Small Steps

Today I learned how to edit/add menu entries in LXPanel on my Linux box. A small thing, sure, but still useful and something I had wanted to do for a while.

Les llengües avuí

Language update for today:

Finished Baza Radikaro 3, about to start number 4.

At 33% on the large Catalan vocab.

Also decided to dive in to the full Pandunia vocab list of just over 700 words. Am at 10% on that one.

Aprenent de avui

At the 30% mark in the larger Catalan course on Memrise. Also completed Baza Radikaro 1 and halfway thru Baza Radikaro 2.

Also learned the 70 words presented in the Pandunia lessons available on the wiki. Will consider going thru the full 740 word list later...

In non-language related stuff, downloaded GarageBand for the iPad and have been having fun with it!

Language Updates

The last few days have been rather productive as far as the language projects go. I have been working thru a larger Catalan collection on Memrise (about 1000 words) and by the end of today will be about 25% of the way thru it.

Other Catalan activity: following Kato Lomb's advice to start reading from the very beginning, I headed over to Project Gutenberg and downloaded La Mare Balena by Victor Catala and started reading it and trying to intuit the text.

I have also been doing the Baza Radikaro (basic root collection) for Esperanto just to fill in a few gaps in my knowledge there. This is a set of about 2500 words and roots collected by the Akademio de Esperanto which enable wide-ranging everyday conversation. Due to the word formation rules of Esperanto, it actually corresponds to something like 15000 words in other languages. Many of them I already know, but as I wrote before, it's good to fill in gaps.

Words of the day

Picked up another 21 common verbs (infinitive form only) in Catalan today. Now up to 143 known items.

Aprenent de Avuí

As of now, my Catalan lexicon count stands at 112 items. :)

I started a new deck on Memrise with Catalan prepositions, and after that I will do one on common verbs.

On that note, I need to look into the conjugation patterns and figure out how the principal parts method will apply.

Aprendizaje de Hoy

Well, yesterday was a little slower on the Catalan and Esperanto. I harvested the words that were in my short-term memory but didn't really learn new items. This morning so far I learned 10 new items in each language, and plan to double that at least by the end of the day.

I am looking forward to selecting my next Catalan course thru Memrise.

In other language news, I feel like my Spanish conversation skills are improving. Yesterday, I was able to sustain 15-30 minutes of conversation with a couple different people without resorting to Spanglish and with perhaps 80-85% comprehension on my part. It felt good :)

Fins després!