First day report! I've got Rush's 2112 blasting out of my laptop speakers. "IT DOESN'T FIT THE PLAN!" *solo*. Epic.
Anyway,
Today I bought a folder, 500 sheets of white A4 paper (no lines as Tesco Express felt the need to accommodate late-night printing shifts instead), 350 post-it notes (could be handy ... flashcards? Labelling everything in the flat?) and 50 folder wallets. £4. What most astonished me was that the paper, albeit lacking lines, cost £2 for the 500 sheets. I won't ever get through that before I lose it.
After finally rousing myself at 3pm after a heavy night out at Nice'n'Sleazy's, interluded by some drunken passionately emotional band-talk ("Guys, I seriously am proud of these tunes. I like what we've got here. I think we're forging our own sound" - hmm) I realised I still had my list of common fruits (ávaxtar) up. Nine of them are specifically fruits that most people, including myself until recently, mistake for vegetables or other subspecies altogether (chillis, nuts, tomatoes etc.). Nine of them are berries, including the generic "berry" (ber). The rest are more regular. Peach is a wanker. Ferskja? Most of the other regular fruits are derived from loan words, assumedly because until anyone with a warm climate started trading with Denmark most fruits weren't known to the Icelanders. But ferskja? It's not that it's difficult, it just doesn't relate at all to anything I can think of, at all. Ah well - it's not too often that I say peach in English anyway.
(By the way, I'm italicising all the Icelandic in here. It just so happens that italicising ferskja in the above paragraph helped in two ways).
With my list of common fruits I went about finding the Vokabel website, then testing myself on all my listed fruits in the standard form and with the definite article ("the" is a suffix in Icelandic; hneta -> hnetan (nut -> the nut), with the combination of end letters changing upon gender - this helps me to remember the genders quickly) about 200 times, mainly slipping up when I got into a cycle of not adding "the" to the end or when encountering bloody ferskja.
Then I ate food. The eggs were slightly off but not to an extreme, so I was able to make myself a Saint Agúr omelette. After a good couple of hours of unassociated boredom I bought those above listed items in Tesco Express (still open at 8pm on a Sunday) and spent a few hours in the library. I started a basic verb list (to eat, to be, etc.) in one of the plastic wallets and dedicated two more wallets to book exercises, then almost finished (for the third time now) Lesson 1 of the Colloquial, copying out all of the dialogues to full comprehension. Then I thought, "these last 2 hours have been productive. I should start a blog to ensure I don't start slacking off". Then I came back and set up this blog. Then we tried to go out to meet my roommate to wish him a happy birthday. He'd gone right into town as the local club was closed. I desperately needed a pee. I turned back and started to write something for these blogs. By the time I finished the blogs for the day I was limiting myself to short sentences, but happened upon a sudden dramatic expansion of vocabulary range and my sentence compositional skills improved to the point of nearly rabid regicide (what?) while Rush's 2112 drew to a dramatic close. "YOU DON'T GET... SOMETHING FOR NOTHING... YOU DON'T GET... FREEDOM FOR FREE!"
Summary:
- Groggy, late, typical start
- Tested myself on common and commonly mistaken fruits and their genders
- Raged about peaches, and to a lesser extent cranberries
- Bought organisational materials
- Used them for that purpose, repeating Lesson 1 of Colloquial to full comprehension and starting an ungrouped verb list with their pronoun variations
- Made this blog
- Listened to Rush
- Finished this blog
These posts will hopefully get progressively shorter as my extracurricular life gradually gets sucked away learning obscure grammar forms for tenses we deserted several hundred years ago.
Hurrah.
Sjáumst! Paul x
No comments:
Post a Comment