Work needs doing

[liaku]

I need to write these application essays sometime soon.  Like, really soon.

Also, I believe I'll be holed up reading all through the weekend.  I'm some 200 pages behind in politics, and I honestly have very little clue what's going on in calculus.  The former is something I want to fix, the latter will probably be a perpetual problem in that class.  In either case, I still need to crunch some numbers.  I'm also behind in history (not worried about that) and biology (but only because I slept through class today).  I am up to speed in Hungarian, but embarrassingly clumsy with some of the cases.  "Tessék?" now features very heavily in my conversations.

And no, I'm not taking German, but I've committed myself to reading all of Coraline in German in the meanwhile, probably at a very slow pace of something like one page a night.  Maybe slower.  So far, I've gotten past the dedication, the opening quote thingy, and two paragraphs into chapter 1.  ...Yeah, I suck.  I know.  But I'm trying.

Comments

[cricep.livejournal.com]

Sigh. I miss calculus. I was good at it once upon a time but then I reached a point where everyone else had stopped taking math classes except for like math geniuses, and I figured I would be in over my head if I continued. I'm still mad at myself for that actually.

[liaku.livejournal.com]

I was good at math once upon a time, but that time's long gone. I can't even do basic addition without a calculator anymore, which probably disqualifies me from the human race.

[greenie1980.livejournal.com]

Sounds like you and I share one thing at the moment: busy as hell! It's crazy somehow, don't you think? I mean you have stuff you know you have to do something for and you also enjoy doing it but there are tons of other stuff which you don't like but which need doing as well. Argh! What do you mean when you say 'calculus'? I mean which kind of formula? I've got an idea but having learned all that in German doesn't help. I'd be interested to see what you have to do, though I won't promise anything. It's true that I did physics and maths for my main subjects for the Abitur but ... As for your German reading... what's Caroline about and who has written it? As for the Hungarian cases... which ones are you doing at the moment? That said... back to my own work.

[liaku.livejournal.com]

It's Calculus I, so it's very, very, very, very basic right now. It's nothing I haven't already learned, but I've forgotten it all--besides logarithms, which I never learned very well. A couple days ago, I was trying to remember how to find a quadratic equation from three given points.

We're doing ba/be, ban/ben, ból/böl (can't do long ö/ü), ra/re, o/e/ön, ról/röl, nál/nél, hoz/hez/höz, tól/töl, but only as locatives. We already learned them last semester, but I'm not as fast with them as I'd like. I'm like Én... nem... szállom fel a metro... ra.

[greenie1980.livejournal.com]

What's your problem with those cases? I mean it's like you have to look up the meaning still each time or is it just when you're speaking or what? Because I mean you also uses these 'things' in English and other languages, so I don't think it's the inherent meaning that poses the problem. Sorry if this comes across strange; I don't think it makes much sense somehow.

[liaku.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I know all the meanings and I write them fine, I just have to think a little when I use them in speaking, so it sounds very slow and stilted. They're just new and I need practice before I can say them naturally and without thinking about it. I know all the rules, but I have to remind myself of all of them before speaking. Like my brain goes: "Okay. Say Én, it'll buy you time while you think. Nem displaces fel, so Nem. Is it szállok or szállom? I don't know! Let's go with szállom! Fel. A metro... We use exterior cases for public transport. Ra. A metrora. Now say the whole thing out loud!"

edit: In hindsight, I think it's szállok. The "a" in a metrora confused me. Too tired to double check. Must. Do. Math. >.<

But then, it's probably no slower than the average novice, and speaking slowly with only a couple of mistakes is probably better than the stream of rambling errors I end up with when I try speaking German.

[greenie1980.livejournal.com]

Only short comments since I'm about to fall into my bed... that sounds pretty normal if you've only just started to learn a language. And it's not as if Hungarian is generally regarded as the easiest language ever. Yeah, it's non-defined conj. if you're just talking about the metro in general, if you mean a special line it's definite. :P Hahaha... when we manage to really meet one day, you have to talk German to me.

[liaku.livejournal.com]

I think it's just indef conj because I'm not using a metrora as a definate object. It's just a prepositional clause (er, well, the equivalent anyway). Still, too lazy to check, and too tired to really think about it.

When we meet, I would talk to you in German if you insist, but I'd be so embarrassed! When I'm doing the VERY basics (Ich bin Rachel. Ich habe keine Geld. FÜTTER MICH!), I'm okay. Theoretically, if I could do what I do for Hungarian and shut up while I figured out what to say, I'd be understandable with an acceptable number of mistakes. But instead I start babbling very anxiously, and even I don't know what I'm trying to say anymore!

[cricep.livejournal.com]

Cases bite my balls.

Heh I know I always brag about my communication wins when I have them, but... how's this for fail:

I was with a hungarian guy. Some slovakian guy was trying to talk to us in slovakian (or whatever the language is even called.) We don't speak that. So I tried english and the hungarian guy tried hungarian, but neither worked. I had previously heard the slovakian guy speaking russian to someone else, and i know my hungarian friend also speaks russian, so i say to him in hungarian: "Speak russian to him. He speaks russian."....

Except that while I *know* the word for "russian," i like never use it. And I mixed it up with something else: "rhinoceros." i'm sure it doesn't sound even remotely similar to most people, but i learned em at the same time and they're permanently mixed up in my head. Oops.

[greenie1980.livejournal.com]

That's what I meant about the metro, yes. :P And yes, I insist on German. :P But I know what you mean. I was the same in English and basically in every language I tried to speak (Irish Gaelic was awful in that respect; too many vowels for once) but at one point it just clicked and I started to made sense. Now I don't even have to think what I want to say but rather get stuck in one language or other. Like when I read a text in French and somebody standing next to me asks me what I am reading in English, my first instinct is to answer in French. *headdesk* Now off to get ready for the day.

[liaku.livejournal.com]

Er, I realized you asked for formulas. Essentially, none so far. We're still at the intro-phase (this is the easiest math class you can take that's for people that're taking it seriously--the only step down you can go is to remedial classes and, like, Arithmetics for Artists and such), so we're just going over stuff the like y=mx+b, y=axˆ2+bx+c, y=aˆx, y=x^a, y=lnx, etcetc. What sucks is that while I've learned them all before, all I remember is y=mx+b, though ax^2+bx+c came back to me pretty quickly. The rest are only passingly familiar. :(

And Coraline is originally in English (which I should get a copy to reference in case I really have no clue what's said in the German) and written by Neil Gaiman. It was the only German children's book I could find when I at the bookstore, and it seemed vaguely to my level--or at least what my level's supposed to be. The dictionary's become my best friend.

[greenie1980.livejournal.com]

Don't worry about overlooking things. If you're busy, that can easily happen. If you ever have any problems at all with these formulas, drop me a line. Same agreement as for German, if you like. :P

Ok, I just looked it up on wikipedia and I somehow don't get how that can be a children's book. But oh well. I don't want to read it and I had a pretty bad scare on Wednesday when I had reached a certain point in 'The Girl with the Dragon Tatoo', which I got from a colleague for Christmas. He didn't read it himself because otherwise I can't imagine he would have gifted it to me. I only went to sleep after I switched the light back on and although 'Caroline' sounds kind of interesting, it also sounds like something which would make me frightened again. Weird as that might sound to you.

[liaku.livejournal.com]

It's not weird at all! I showed the book to my friend, and she freaked out and said it had terrified her when she read it. Gaiman's not the world's best at writing non-creepy books for children, though I think he was channeling the likes of the original Grimm's fairy tales, which were pretty creepy in their own right. He also wrote The Graveyard Book, which is more kid-friendly, but it's still essentially about a boy raised in a graveyard by ghosts.

[greenie1980.livejournal.com]

Glad to hear that! When I wrote that sentence I thought something like 'maybe that's weird for her since she's ten years younger than me and not scared and me old chick would be freaked out by that book, even after reading only a summary of it'. I think that other book really really freaked me out on Wedneday and I felt like not wanting it in my flat anymore, so I came close to just opening the window and throwing it out into the grass (I live on the ground floor of our apartment block). When I watch stuff online these days, I keep returning to the 'Famous Five' series on youtube. I think at the moment I just have a problem (again) with reading/watching people doing stuff to other people. That's maybe also why I enjoy 'Rudolf' quite a bit because it's basically him and to a certain extent Mary who are deciding about things because of circumstances and it's not like the other people around them are pulling the trigger of the gun. In addition, I adore the music for its emotional quality. And now I'm off... have a nice day (?).

[darlingchaos.livejournal.com]

I /LOVE/ Coraline and wish I could read some of my favourite books in another language... or better yet, some of my favourite foreign books in the original language (like Inkheart!)

:D Best of luck with the mission :D