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.