A little bit of everything.

As I do every week, I watched another Norwegian film. Well, I should be more specific and say that I watched a Norwegian film with a lot of Albanian thrown in. The film's title is Blodsbånd. A somewhat disturbing movie about a boy that leaves Kosovo in search of his father in Oslo. He ends up back in Kosovo after some very unfortunate events. The movie got me thinking about how many people leave their homeland in search of a better life, only to return after not finding it. Anyway, that's neither here nor there. Because there was so much Albanian spoken in the movie, I had Norwegian subtitles on throughout. When Norwegian was spoken, it was with a very heavy accent, so that was a listening plus for me.

I've put in a couple more journal entries on Lang-8 too.

I finally bought a few ebooks from ebook.pl. Of course, I bought another Chmielewska novel - I really do like her writing style - and a Jacek Dkuaj novel. But I also got a short, 100 page book called Legendy Warszawskie which I'll read first. I'm familiar with a couple of the Warsaw Legends, such as Wars i Sawa and the Mermaid, but the book includes a few more that I'm not familiar with, so that'll be a good read.

I've completed the second Türkçe Öğreniyoruz course and have started the third. The first two courses were largely refresh/reinforce courses for me, since most of it had been covered in other materials I'd used. And, of course, I'm continuing with the Skype sessions. Those are helping me immensely.

Vinterkyss(et)

After this last week, I feel like I've gotten a fresh kiss from winter. What was I thinking, coming to the cabin in such cold weather? One night it reached -30 below - real temperature. This is in an uninsulated log cabin.

Anyway, we're back in the 20s and heading to above freezing by the end of the week.

I watched Vinterkyss, a rather sad, but good Norwegian movie that came out in 2005. Surprisingly, there was a substantial portion of the movie that was in English. I didn't mind. It served its purpose in the film.

I also put up a couple more entries on Lang-8. I'm so happy to be using it now. I've already gotten good corrections and learned things from it. And made a couple new friends in the process too! Originally, I was thinking to only write my entries in Norwegian for now, then maybe mid-year start with Polish entries. I may move that up by a couple months and hopefully start with Polish entries by March.

I've gone through another chapter in Rzeź bezkręgowców. That's coming along nicely, even if a bit slower than I'd originally planned.

And I've gone through two more lessons from Teach Yourself Turkish. I'm at the point right now where grammar is really making a difference, and as a result, it's requiring much more attention to detail. I'm happy with my progress, in any case.

Overall, it's been a pretty productive week. I've even had a fair amount of translation work. And I'm kind of amazed I've been able to do all this from the cabin.

A fantastic movie and a bit of reading and writing

I got a chance to watch Elling, an absolutely fantastic Norwegian film the other night. I HIGHLY recommend this film! By far the best Norwegian film I've seen to date. It was also the easiest film to follow the entire dialog that I've watched. I'd like to think that a week away from hearing any Norwegian refreshed my senses and that was the reason I understood so much, but I doubt it. It was just a great movie and kept me interested. There are a couple other movies that are related that I'll have to check out: a prequel and a sequel.

I've also finally begun using lang-8 for writing. We'll see how that goes. There really aren't all that many native Norwegians there, so we'll see how often the corrections come. Because I'm a free account member, I can only list two study languages. It's not a problem for now, since I'm not ready to start writing in Polish, much less in Turkish. Unrelated, by what's up with so many Norwegians studying Japanese? The majority of Norwegian users are Japanese learners.

I'm getting through the Polish novel Rzeź bezkręgowców nicely. I'm pretty happy with that. It's not too difficult for me, and I like the author's writing style. Many of Chmielewska's novels have been translated into English, so I will probably try and read her in English at some point too. Just not this year.

I'm about half way through the Teach Yourself Turkish course. I'm very happy with how that's progressing. I don't know the exact count, but I would guess that my Turkish vocabulary is at about 1200 or so words. Not bad for having studied the language for under three months.