Tuesday, January 31
I was going to watch the SOTU, I really was, but I'm still getting over this cold and I'm just not up to the level of drinking that would be required to stomach the smirking bastard. I am feeling better than yesterday, thanks to the great quantities of Vitamin C and sleep I've had over the last 48 hours, and more immediately to the great quantity of cookie dough I just found vacuum-sealed in the freezer. I made the stuff a long time ago. It sucks as cookies, puffs up into icky cakey things, but as dough qua dough it does the trick nicely, oh yes it does. The best thing is that Past Me was smart enough to portion it all out into uniform little balls and freeze them individually.
I'm on lesson 26 out of 30 and the nice people at Pimsleur decided they didn't need to do a Level 2 for Greek so I figure I'll be done with it in the next week or two. Now I'm getting ready to start a new language for the new year. I'm starting to have second thoughts about the one I picked to do next. (Hint: it's on this page (oh, aren't they beautiful?)) The book I bought is very scholarly and formulaic, with lots of tables for memorizing things. I'm a little concerned. I mean, sure, I'm a language geek and all, but this looks like the kind of teaching that doesn't work, and it concerns me. Unfortunately, there aren't an awful lot of other options. This happens with obscure languages, and I guess I should get used to it if I want to work my way through all the ones I want to learn. I'm thinking more about quantity than depth; I plan to spend a year or so on each one and see where that takes me. I don't care so much about being fluent in any one language unless I move somewhere I need fluency. I mostly want to be able to decode a whole lot of alphabets and syllabaries when I see them and know some basics: hello, please, thank you, maybe order a cup of coffee, figure out a headline, sing along with a pop song. I don't really need to translate literature.
8:33 PM
