Day: November 28, 2020

November 21, 2020 1 of 8

Evelyn and I met up for Pokemon Go Community Day and on my way home, I finished my second Pimsleur Vietnamese lesson. First, I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m going to need to do each Pimsleur lesson twice. When I look at written Vietnamese, I can understand it, but the native speakers on this recording don’t sound anything like the speakers in the Rosetta Stone, so I don’t know what they’re saying at all.

Also, on the way home, I didn’t get any red lights, and the parking lots on the way home were pretty small and it would’ve been frustrating to try to turn around in them and so I had Ray Brown and two Vietnamese people talking to no one in particular for probably about 15 minutes. I finally ended up putting the radio on and throwing my podcast phone into the back seat.

Now, this isn’t my normal in-the-car language approach. I usually listen to my language podcasts through my bluetooth speaker, which I can then turn off while I’m driving because it just requires me to push a button that I can find without looking at it. Trying to pause something on my phone screen, however, requires an actual complete stop.

My bluetooth speaker doesn’t work with Pimsleur, which is a real source of frustration for me not just for the “I can’t stop my podcast by touch” factor. It’s also annoying because my bluetooth speaker is much easier to hear and when I try to use Pimsleur on it (and I’ve tried with three languages now — Lithuanian, German, and Czech), I miss syllables. Like “thank you” in Czech might come out as “ději” instead of “děkuji.” So frustrating.

And it’s not the speaker. I can listen to Chinesepod lessons on it and also to Audible books. It’s just Pimsleur. Speaking of which, I’d better start downloading Chinesepod lessons again.

Well, for better or worse, November only has nine days left and I go back to Chinesepod in the car on December 1. I doubt I’ll be able to make much progress on Vietnamese in that time, particularly doing one lesson every two days, but every minute I spend will be a minute towards being able to use this language.

Our Gratuitous Amazon Link for this post is the third Discworld book. Today I bring you Equal Rites, by Terry Pratchett.

November 19, 2020 3 of 8

I’m spending entirely too much time trying to get a capital “č” for that title.

Okay. I finally just found a page with it and cut-and-pasted it.

Today I finished Pimsleur Conversational Czech. I’ve been doing Duolingo Czech for a couple of months now and am getting somewhere, but I wanted to come at it from a different angle. I have most of it nailed, except for the part about “what do you want to do?” I don’t even know.

The program seems to be geared towards businesspeople. Well, technically, business*men* on work trips to Czechia. We learn a word for “to have lunch,” but not “to have breakfast” or “to have dinner,” which is odd. I guess they don’t have breakfast or dinner meetings in Czechia?

As for why I emphasized “men” in the previous paragraph, well, like when you’re supposed to say that you want something, like something to eat or drink, they want you to say “chtěl bych,” but that’s what a man would say, for a woman, it’s “chtěla bych.” So frustrating.

Also frustrating is that there’s not a lot of time to say the sentence if it’s particularly long or complicated. I found myself skipping the “Wenceslaus” part of Wenceslaus Square and just saying the “square” part for the first two lessons after it was introduced. Now I can say “Václavské náměstí” like it’s no big thing.

I’m still working on Duolingo Czech and will be working on it until the end of November (when I switch to Duolingo Italian). And then I’ll be back to Czech in June of 2021? August of 2021? Something like that. Maybe I’ll save up for the full Czech 1 course for next year instead of just the conversational part. I will still be “Ano. Ráda”-ing instead of “Ano. Rád,” because, still a woman.

And for the last 10 days of November, I’m going to be tackling Pimsleur Vietnamese in the car. I did Rosetta Stone Vietnamese a couple of years ago and wanted to do two months of Vietnamese in December and January, but none of my games come in Vietnamese. Even if I set my phone to Vietnamese, the games that change their language according to phone settings revert to English (or at least they did the last time I checked, which was . . . a month ago?). So I’m going to squeeze in 10 days of Vietnamese at the end of my Chinese/Czech months, for this year, at least.

And our Gratuitous Amazon Link (I wish I had some good language books to recommend so that this would be less gratuitous. Alas, I don’t), we have All Fall Down, the first of the Embassy Row novels by Ally Carter.