(no subject)
I Facebooked Vicky Coren about her article last week, and she wrote me the nicest, sweetest, friendliest message back. The inter-highway is just great sometimes!
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I think I've decided to turn down the French job. I can't afford to relocate on the salary they're offering me and expect to see anything of Hannah. There are other possibilities, although I don't want to jinx anything by talking about it too much yet.
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My Lao is going pretty well, I think. In a lot of ways it's refreshingly simple: no plurals, no noun declensions, no verb conjugations, no verb "to be". The tones are causing me a few problems - I think when I say things I'm really exaggerating them, it sounds like I'm singing. Literally every single source I have on Lao tones disagrees with every other source, so I have picked one system at random and am hoping that, what with all the regional variation, if I make mistakes they'll just think I learned it somewhere else.
The resources I've found are not bad, although as usual they are full of such spectacularly useless practice phrases as ຄູພາໄປຍາມໂຮງພິມ “a teacher took us to visit the printing factory” - man, it's going to be quite an effort crowbarring that one in. Still, it is a source of continued pleasure and mystery to me that I am already able to read sentences like this. I am at the lovely in-between stage where I can understand simple reading exercises, but where the language is still strange enough for me to be excited by my own understanding.
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Once I hoped you'd be
my epic. Turns out you were
barely a haiku
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I think I've decided to turn down the French job. I can't afford to relocate on the salary they're offering me and expect to see anything of Hannah. There are other possibilities, although I don't want to jinx anything by talking about it too much yet.
---------------
My Lao is going pretty well, I think. In a lot of ways it's refreshingly simple: no plurals, no noun declensions, no verb conjugations, no verb "to be". The tones are causing me a few problems - I think when I say things I'm really exaggerating them, it sounds like I'm singing. Literally every single source I have on Lao tones disagrees with every other source, so I have picked one system at random and am hoping that, what with all the regional variation, if I make mistakes they'll just think I learned it somewhere else.
The resources I've found are not bad, although as usual they are full of such spectacularly useless practice phrases as ຄູພາໄປຍາມໂຮງພິມ “a teacher took us to visit the printing factory” - man, it's going to be quite an effort crowbarring that one in. Still, it is a source of continued pleasure and mystery to me that I am already able to read sentences like this. I am at the lovely in-between stage where I can understand simple reading exercises, but where the language is still strange enough for me to be excited by my own understanding.
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Once I hoped you'd be
my epic. Turns out you were
barely a haiku