First post of shiny new books & reading, language learning and chess blog!
My reading’s been severely impacted by my deadlines, Everything That Is Going On In The Real World and my music/language learning. I’ll be posting about my music learning over at Growing Fins, but on this blog I will detail this new journey I am on, learning four languages on Duolingo* and how I’m augmenting that with other material (websites w/ grammatical information, and grammar books), since obviously, Duolingo is not enough.
I’m desperately busy and snowed under with deadlines right now, including working on Truancy 8 whenever I have the time, so I actually have no business setting up another blog (it was a mere hour’s worth of procrastination, I swear!) — so more posts will be forthcoming in August!
For right now, my reading for pleasure includes:
- On Beauty — Zadie Smith
- Blackberry and Wild Rose — Sonia Velton
- The Eye of the World — Robert Jordan
Yes, I’ve decided to reread the Wheel of Time books and read the last two volumes (never got around to it). Curious to see how it holds up. The last time I read the first six volumes was in the 90s!
Later on, I’ll likely be posting about the language books I’m going to be acquiring later this year. I’m going to start acquiring more French learning books first, and Latin, since I have a more solid grounding in both languages (been learning French off and on since 1992, and collecting Latin phrases since I was a kid). I’m dealing with Welsh and Greek more slowly, though I do have some background learning there, too. I travelled off the beaten path in Wales twice (2005, 2014), listened to welsh radio, picked up some of the language. I also started learning Greek sometime in 2004-2005 for a backpacking trip that never happened.
Feels like if I want to do things, and I’m in my mid-40s, I shouldn’t waste too much time. And because I’m so excited about all of these things I am learning (about 15 minutes to an hour a day when I’m winding down after work or during lunch), I’ll want to talk about it.
As I mentioned over at the Preface, I’ll also be waffling about learning chess and chess strategy here (10-15 minutes of playtime a day). But when I have time for such things. Because in my mind, a good library also has a chessboard.
*six if you count Italian and German, but I’m putting those on hold for now. I am a magpie who has accumulated very shallow knowledge of several languages but who has never really stuck to learning one in depth. That is my journey right now.