? of the 'non-super-easy' ones wrong - I wasn't counting the ones like 'galaktikus' for galaxy, but more the ones that are very specific to the language, like 'pamesti' (to drop/lose)  - not obviously borrowed words.  That is still pretty good for a week on it.  (and hundreds and hundreds of words)

 

I've added some Greek review the past few days, and continued with the Russian site (Busuu) and Spanish and French on my Duolingo profiles (with the Greek there, and on Greekpod101).  I dropped the Bulgarian except for a word or two here and there because I tried to join their site as a birthday gift and it wouldn't let me pay for less than 6 months.. and I didn't want to commit to that much money on it yet.  Instead, I'll buy myself a longer garden hose closer to my birthday.  We've also still got to pay for what the mail truck is in the shop for, and fix the kitchen faucet that has sprung a leak, but not a major one.

Today at the supermarket Esme brought me this little cooler thing that Mark wanted to use in the greenhouse for cold-stratifying seeds - and I didn't know what in the world they wanted it for when she came up to me carrying it.  I asked her 'Apparata se quoi?' loud enough that people turned heads next to me.  She knew what it meant (fairly easy - what is this apparatus? in pseudo-latin-french which my brain seems to operate in).  Then : I kept myself from saying the next thing that was not quite-English 'ya apres nostri a seguir' (it follows after us) and instead said the English translation from my brain of 'I guess it's coming with us then', with a note of resigned sarcasm.  That last bit isn't Latin, it isn't Catalan, it isn't French - but it has elements of all three.  

I really don't know what language my brain 'speaks' in before it translates to English - at one time I thought it had to be only French, because that was what was present in my childhood - but the answer lies somewhere between several languages - so I must have picked up more from reading, dictionaries and encyclopedias, (my dad had a set of language books from Simply Teach Yourself ...something in red leather-bound volumes, there were also math, accounting and other books in that series but I adored the multiple languages), other television? and so forth.  And the more languages I learn, the better I am at interpreting that what comes 'pre-installed'  isn't just nonsense, it actually does have roots in somewhere, and that it's grammar, of course, is absolutely horrid.

note : a friend looked at what I had written and said 'you were speaking a patois' - a pidgin, especially of French, that includes regional dialectical differences and/or adaptations to nearby languages, sometimes called a creole in other countries, but also referring to the 'country speak', 'colloquial' or 'rough way of saying things (what patois means)' vs. the refined correct grammar forms.  I like that, I'll take it.  

 I don't know what form of French my grandmother spoke, as she was French and Indian (Ojibwa from Rolla, ND, her parents did not live on the reservation, her mother was half or full Indian, from what I was told and remember (I was five when she died, and my mother told me some of it - so this is how I remember what I was told:) my great-grandmother's name was Bessie Gannon on my grandmother's birth certificate, and a gravestone I've seen - but didn't have any birth record for Bessie that we could find - and her father was many nationalities, in-and-out moving around, gambling and doing odd and long-haul type jobs - Grandma was third or fourth youngest out of ten children, several of the girls had already gotten married and moved away - so after Grandma was seven years old (and her younger sister four, and maybe another younger boy, and then the baby girl) their mom got sick and their father had been away for a long time, and all the children at home, right down to the 18 month old baby, were sent to an orphanage near Owatonna, Minnesota, very far away from their home.  The boys and the girls got split up.  The baby was adopted out (Grandma's sister, when I was a kid, found her and met with her).  

In the orphanage it is possible they learned Latin from the nuns? but she did tell me they were nuns, and they definitely spoke some German, and that she and her sister were in a German speaking household for a while but the lady gave them back because Grandma was stubborn and talked back, she said the lady called them 'dumkoff' (dumbhead) all the time, and that Grandma wouldn't stand for them beating her littler sister who still wet the bed, she made them beat her instead and she told me that once when she fought back the lady locked her in a closet and she screamed and hollered and beat on the door and after that I guess the lady decided Grandma was too spirited for her and both girls went back to the orphanage).  

Grandma's name was Vera, and her little sister was Inez, and the youngest I think was Priscilla by birth? perhaps Patricia.  The older girls were Nora and Eva and Ava and another name that sounded like Eva... and then there were several boys Arthur and Clyde.. Claude? and I can't remember the other maybe a William?  What I did find out I had written down in a notebook for Esme for the future - but I can't find it now.. it's somewhere around here with a bright turquoise cover and has all of my father's family's info  and my mother's father's family's info in it as well (which I found much more of).

On Baltoslav tools - I am playing the pictures game in multiple languages - it goes very quick and gives me a good random selection of words to test - and in Bulgarian, I am getting today maybe a score of 5 or 7 before I lose the three lives over 4 times, in Latvian, about 40, in Lithuanian also about 40 - both of those about 4 times played, Catalan 55 (high score, 2 times), in French 280 (one time played)!  I find it really interesting what French words I have not learned, like wild boar, or trace (it left no trace, not to trace something) etc..  they tend to be high tier ones you would only get in certain circumtances.  In Catalan I'm still getting some of the next tier down wrong - faucet, sparrow etc.

After that, did a comparison with babadum on the French and went to score 125 - with probably about ten mistakes in there on again (it doesn't show you how many mistakes, and there are no 'lives lost' there.  Again, it was mostly high level words that I had not heard and/or positively identified before - even in all the time I've studied French - but I felt the mistakes harder, and also felt the 'I can figure that out from it's parts' stronger, as well - on words that I had an idea about, but had not heard the combination before.  I also like that I knew a lot of the 'abstract' words in French that I have learned the Lithuanian word for on the same system, but how that feels different in my head now because I know the French from a different level, and understand that picture better now (since it is all pictures there, and no explanations).

faire le ménage ou apprendre quelque chose?

One small layer of my brain says I should be cleaning - I'm doing some laundry - I should be baking more madeleines because I'll eat them, but there are no eggs (except under chickens) as they were all boiled and fed to dogs.   Instead I'm practicing my French to Spanish, because I keep reaching 'through' the French to get the Spanish from the English... and that is just how my brain is set up.  I will be doing my Russian lessons later, as well, but for now, this seemed to be the rubber-band effect I needed in my brain.

Spanishdict.com : using that for 'blind' retrieval of Spanish words from English - and that is hard - spelling them and not grabbing the French word.  When I consistently keep reaching for the French, I've been writing it down on a list of things to practice, to connect the three angles of the triangle (French--English--Spanish) a bit better.

Mark made me the extra colors of the pushpin magnets I was asking for - the red for French a week or so ago, and now the blue for Spanish - and I've been putting them to use this morning putting up the words I have a hard time grabbing the Spanish word (blue) for from the French (red).  And as I was reaching through this brain network I sat down and drew a little map of some of what it feels like where languages are stored.  Of course, the more I work with a language recently, the more it takes up more space and connects in with other things.  That 'pool' of blue for Spanish isn't completely a good thing - because it is pooled there half isolated and hard to retrieve.  But there is always the base of French, ASL And English that were there in my infancy.. wrapped and flowing through everything - and everything else gets connected and shoved in and around it like a big squishy purse or drawer where the files are not well organized.

(separate thought : perhaps Latvian shouldn't be such a tiny dot, I recognize and can insert words on Clozemaster far better than I do many of the others - although I get 10/10 on French there, and 9/10 on Spanish, getting 7/10 on Latvian, which I've barely studied, is nothing to sneeze at, and I do a pretty good job on BaltoSlav languages on Latvian words and Ba ba dum has Lithuanian that is closest, flag striped yellow/green/red : I have played a bit more on Bern Istaba as well, the children's site for Latvian similar to the English site Starfall Esme used to play on)

But I have swept and put the rugs in the laundry - I'm afraid perhaps the valve is leaking again, but we have to pull everything out to look at it, take the screws out of the wall and shut off the water - I've cleaned the floors in several places, looked in the fridge for anything to chuck out and so forth... with the truck not easy to get to town in, I don't want to get into a plumbing job or other major project.  If the valve is leaking, it is a tiny trickle that I have only barely noticed from a low spot in the garage floor that holds the water there if it gets there...  So many more things need to be dusted and cleaned, it is neverending.  And this is my first day off that didn't automatically come with 'ten other things' planned for me to do, so I've been sort of drifting from one thing to another and not held fast onto any one big thing I have to do today.  I haven't done a shred of art in a long time, well maybe a sketch or two, and the language map above probably counts in some way.

I did go look at the garden - everything has been very wet and is wanting warmth and sunshine, maybe even some fertilizer.  I pulled some weeds, fed the chickens, gave them fresh water - and Mark and Esme are doing things with the greenhouse plants.

bits

 My little Tacoma mail truck had a strange issue today, I went over a bigger-than-I-thought dip in a parking lot and hit the pavement at a bad angle - and the whole truck jumped quite a bit - and then the gas pedal went to the floor and there was no vroom... but everything else was working and I couldn't figure it out.  The vehicle moved forward very very slowly, and did not accelerate - but braked fine, turned off and on fine, changed gears (same in Reverse - very very slowly, no acceleration possible, but braked fine).  Called my mechanic and sent him this picture and we worked out over the phone that the cable to the pedal had slipped out of it's harness bracket and thus, had no tension to be pulled back and forth by the pedal.  He instructed me to place the cable back in the harness and tighten up the nuts so that it held in place again - and all worked out good.  She still needs to go back to him for the fuel injectors are not sealed entirely... but I've been working all week and he's had the other vehicle so I've just been trying to limp to the moment we can exchange and get this hopefully small adjustment made, so she can go back on a longer route.  I went on a longer route with the company vehicle the other day because I didn't think she was safe to take out on that - and got a bunch of wire wrapped up around the drive train underneath in a you stay on the side-of-the-highway or be wiped by a semi-truck sort of thing... mailbox to mailbox etc, but the postmaster was able to cut it all out with wirecutters and then the vehicle worked ok for the rest of the trip.

So, vehicle excitements - let's not have any more, please?

I got some more seeds in the mail, some for our greenhouse operations, and some for the gardens.  I would like to use some time out there tomorrow.  I've been working on French and Spanish on my two Duolingo apps, and Russian - and backing that up with the Russian lessons on Busuu and Bulgarian and French on Clozemaster.  I got the little reading book in the mail for French, but it is a bit higher level than I had hoped to go over with my daughter - still good for me, but I will have to stick to the children's primers with her over our family chat line for a bit.  I realized a few months ago that I had been avoiding Chinese and Russian and a few other languages simply because well, those were the "growing up during the Cold War" type languages that why would you learn those unless you needed them for some reason?  But also, that I was missing some essential knowledge as a linguist-wanna-be by avoiding them, and how much Russian was similar to Czech and Bulgarian - which are some of my target languages... and encountering it in movies and a few animal videos I'm watching.  Then I found the course on Busuu and it is really really good - presenting things in a very understandable manner and also very different than on Duolingo (much more focus on spelling and understanding the grammar reasoning).. so, wow, I didn't think I'd be learning that this year, but I am.



Languages : (PROGRESS)

French :      L 25         XP 50804 20804 XP beyond Level 25
Welsh    :     L 24         XP 29792 +208 XP to next level
Spanish :     L 23         XP 24646 +1354 XP to next level
Japanese :     L 19        XP 14335 +665 XP to next level
Czech :         L 19        XP 13649 +1351 XP to next level
Romanian :   L 17        XP 11143 +857 XP to next level
Portuguese :  L 16       XP 9632 +868 XP to next level
Italian  :         L 15       XP 7625 +1375 XP to next level
Greek :           L 14       XP 6955 +545 XP to next level
German :        L 14       XP 6041 +1459 XP to next level
Finnish :         L 13       XP 5515 +485 XP to next level
Catalan (es) :  L 12       XP 4052 +848 XP to next level
Swedish  :       L 11       XP 3689 +211 XP to next level
Norwegian :    L 11       XP 3097 +803 XP to next level
Spanish (fr):    L 11       XP 3025 +875 XP to next level
Russian           L 11       XP 3007 +893 XP to next level
Hungarian :    L 10       XP 2438 +562 XP to next level
Ukrainian :     L 10       XP 2288 +712 XP to next level
Irish :             L 9          XP 2174 +76 XP to next level
Turkish :        L 9         XP 2044 +206 XP to next level
Polish :          L 9          XP 1798 +452 XP to next level
Chinese:        L 8         XP 1446 +204 XP to next level
Dutch :         L 7         XP 998 +127 XP to next level
Hindi :         L 7          XP 977 +148 XP to next level
Zulu :         L 7            XP 789 +336 XP to next level

Languages

November 2023, vs July 2023, vs December 2022 

Since they initiated the hearts system on me I haven't been advancing very fast - but I know that Japanese has gone from level 10 to 'level 19' in that time, so their original system is not working there...

old crown numbers here because that is what I was keeping track in before they changed THAT system last year... to levels, and now they've changed it yet again to 'sections and units'  //roll eyes, just pick something and stick with it!

DuoLingo:

French           475 /  464  / 417

Welsh            376 /  370  / 360

Spanish         309 /  294  / 243

Czech           169 /   169  / 160

Romanian     149 /  149  / 144

Portuguese     111 / 111  / 89

Italian             91  /  91  / 83

Japanese       77 ??  /   77  / 65 (not right, I've advanced 9 levels)

Greek             74  /  72  / 61

German       80 /  79  / 60

Finnish       71 /   70  / 62

Norwegian   67 /   67  / 47

Swedish       43 /  43  / 43

Irish             51 / 51  /  51

Turkish         39 / 39  / 38

Catalan        38 /  34  / 23 * (learning via Spanish language)

Polish         30/    30  / 30

Hungarian    26 / 26  / 21

Ukrainian    19 /  19   / 0 (began April)

Guarani         7 / 6  / 0 (began April) * (learning via Spanish language)

Chinese         11 / 4  / 0 (began July)

 

external : Latvian, working on just a little of it here and there

Pondering a sitch or a skitch more

I was surprised by the Welsh word 'cwch' today, and its meaning - which is a comfortable cuddle or a hideaway spot or to stow something away in a hidden place.  It has several meanings, and it was odd to hear it in some of the sentences I was reading.  I was reading an article by David Jandrell about Welsh Valleys Speak at Parallel Cymru, a bilingual online newspaper where I've been doing some of my Welsh studies.

It is a little fitting with the multi-use word in Welsh though, and it makes me wonder if it has come from similar far back roots and if anyone else would know of it.

The word: 'skitch', or 'sitch'

It brought back to mind something that has passed down through my mother's family, a bit of  vernacular I always thought was British English, but could even be related to the word 'sich' in German.  But nothing I've found actually seems to fit with how the word was (and is) used.  I have seen the word 'skitch' meaning to scoot over, which might be close to the meaning I learned.



The meaning I grew up knowing meant a small quantity, or a small quantity more than what was given previously.  If the item given was not specified, it could also mean a quantity of time.  It translated best to somewhere between 'a bit' and 'a pinch'.. and I have no idea where it came from but it still pervades my speech now as an adult.  Not only do I not know anyone else that says it, I can't remember anyone outside of my own family as a child using it.  Google shows up nothing - it says it is a vernacular for 'situation'... which in this case, does not fit.

Examples :

'Give me a skitch more of that (flour, a length of something like a board, pipe or fabric etc..)'  If you needed a very tiny amount you would say 'Give me just a skitch more' and that would mean less than a skitch.

I definitely remember using it a lot in baking, but also in sewing.  It would be very unnatural to ask for a 'skitch of marbles' or a 'skitch of apples'... it was more used in something that normally would not have quantity until it was measured, such as flour, or water or a length of board, pipe or cloth.  You could knead the bread a skitch longer, or pound a nail a skitch deeper, or do something, anything, just a 'skitch' better than before.

You could also 'sit a sitch' or 'sit a skitch' to sit for a little while somewhere

Or you could 'drag/push/move that item a 'sitch further' or a 'sitch closer'.
You could skitch over to the side, as well, but I wouldn't say 'sitch over' unless I meant 'a sitch over that line' etc.

"Wait a skitch more" meant you wanted to do something just a moment later, like after finishing a task that you were involved with but not much later than that.  The 'now in a minute' in the article made me laugh and remember this, too.

 

Background and other bits:

 
I am thinking this must have come down in my Grandmother's family, as I did not hear it from anyone else and my Grandmother Vera had very few siblings or other relatives that I knew growing up.  She was adopted out of the Owatonna Children's home in Blue Earth Minnesota, and knew French and some German from the nuns there and from one of the families that had adopted her for a while.  From some of what I remember being told she went to a German family for a while but eventually went back and stayed at the orphanage until she married my Grandfather.  Her birth mother was part Ojibwe / Anishinnabe from the Turtle Mountain Indian Reservation area in North Dakota, but I believe her father was of French and Russian descent.

I know there are records out there that one of my aunts had - but she said she was told not to give the information to anyone.  So, that is as much as I know.  The children were taken because their mother got sick and/or couldn't pay bills - there was some confusion on that part.  Their father was 'out' and couldn't be found - he apparently went away for long periods of time and then showed back up with money, as many men did at that time.  There were older sisters (Ava and Eva?) but they were married and their husbands wouldn't let the children come live with them.  So my grandmother, her sister, the baby girl and at least two of the younger brothers were transported a long distance to the Children's Home.

I know this is why I bawled so hard at the book 'Before We were Yours', because it matched some of the stories I did hear - of my grandmother being oldest of those that went to the home, not knowing where some of her younger siblings went, especially the baby, Phyllis.. and also about having to clean up after her younger sister Inez when she peed the bed so that the nuns wouldn't whip her for it in the morning.  That book hit home that I could see my grandmother as a young girl in the shoes of Rill/May.. and her doing everything she could but still not being able to keep them together.