All over the map

[ritaxis]

First:
This is from here. I saw it here.

Secondly:
I am now a mother-in-law twice over. Frank had to get deportation proceedings started against him in order to get married. Because, you see, when they start deportation proceedings against you, you have 30 days before you have to leave the country, which meant that the foreign police could sign off that he had a legal status to be in the country on the day of his wedding. And now that he's married, he gets to appeal the deportation on the grounds that he is married to a citizen of the EU.

If you want to see way too many pictures of the happy event, you can go here. Notice, especially, the glass balcony on which the fairytale princess and her consort are standing, in the room full of low arches like unto a salt cave, within the Staremestko Town Hall (next door to the astronomical clock, of which of course there are pictures). Frank is not wearing an orange sateen tuxedo with matching pork pie hat, he is wearing a good dark suit of the type apparently most fashionable in Communist times,along with an orange shirt and tie. Hana is wearing an absolute fairy princess dress and elbow-length gloves and is having the time of her life, apparently. I invite you also to notice the tesselated sidewalks.

Meanwhile, my younger offspring has not been idle. She got her scuba certification, and would have her advanced certification also, but they had to cancel some of the dives for that because of rough water and poor visibility. The weekend her brother was tying the knot 9000 miles away, she was exploring the microbreweries of the north coast. In general she's living as exciting a life as one can in Santa Cruz without doing unwise things.

And I got to be the trick or treat lady at the Agave Agape tequila tasting fundraiser for the Women's Center, by which I mean that I handed little tasting glasses to the people when they came in and I handed them little goody bags when they left. In between I ran around and did whatever needed done. I was far from the busiest person there, but I was plenty tired after.

And I am almost finished with the hundred-years-after story, which is way topical for some reason, and I have figured out so many things I am ready to go back to the beginning of the not-Poland book and revise the feathers off it and then forge ahead and finish it.

I'm thinking that the sister needs her own story, but while I believe she is an interesting person who does interesting things and who has interesting thigns happen to her, I don't have a particular story in mind for her yet. Maybe it's her daughter who gets her own story, I don't know. It will come to me eventually. probably.

Also, I have been studying Czech for almost an hour every day again. I spent time in bed in the morning with the dictionary and the verb book, rying to memorize things and to compose simple sentences with what I'm learning. Then at my break at work I use this online vocabulary quiz thing to try to memorize more words. I figure that just knowing a lot of words would be better than having all the declensions memorized (though I do intend to memorize the declensions!), because it's better to be able to say a thing incorrectly than not to be able to say it at all.

Comments

[davidgoldfarb.livejournal.com]

Awww...they look absolutely adorable! And I have to say that Frank really pulls off the orange shirt and tie.

[khiemtran.livejournal.com]

What are you using to study Czech? (I'm just starting to work up on Slovak...)

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

While I was in Prague the first time I bought a textbook and workbook called "Do you want to speak Czech?" It's not the best in the world. I have used that intermittently for I guess almost three years. Very intermittently, I have to say, but it's also kind of a frustrating textbook.

Last time I got myself a better dictionary and "401 Czech Verbs" which has straightforward tables of nouns, pronouns, and possessive adjectives, and a stupid truncated chart of demonstrative pronouns (so stupid and truncated that it seems to me to be misleading). It also has front matter that gives a rundown of how the noun cases and prepositions work with the verbs.

So currently, I'm spending time in the morning with the dictionary and the front matter of the verb book, using the lists of verbs and prepositions which-take-which-cases and the tables of verb inflections and the noun/adjective/pronoun declensions, to compose setnences. Then I spend some time in the middle section of the dictionary, which is an English phrasebook for Czech speakers, just trying to memorize words and phrases.

Then, at work, on my break, I spend fifteen to thirty minutes online at a really simple site just matching Czech and English words, again, just trying to memorize stuff.

I intend to take the Czech textbook and workbook upstairs and use it with the verb book, because it does have more nuanced information than the verb book -- it's just less accessibly organized. Also, I need a dictionary that is arranged for English speakers, because the Czech one doesn't tell what declension the nouns are . . . which is difficult because you can't always say "this ends in this letter, so therefore it is declined like this:" there's a lot of overlap.

But right now my main focus is to ramp up my automatic production of words and approximate forms. I may be wrong, but when I speak Spanish -- of course a much, much easier language -- I notice that if I get the gender or the verb ending wrong, I can still express myself, whereas if I have no idea what word to use, I'm stuck. This is reinforced by the fact that about half the adults I talk to on a daily basis have less than fluent English, and I get to see how they manage.

[khiemtran.livejournal.com]

Thanks! I used http://www.locallingo.com/ before going to Prague and I was quite pleased with it. But obviously I'd need something else to really start building up the vocab and grammar. (It was usual at least having an understanding of how the declensions worked, so I could predict which words might actually turn out to be the same word, even if I couldn't form them myself.)

Hope it goes well!

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

I have a serious problem with local lingo: most of its sound files are in real audio format and I can't listen to them. I had so much trouble with real audio that I just don't deal with it at all any more.

But! You reminded me of their existence, and I went back and looked at some of the non-audio resources, and found some that were pretty helpful.

So what I know about Slovak is that it's only a smidge more different from Czech than US English is from UK English -- enough so that Slovakia and Czech Republic both have laws that say that it's perfectly fine to use Slovak in Czech Republic and Czech in Slovakia. But when I look at written Slovak it looks to me like there might be some pitfalls in trying to study Slovak using resources for Czech. Not all the spelling differences look perfectly consistent, for example.

You said in your journal Slovakia is in your future -- in what capacity? The next time I'm going to Czech Republic is June 2013 to see my kid graduate. I'm hoping to stay some weeks that time, but who knows how things will play out -- I certainly can't
t imagine where the money is coming from at this point. At any rate, I'm planning to be able to have conversations next time!

[khiemtran.livejournal.com]

Just a flying visit for me, I'm afraid. Although it's the sort of place I'll probably end up going back to. I'm sort of trying to gauge how much effort to put into Slovak at the moment, since I'll also be passing through VIenna and it would be good to polish up my German a bit. But, it seems a bit rude to turn up having studied only the language of the country-next-door...

[heleninwales.livejournal.com]

Congratulations to Frank and Hana. The convoluted process of acquiring the right to marry and remain in the country seems suitably Kafkaesque. :)

Good luck with the Czech.