Hm

Hm, hardly anyone comes to this blog. Probably because I don't write much on it. It was going to be where I shared my stories freely and without cost, but I found the format of a blog was not conducive to reading stories.

I tried linking to google docs, but no one was looking at them. So, here it sits. A lonely blog. Perhaps I should think of more alternate hymns and post one a week or something. (I'm not really the personality to do that. I'd post when I had one or when the mood hit. Thus, one week might have one post, a different week none, and another about ten.)

French is driving me nuts. I wanted a simple "conversational French" and got talked into French 101. 6 chapters. Test on chp 4 is here and my brain is fried. I love playing with languages. "Playing" is the key here. Tests, graded homework, stress are not part of a fun learning experience for me - especially when the person correcting the homework or tests is not always correct. Also, speed and hurry-hurry-hurry, complete with deadlines (tests) don't jive with my core.

At the same time, conversational Spanish wasn't working for me, so I opted for the college's Rosetta Stone. when I checked into it, I was not told the time commitment difference between the 1, 2, and 3 credit classes. I signed up for the 3, then found the time commitment was far too much, especially with the French 101 I was concentrating on.

At the moment, the only class I have is French (and I'm feeling like a real loser for dropping two of the classes I did). Sigh. Will I ever figure out who/what/etc. that I am? I suppose I'm one of those "lazy" ones who cannot stick with things. Barbara Sher would call me a "scanner" because I do one thing for a while, then I'm ready for something else. But how can one make money doing that? And we could use the money.

D'ja ever feel like you don't really belong in this world? Like what gives you power and strength is rare and difficult to find, while what saps your power and strength is in over-satiating abundance? I can't be the only one craving the lifestyle I crave - but am I the only one not smart enough to find a way to live it?

Watching Movies

Did I mention that the ooonnnllyy way to watch Quest for Camelot is in French? Turn off the French subtitles, though. They don't match the spoken words and can drive you crazy if you have an idea of what both are saying. It's a confusing way to improve your French. When I watch this cartoon, I often pause after "I Stand Alone" is sung, go back and listen to it in English (okay, American) a time or two, then go back to the movie in French.

The last several times I have watched Lilo and Stitch (the original movie), I watched it in Swedish.

The key to watching movies in languages you do not know (or do not know well) is to watch the version in your native language until you nearly have it memorized. That way, you'll know what the characters are saying, even if you couldn't repeat it. I have no clue why I like to watch movies that I cannot understand (or, in the case of French, understand very little). It's just awesome - provided I've watched the movie enough times in my language to know what's going on.

Linguistics

I love languages. I love linguistics. My mother had a book about the history of the English language years ago. I gobbled it up.

I love languages. I dabble in them. I play with them. I don't know why I don't drop everything and just do languages all day. (I actually suspect it's because something that fun that I'm not paying a university a ridiculous sum of money to teach me, must be a wicked thing to do, a terrible waste of time.)

If I could have unlimited time to do anything I wanted, I would play with languages. Okay, let's get this out of the way: I am fluent in American English only. I play with French. I used to know Spanish better than I do. (I had a perfect accent when I read, but I had very little or no idea of what I was reading.) Once, I knew a little sign language (enough that a deaf person came up to me in a restaurant in Michigan to talk to me - alas, I didn't know enough to hold an intelligent conversation). I've exposed myself to Chinese, Swedish, Irish Gaelic, and Russian, as well as to English from the British Isles, Canada, Australia, NE United States, and SE United States.

I would also be part of a linguists' group that met for two or three hours once (or more) a week, just to speak to each other in languages we wanted to learn (or to learn better). I would be fluent in fifty languages. As an aside, I'd also adopt kids from all over the world, in all colors that humans come in, here, on this planet.

Oh, yeah. I make up languages, too. My oldest daughter and I would speak nonsense to each other when she was very, very young. She loved the game as much as I did. My cousins and I made up a backwards language, which had probably been invented millions of times before, in the history of this planet. I made up a code for words in L'Jn - the Novel. In one part, she meets some people and cannot speak their language. The reader can figure out what the people are saying if they are good at cryptograms (which I love to do, by the way).

And the ironic thing in all of this? I took a language test before I went on a mission for the church I belong to. It was geared to find out how fast a person can learn to pretend nonsense words are real words. In other words, you had a chance to learn to speak a non-existent language. The man who gave me the test assured me that everyone got at least xx points (I forget the number) in the test. I got a fraction of that. Needless to say, I didn't go to any foreign countries. But the thing is, there was no intelligence behind that test. Real languages have real intelligence behind it. Real people speak them. Even the languages I made up, had intelligence behind them, except for the gobbledygook that my daughter and I spoke to each other and, in that case, there was no need to pretend that meant anything.