Using what I can get my hands on

This week, the Norwegian movie of choice was Varg Veum, Bitre Blomster (Bitter Flowers). It's based on a series of detective novels by author Gunnar Staalesen. It was an excellent movie. I like crime stories and the Bergen scenery was stunning. I'd not heard of the author before, but because of this movie I'll now be on the lookout for his novels. And I guess there are plans for more movie adaptations of the Varg Veum series, too.

Being in Northwestern Wisconsin for the last couple months has also given me the opportunity to actually speak Norwegian to a couple people in the area. That's been an unexpected bonus that I'm glad presented itself.

I'm continuing with Czarne Oceany. And I've been listening to Polish radio online, as well as my Polish music collection. Right now I have no local opportunity to speak Polish. I could go the Skype route, but I'm already doing that with Turkish. I generally don't like doing the same thing for more than one language, so I won't be doing Skype for a while for Polish. It is about time I start writing entries in Polish on Lang-8 though. So that's next on my list.

I've now started with the 4th Türkçe Öğreniyoruz course. It's the last in the series that I have, although the series runs through 6 courses. The last two courses are readers, from what I understand, so I'm not sure I'll even bother to hunt those down. I have plenty of other reading material available to me. As a matter of fact, I'm now able to get through a lot of the daily news. I've been using Hürriyet. My vocabulary is increasing fairly rapidly with it and I don't have many problems with grammar. This is helping with my Turkish Skype conversations. We now have a much broader assortment of things to talk about. And speaking of Skype, we've upped the amount of time for each conversation (still twice a week) to 20 minutes.

All in all, I'm much farther along with Turkish than I had planned to be by this time in the year and less than where I had planned to be with Polish. I'm about where I want to be with Norwegian - that is, able to communicate on most any subject that comes up, even if my vocabulary isn't the most elegant.