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