Music, music.

Music is primarily on my mind, but I'll document what else I've done this week, too. I get all excited about music in general in February because of an Italian music festival - Festival della canzone italiana di San Remo. I can't help it. It was the first and only European music festival I had the privilege of attending. How my friend scored tickets to it is beyond me, but I'm glad he did. Anyway, this is the oldest festival of its kind in Europe. And it's a precursor to Eurovision. There are similar song festivals throughout Europe.

On to Norwegian, I watched the Norwegian film Bare Skyer Beveger Stjernene (Only Clouds Move the Stars). It's a good family film that deals with family loss. And the girl that plays Maria - Thea Sofie Rusten - is fantastic in her role. My next movie for the week is Svidd Neger, which looks like a really interesting story. I'll recap in my next post.

Since I've been spending a good portion of my winter either in the Twin Cities or in Northwestern Wisconsin, I'm sort of in the heart of Norwegian immigrant territory. I've been able to speak the language more than I would have thought before coming up here, even if the people I talk to speak a somewhat archaic Norwegian.

Since I finished the Chmielewska novel I've been looking for something else to read, preferably another one of her books. No such luck in finding anything. I have a substantial Polish pop music collection, so I've been listening a lot to that. And it fits in with my music obsession this week.

The Türkçe Öğreniyoruz series of language courses I picked up are really good. Very different accents on the audio, and as I mentioned last post, everything is in Turkish. I'm cruising though the second course, since most of the contents of the first course I've already learned elsewhere. I also managed to find a Skype partner for Turkish, so I can practice not just writing, but speaking. We've agreed to chat twice a week, and already I'm feeling more confident. I also discovered another Turkish singer - Gökhan Özen. I'm listening to him as I write this post, as a matter of fact. I'm enjoying his high-energy music.

On a final note, I have to giggle a little at the Norwegian, Polish and Turkish top 20 charts. Bruno Mars in on all of them. I know I'm an old coot, but what's up with that?

Lots and lots of music

This week has mostly been about music, at least for two of the three languages I'm taking on.

Norwegian music is pretty hard to come by through internet radio stations. It seems most streaming stations prefer to play hits in English, mostly American. Every once in a while though, I get a chance to really listen to some good Norwegian pop. P4 has been playing some decent pop lately, and I've recently discovered a singer I really like: Kari Bremnes. First off, her music overall is pretty fantastic. Second, her lyrics are interesting. And very clear. She's very easy to listen to. So I headed over to Amazon.com to see if her music was available for download. It is! I downloaded Fantastisk Allerede. It's a two CD set (which really means nothing when you're buying MP3s) and I've been enjoying it a lot. There are some other artists I've been enjoying too, such as Trang Fødsel, Áge Aleksanderse, CC Cowboys (I really have to be in the mood to listen to them), etc., but I've spent much off my music listening time with Kari Bremnes.

I also have another movie to watch, although I'm reluctant to watch it right now. I think it might be beyond me, In fact, I know it'll be beyond me. It's called Kill Buljo - a Norwegian parody of Kill Bill. And it takes place in Sami country. Maybe in a couple weeks. I'm just not up for it yet.

I would really like to start writing more in Norwegian. I'm feeling more comfortable with it and can to a certain extent express myself in writing, so I may also start to post short writings to Lang-8.

I'm doing pretty much the same thing for Polish, listening to lots of pop music and news via internet radio. Polish, in contrast with Norwegian, offers a lot of listening options. I already have a sizable collection of Polish pop music, so I continue to listen to that.

Since I've dropped reading Linia Czasu for now, I feel like I should be reading more in Polish. But I don't want to get too bogged down in just reading, since that's the bulk of what I'm now doing with Turkish. So I've decided to do some exercises from one of my workbooks - Intermediate Polish. The exercises are frankly really dry. I have another book - Colloquial Polish - that has other exercises which are much more fun, but I've already gone through them and they're a bit too elementary for me by now. I wish I could find some exercises that weren't so dry.

And finally, I'm continuing with Teach Yourself Turkish. I'm on the 4th chapter. I'm really liking it. It's throwing lots of useful vocabulary my way.

Overall, I feel like I've covered a lot with each language this week. I'm pretty happy.