Friday, August 17, 2007

Status

Just finished lesson 28 of 90 in the Pimsleur Russian series... finally re-introducing the familiar "Tbi" for "you". I'm actually getting into words and areas that I really had not ever had in College (in your basic courses, you tend to talk about family, colors, and parts of the body a lot, while Pimsleur wants you to know how to ask someone out to dinner and get directions to the restaurant - a bit more practical). I still haven't decided how far I'll go with this: Russian is still a cruel language, and I still don't ever want to GO there.

Swedish: I'm doing a good bit of reading on this, but my evenings have been a bit crazy, so not as much time on this. I did find a cool site with interactive Swedish lessons not unlike the Deutsche Welle site: Learn Swedish The only problem is that you NEED to use a dictionary with the site: All of the instructions are in Swedish, and there are no pop-up translations... but it's very good for slang and colloquial, and has tough quizzes.

On the GENERAL e-learning front: I've figured out that my method NEEDS to be writing and speaking: Multiple Choice is my downfall, because I'm pretty logical and instead of really thinking about the word, I almost always do a process of elimination... so I do great on the quiz, but the word remains unlearned.

I'm off with the family for a weeklong vacation, and will be doing some more Svenska there. I'm hoping that by the end of the week, I'll be comfortable enough with the basics to make my first call to the Swedes for a chat!

But don't expect much posting in the next 10 days... I'm not sure if the interweb is at the resort! (And even if it is, I won't be on it much!)

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