Election, Questnet, Duolingo
Jul. 6th, 2016 07:51 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tcpipThe results of the Australian election is still ongoing, and despite a good swing to Labor, it seems the LNP Coalition will be returned with a minority government. As always, The Pollbludger gives the most up-to-date analysis and count. The conservatives in the LNP have taken no time to turn on the more liberal Malcolm Turnbull who, already held in check with for any policy initiatives, with calls for him to step down. The campaign is a significant credit for the Labor Party who faced a media that overwhelmingly endorsed the Coalition, and actually made policy initiatives the main point of contention. The possibility remains that if nobody can gain confidence of the House, that new elections will be called.
On a completely different tangent, I am currently at Questnet 2016. at the Royal Pines. To be honest, there isn't a great deal on the agenda that looks especially of interest of me (the data storage talks are perhaps useful), and there is far too many IT security talks (as if that isn't a racket). Bugging the vendors about hardware we need however will be worthwhile. The venue itself is of come interest; set several kilometers inland on a golf-course and surrounded by suburbia, the triangular-shaped building has the feel of something of an open-plan luxury prison from a 80s science-fiction film. I took a walk around the grounds yesterday afternoon, studiously ignoring the all the signs that said that it was meant to be limited playing golf, and spent some time in the company of the various waterbirds that inhabit the artificial lakes in the vicinity.
Finished last night with the completion of my third Duolingo skill tree; German. I cannot pretend that I am enamoured by the sound of the language, the inconsistency of the pronoun 'Sie', the sheer range of definite articles according to declension and contraction, and especially the V2 word order. I also found that despite much commonality with English, there were many words that could not be recognised intuitively from an Anglophone perspective (unlike French). Still, I shall nevertheless soldier on with this tongue primarily for familial reasons (and maybe even technical purposes), despite a personal preference for the Romance languages. Speaking of which, my next owl objectives are the West-Iberian languages; Spanish and Portuguese.
On a completely different tangent, I am currently at Questnet 2016. at the Royal Pines. To be honest, there isn't a great deal on the agenda that looks especially of interest of me (the data storage talks are perhaps useful), and there is far too many IT security talks (as if that isn't a racket). Bugging the vendors about hardware we need however will be worthwhile. The venue itself is of come interest; set several kilometers inland on a golf-course and surrounded by suburbia, the triangular-shaped building has the feel of something of an open-plan luxury prison from a 80s science-fiction film. I took a walk around the grounds yesterday afternoon, studiously ignoring the all the signs that said that it was meant to be limited playing golf, and spent some time in the company of the various waterbirds that inhabit the artificial lakes in the vicinity.
Finished last night with the completion of my third Duolingo skill tree; German. I cannot pretend that I am enamoured by the sound of the language, the inconsistency of the pronoun 'Sie', the sheer range of definite articles according to declension and contraction, and especially the V2 word order. I also found that despite much commonality with English, there were many words that could not be recognised intuitively from an Anglophone perspective (unlike French). Still, I shall nevertheless soldier on with this tongue primarily for familial reasons (and maybe even technical purposes), despite a personal preference for the Romance languages. Speaking of which, my next owl objectives are the West-Iberian languages; Spanish and Portuguese.
no subject
Date: 2016-07-06 04:04 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-07-06 05:37 am (UTC)Not with any great confidence or speed. I tend to rush to completion the language tree, then revise (which will be necessary anyway).
> Duolingo feels all right for vocab, but is hard on the grammar.
German grammar is hard :) This said, I think it does a lot better than Google translate!
no subject
Date: 2016-07-06 08:01 am (UTC)I just completed the Dutch skill tree, and did manage to read some articles from a Belgian newspaper a few months ago (it was used to wrap Duplo my partner bought on eBay!). Admittedly the articles I was reading were mostly about Star Wars, but i was pleasantly surprised nonetheless.
no subject
Date: 2016-07-07 01:35 am (UTC)I must admit I'm struggling with Dutch, despite being told that it's relatively easy. To me it sounds like English and looks like German, but is neither!
no subject
Date: 2016-07-07 01:58 am (UTC)a technicalitynot being able to fit enough required-for-a-major third-year-level subjects into my degree WHILE ALSO taking the infinitely more interesting German/ic Linguistics subjects. *g*I was fluent and had a good mastery of German grammar back in the day (by which i mean, uh, the early-to-mid-2000s. *g*). I've lost leaps of it by dint of not-practicing, although it's suprising and pleasing how much of it I subconsciously remember: I'll be looking at a Duolingo exercise and I think "I literally have no idea what this word means" but then the answer pops into my head! Sometimes I don't even requre prompting from multiple choices, and my fingers will type something about which I feel highly uncertain, and it will turn out to be correct! :o
no subject
Date: 2016-07-07 02:03 am (UTC)I often practice Duolingo with the sound off but sometimes when I listen to the pronunciation, the meaning of a word I have no idea about from its orthography will leap into my head because it's quite similar to the German.
(I have a near-immediate understanding of the pronunciation of any given German word from its orthography, and have since ...age 8? 9? Which confused people, because they assumed that if i could read words on a page, i knew what they meant. ... not so much, it's just that German has a very regular grapheme-phoneme correspondence, and I mastered it.)
I have yet to master Dutch orthography and its relationship to pronunciation, so I'm constantly being surprised by how Dutch words are Actually pronounced.