The German Project/Das Deutsche Sprachproject: 55 Days/Tage, 63% Fluency/Fließend

Es sieht immer noch aus wie mein verrücktes altes Gehirn kann mehr neue Wörter ziemlich gut auf Deutsch lernen. Ich habe fast täglich für zwei Monaten die Sprachübungen arbeiten. Ein Teil meiner Grammatik ist manchmal falsch, aber ich (langsam) weiter zu verbessern. Ich benutze auch ein Sprachübersetzer Programm für mich zu testen. Ich kann Sätze jetzt mit weniger Anstrengung komposieren. Wann ich deutsch dazu spreche, versteht mich das Programm gut, also ist mein Akzent zumindest verständlich. Ich kann es besser schreiben, ich lese es gut genug und ich habe die Bedeutung von unbekannten Worten durch ein bisschen besser intuition zu erraten, aber ich mache immer noch schlecht beim Lernen durch das Zuhören. Das ist immer noch ein eine ständige Schwierigkeit für mich mit Deutsch und anderen Sprachen. Vielleicht sind meine Erwartungen jetzt zu groβ, aber ich versuche es noch.

Translation (or at least what I tried to say): It seems that my crazy old brain can still learn some more new words in German fairly well. I’ve been working on the language exercises almost daily for two months. Some of my grammar is sometimes incorrect, but I am continuing to (slowly) improve. I also use a speech translation program to test myself. I can now compose sentences with less effort. When I speak German to it, it understands me well, thus my accent is at least comprehensible. I can write it better, I read it well enough, and I’ve been correctly guessing the meaning of unknown words through a bit better intuition, but I’m still doing poorly at learning through listening. It is still the constant difficulty for me with German and other languages. Perhaps my expectations are too great now (at this age), but I’m still trying.

I sort of did a review of some progress notes on earlier attempts and reasoning for learning German in an entry some while ago (Deutschhackung). Some of that commentary still applies here. This is the third of my language projects (after Swedish and Ukrainian). This re-immersion into German has stepped me up into a more intermediate level. In all honesty though, despite the fluency rating my program gave me (which I think is over-generous), I feel that I’d be dead in the water if I had to engage in a more technical or colloquial conversation in German with someone. My “know enough to avoid getting jailed or shot” principle applies equally to learning this as it did with learning Spanish many years ago.

It’s a really shame that more Anglophones don’t learn more about this language, as they are closely related, and there are some really cool tricks about German, mostly to do with its flexibility for compounding words, more so than English has. Unfortunately, the taste for learning and acquiring it generally has been soured somewhat for most North Americans and non-Teutonic Europeans alike in the past, for the fact that Germans were our adversaries in two of the bloodiest conflicts in modern history. People, out of some defiant reaction toward a perceived enemy’s propaganda of being a “master race”, won’t readily pick up an interest in learning that other language or culture, especially when one’s own national or cultural pride takes over, from the fact that one’s side proper was victorious over such opposing forces, not just once, but twice*. It thus made the language, and the culture around it, maligned for a long while, even perhaps subconsciously if not overtly. Sadly, there were several decades of this friction going on between us and the Germanic states in the early and mid 20^th century, and even though over 100 years has passed since the beginning of it in World War I, with a worsening of it by fascism throughout the second World War to follow, the result was that, either through our own ethno-centric pride after those war years, or through lingering stale resentments. Thus, German’s popularity as an alternate language to learn waned and became a lesser desired form of protocol language. Sadly, I feel that German was uncooled for us in that sense. This ignorance became a meme that continued to stick around long afterward, even being passed on into the generations who didn’t or don’t even have such grudges about the past. More sadly, it’s also commonly perceived that the only other reputed keeners for any such renewed interest in learning German here in North America, outside of those who already have familial ties with the culture, are mostly amongst those who allegedly belong to or associate with Neo-Nazis, the Skinheads, or those who have similar such sociopathic racist tendencies. That’s not exactly good PR for the language either. That’s my theory for its weakened popularity anyway. If I could make up a nice concise German word that adequately sums up this meme, it would be probably be Bedrohungkulturvermeidung**: a defiance against, or willful shunning of, something representing a cultural force that is, or once was, thought of as corruptively evil or potentially destructive to your own. It’s an ignorant concept meme that I suppose I’m actively trying to shatter.

Now that I’ve been more immersed, here are a few things of note that I like/love about the German language, or at least keep me curious and interested enough about it to make me keep learning it:

1.       Easy to spell – No, honestly! Some other people look at the longer words and get intimidated, but it’s really quite logical. If I do misspell it, it is due to me being a shitty typist (and unable to find the umlaut characters in the Alt-key sets). There are no silent letters in German that I can find, unless they are adopted foreign words. There are some signature diphthongs, but at least those are restricted to only one sound each. The only confusing part in writing it for me is when to use “v” and “w” when guessing the spelling of some words, as those sound the same to me, and when to use “s” or “ss” or the “ß” in the spelling. Otherwise, it’s all pretty straight forward.

2.       Prefixes and suffixes – The prepositional prefixes (ab-, an-, auf-, aus-, .  .  . -, über-, un-, unter-, ver-, vor-, zu-) , and the suffixes (like -heit, -keit, -ung) can be affixed to an infinitive verb to make a lot of options with a lot more flexibility than what English has.

3.       Easier pattern recognition for me for translating cognates – For example, the German words with “cht” in them generally equate to the same word with “ght” in it in English (sicht = sight, licht = light, Nacht = night, Macht = might (power), acht = eight) … und so wieder (etc.).

4.       Lots of similar and common words in German with not only English, but other languages – Dutch, what little I studied of it, looks like a very vowel splattered marriage between English and German. If I choose to learn more of it, it would be easier knowing English and some improved German. Swedish has lots of words that are related to German, which makes it a little more retainable.

5.       It’s multinational – Germany, Switzerland, Austria speak it, as well as pocket German ethnic communities like in the Czech Republic, the Alsace region in France, plus in Northern Italy, Southern Denmark, Western Poland, and whichever other countries share borders with the German-speaking nations. It’s more likely that the German language extends into these other bordering nations rather than the other way around.

The things that aren’t so nice about German:

1.       The dreadful grammatical gender issue – not just masculine and feminine to know, but neuter as well. As an Anglophone, my revulsion for such a complicated system, which includes having to match all case articles and adjectival forms accordingly, seems to be deeply ingrained.

2.       The numbers – the way the order gets switched for the tens and ones after the teen numbers. This doesn’t help a mind like mine, which is already tainted with a bit of innumeracy.

3.       The guttural ‘ch’ sound – Not such a pleasant thing to hear, but at least it’s not as heavily used in German as it is in other languages like Dutch or Arabic. My reluctance to learn either one of those other two is greatly based on the frequency that this horrid sound is made in general parlance when I hear these languages being spoken. It’s somewhat of a hostile sounding phoneme. I’d hate sounding like I’m going to spit or hock up phlegm all over someone while I talk. The word ‘Küche’ (kitchen) is a particularly awful word for me to hear. If someone said ‘Gehen Sie in die Küche.’ (Go in the kitchen!), just the sound of that final word in that sentence would make me feel like I was getting punished instead of going to this room that ordinarily makes me happy. To be a fair critic, I give equal weight in comparing annoying sounds between German and English, I’ll readily admit that the most unpleasant sound to come from the English language (as many foreign learners of it would probably agree) is the silly ‘th’ diphthong. In fact, I hate the word ‘diphthong’ itself for the fact that it has ‘th’ compressed in it.  A lisping sound that is considered generally ear-grating and annoying in most other languages is all too common in spoken English***. Linguistically, in general I find that these are the two most unsexy sounds that any language can have.

4.       Genitive Case confusion – A Germanic language like Swedish is similar to English when changing to a case form that indicates possession, the advantage being that neither language has grammatical gender.  German itself is inherently so much more complicated because of that issue of grammatical gender.

5.       Accusative and Dative Case definite and indefinite articles – this is a nightmare for me to keep straight in my mind between all the stupid genders. Added to that are prepositional article contractions to account for too (am, im, zum, vom, zur, beim, etc.). This is not at all easy for an English thinking mind.

6.       Which “This” to use – I cannot for the life of me keep it straight in my head about which form of the demonstrative adjective ‘this’ to use in German (dies, diese, dieses, diesen, diesem, dieser) for the right case. I cheat a little and generally play at safe all the time by simply using das (that) or ‘das hier’ (the English equivalent to ‘that there’ or ‘this here’).

The some of the more useful to adopt and interesting German words, in my mind, are as follows:

1.       Schadenfreude – (harm joy) that twisted sense of pleasure you get when you find out that someone you absolutely despise becomes stricken with some sort of misfortune. It has been adopted into the Oxford English dictionary, and I don’t think we use it enough when we witness things that pertain to it.

2.       Ohrwurm – (ear worm) that song that enters your head and then just won’t stop playing itself over and over again through your mind.

3.       Words ending in -ig, -ling, -us – those endings denote that a word is masculine, less shuffling around to do in my mental junk drawer.

4.       Words ending in -ung, -ie, -ik, -heit, -keit, -schaft, -ion, -ur – those endings automatically indicate that the nouns are feminine. Again, a detail that helps me do less mental hunting and pecking.

5.       Words ending in -um, -ment, -chen, -el – those ending indicate that the noun is neuter. Again, a helpful mnemonic.

6.       Weltschmerz – (world pain) A feeling of melancholy about being sick and tired of dealing with too many problems. Another German word readily adopted into the OED.

7.       Reichen – a verb (infinitive form here) roughly meaning ‘to be sufficent’ or ‘to be enough’. Handy to know if you are in a situation like when you’re with some hard-drinking German buddies who are trying to order round number five of Jägermeister shots each chased with one litre steins of beer, and you’re half-wrecked already and haven’t yet finished your third. It’s easy enough then to say half-pissed “Nein danke, das reicht!” (No thanks, that’s enough!). I’d probably be drunk enough by then to pronounce those awful “ch” sounds correctly.

8.       Hintergedanken – (behind thoughts) I actually learned this word from one of the lectures of Alan Watts. It’s used to describe a thought in the back of your mind that you are instinctually trying to act on. It’s sort of like working on an ulterior motive that you are not really conscious or aware of.

9.       Fernweh – (wanderlust) Given that I’m typing this entry on what is yet another staycation, I’m getting too intimately familiar with the meaning of this word. It is the complete opposite of homesickness (Heimweh in German). That is, it’s a desperate intensified and unsatisfied desire to be anywhere else: for the sake exploration of someplace novel and unfamiliar; to be anywhere else than where you currently are at.

10.   Bierficker – Here comes the nasty word number 10, the spot reserved for profanity, vulgarity, and potty-mouth vocabulary. I learned this one many years ago (and not because it was directed at me though). It’s a compound word used as an insult directed at a guy’s masculine endowment: the combination of ‘beer’, and a word that means the same as the English one with the ‘i’ substituted for the ‘u’. It’s meant to suggest that some guy’s Schwanz ist so klein dass er in den Hals einer Bierflasche passen kann. Again, this sentence is semi-Anglified since I can’t use the genitive case very well, even to describe genitals. However, the gist of this word implies that indecent acts with a beer bottle could be performed, because one’s genital unit is so miniscule that it could fit into the neck of one. Leave it to the beer-drinking, applied science/technical engineering minds of the Germans to dream up this kind of trash talk.

I found the time to complete this language program five days early. Partly because I was a bit more ambitious because I’ve been finding more comfort and ease with this language from, and partly because I had nothing much else planned during my week of holidays. I filled the void with some more lessons.

 The next two-month language learning session I have lined up is French, which is appropriate: because the program begins on July 1^st, on the 150^th birthday of this great nation, and thus it would be very fitting to learn more in my country’s other official language. I was hoping that I’d get some direct immersion in it from a trip to Montreal, but that’s going to have to wait.  

*- It should be made clear that there are no real winners of a war. Lives are still lost, industries, infrastructures are razed, the environment gets destroyed, and debts amass all for the sake of destruction on both sides. Resources get taken away from education, reducing social poverty, enhanced development, and responsible sustainability. Victories have an expense just as losses do. The one thing I’ll say for the resilience of the Germans, despite being defeated twice, they came together again as a leader in technical and economic development on the world stage, far better in ways perhaps than we have as North Americans, who were the so-called victors of both conflicts. Another reason they should be respected.

**- A compound word I constructed from what I think roughly translates to “threat-to-culture avoidance”. It’s probably incorrect. I don’t know if such a word actually exists in German, but it wouldn’t surprise me at all if it, or some variant of this word really did.

*** - I had a living example to bring this fact to light to me during my brief time as an English teacher in a foreign country. I was tutoring English to other teachers in the faculty of the school where I was working at after class hours. This one teacher, though interested in learning some English, had great difficulty in pronouncing the ‘th’ sounds, and judging by her reaction, she also found this diphthong a repugnant nerve-grating thing to hear. To make matters worse, she was a math teacher, so I assumed she would be interested in learning the proper way to say the numbers. Big mistake! The ordinal numbers after 2, and the way fractions are expressed make learning numbers in English a nightmare for someone without ability or liking for pronouncing the ‘th’ sound. Teaching her ordinal numbers (4^th, 5^th, 6^th etc.) and fractions was almost like the scene in the Monty Python film, The Life of Brian, where the Judean masses were taunting the lisping Biggus Dickus with the recitation of ‘S’ laden names. I realize now that I could have been exceptionally torturous to her, and could have made her recite the ordinal fraction 3333/33,000 (three thousand three hundred and thirty-three thirty-three thousandths)

The Ukrainian Project/Український проект:Day/ День 60, Fluency/Швидкість 8%

Український дуже складна мова. Це найважчий мову, який я вивчаю. Я знаю тільки прості речення. Найголовніше про це в тому, що вона вчить мій розум читати інший алфавіт.

Translation: Ukrainian is a very difficult language. It is the most difficult language that I am learning. I only know simple phrases. The most important thing about it is that it teaches my mind to read in a different alphabet.

It is near the end of the second two month period of learning another language. This time, I chose the hardest of my set of six to practice. It is strange to progress from the easiest (Swedish) to the hardest in the repertoire, but that's how the random selection worked for me; plus, all the other remaining ones in the set would look easier after doing this one. So, why is Ukrainian one of my target linguistic ambitions? Like for the last language project (The Swedish Project), I provide this summary of reasons:

1. It's one of the languages of my heritage - One weird fact about me is that I taught myself how to read Ukrainian alphabetical script before I ever really learned any of the language. My grandmother used to share our family's post office box with my parents, and after she died, her issues of the "Ukrainian Voice", a Ukrainian language Canadian newspaper, still came in our mail. I figured out the alphabet by myself when I was in a more precocious phase of my adolescence, merely out of the interest of being sneaky and trying to "break a code". And I did it, using only a copy of this newspaper and a bit of pattern recognition (I was a weird kid!). As for learning to actually communicate the language, it was sadly lost upon me. I never got to learn and understand anything from my paternal grandparents, and by the time I started getting a better aptitude for it, sadly, both of them had already passed away. Even if they were still alive when my interest in learning the language may have peaked, they weren't exactly scholars themselves, and I don't think they would have had the patience to teach me at that age. I do this to sort of honour them. It's a shame that out of all their grandchildren, I'm probably the only one who could find their tombstones in the cemetery they are interned at, since the engravings on them are all in Ukrainian. This leads me to the next point . . .
2. To not lose my knowledge of the Cyrillic alphabet - I find it strange that my Dad, who was immersed in Ukrainian in his youth as his first language, can read cursive written Cyrillic script but not the alphabet printed form itself (or it at least doesn't come to him as instantly). He may have once, but somehow it didn't imprint itself well enough, and it became lost in the lapse somewhere between his ages of eight and his eighties. I suppose it's proof of the adage, "If you don't use it, you'll lose it." I hope not to have that same deficiency as I age. This is the practice I need to avoid such illiteracy. Personally, I really like the Cyrillic alphabet for the fact that all the consonant sounds in Ukrainian are presented with single letters; no strange couplings or illogical looking diphthongs, or tricky silent letters are there as in English (ch, sh, th, kn, ough). You'll realize how superior it is to the Latin alphabet when you compare it to a Slavic language that doesn't use it, like Polish. The consonant sounds made in Polish sometimes need up to four Latin letters strung together (like "szcz") to represent the same sound that is written with one letter (Щ) in Cyrillic. That, plus along with using the horrendous montage of accented characters Polish has would make typing it a nightmare. Polish and Ukrainian, given that they are neighbours geographically, have many similar cognates, except the same sounding word in Polish may be written with eight Latin letters whereas the one in Ukrainian could probably be spelt with four in Cyrillic. Ukrainian has a tough vocabulary and a bitching hard set of grammatical rules, but once one is acquainted with the alphabet, it becomes at least a relatively easy language to spell despite some of the tricky pronunciations. For me personally, knowing this alphabet has already been useful in garnering employment in the past, working at a museum and cultural centre, so it validates and verifies to me that it's not such a useless thing to learn.
3. It's a true survivor - It's impressive and simply amazing that this language still even exists at all given the tumultuous history of Ukraine itself. The etymology of the name of Ukraine itself derives from a something akin to meaning "borderland". The region has long been a route for traders and invaders, given its ease of access with much of it being flat steppe land, meaning that it has long been a disputed land and a target for conquest from the early Eurasian groups like the Huns, Mongols, Tatars, Turks, and other Eurasian steppe tribes , to the Vikings, Poles, Lithuanians, to this last century of Austro-Hungarian Imperial rule, and of course ending off  with Russian Communism, and hostile Russian expansionism up to today. So many of these empirical forces, coming at all sides of it from Europe and Asia, either by brute force, or slower forms of assimilation, could have washed away this language off the face of the Earth and making it extinct, like what has happened with so many aboriginal languages on this continent. But, the Ukrainian language remains alive, despite all the historical upheaval of conquest and subjugation of the darker political forces. The resistance and resilience of the people and the culture and language of that region pretty much sums up what Skinny Pete said in the movie, The Italian Job, that being: "If there's one thing I know, it's never to mess with mother nature, mother in-laws, and mother freaking Ukrainians".   
4. For simplifying and softening the introduction to Russian - Ukrainian is closely related to Russian, which is one of the other of the six language modules I'm learning this year. Russian is the more unfamiliar one. I'll explain more as to why I'm learning it in the entry I'll give about the future progress with that.
5. To have an avenue of some connection with potential ancestral ties - It's doubtful that I'd ever step foot into the "Old Country", given the political unrest occurring there, even for the sake of taking a genealogical tour to get to sense of what my roots of one half of my heritage are. I'm far too estranged from whoever there are left of the relatives that live there now. That's a real shame. The insular nature of Communist rule severed the contact we could have had with each other. However, I won't discount the chance to somehow reconnect with any relations there, just as there is some contact made with my Mom's relatives in Britain now.
6. Learning tough grammar cases helps to better learn (or at least question) those noted in my own language - The sobering revelation one [an Anglophone] gets through learning a language like Ukrainian is understanding how stupidly ineffective and imprecise English can be in comparison, and how dastardly difficult it is for others to learn it. There is lots of English grammar that is technically imprecise, and heavily reliant on context. I cite this following example: if you were Ukrainian  and just learning English for the first time, and heard the spoken words "mother's milk", what must go through your head if you had an especially analytical mind?* First of all, just hearing (not reading) the words "mother's milk" with the Ukrainian ear isn't enough for this listener to define which case is being used. It could be: 1. mother's milk: (singular genitive) - like the mammary secretions from a nursing mother, 2. mother's milk - like a glass of milk belonging to mom that is going to be used instrumentally for consumption, 3. mothers' milk (plural genitive), milk from more than one mother, (except in Ukrainian it may be corrected by perhaps pluralizing the word milk to "milks" because logically, more than one mother doesn't make the same milk in one collective breast), 4. mothers' milk - where more than of a set of mothers share the same container of milk to use, 5. same case as 4. except there is more than one glass of milk involved, and then 6. let's not forget that milk is also a verb in English, so another question that can brought to mind to the Ukrainian listening is, "What are the mothers milking?". All those noun cases can be indicated with the single oral utterance of "Mother(')s(') milk**" in English, but yet the words are not orally/aurally differentiated to represent each one of them accordingly. However, in Ukrainian, that isn't so: the declension of the nouns between singular and plural genitive, instrumental, accusative, dative, locative, and vocative cases make each one of those situations I mentioned a lot more defined and accurate grammatically, or at least pertinent enough to better distinguish whether it's some mother's glass of milk, or her actual breast milk on the table, along with a more exacting degree of plurality. Out of all the languages I'm learning, Ukrainian has the most (confusing) case declension forms to deal with. It's very daunting, I must say.

The things I find challenging and difficult about Ukrainian is a very long list and would be too exhausting to explain. I will focus on the positive though. For now, at least I can: a.) readily identify if something written in a Cyrillic alphabet is Ukrainian or not (as opposed to Russian, Serbian,  Kazakh, Belorussian, etc.) b.) figure out the verb conjugations with a bit more intuition, and c.) at least know enough for a few manners, to explain that I don't understand well, and to politely ask a person to speak slower.

Now for the list of my favourite words, or at least the one's in Ukrainian that I find interesting. I'll transliterate them to the Latin alphabet for your ease of reading:

1. Туман - Tuman - It means "fog" or "mist", but more colloquially, I learned from my parents that it's also a word used to mean something like "fool" or "dummy" (they didn't use it on me as far as I know). I would guess that the relationship is derived from the same sense as we would say in English that we are trying to think with a "foggy mind".
2. Птах - P'takh - It simply means "a bird" or "the bird"***. It's funny to me because, if you are acquainted with the Star Trek universe as I am, you'll note that it's pronounced the same way as a frequently used Klingon insult. If you ever saw the comedy film, You Don't Mess with the Zohan, the same sounding word, presumably from Hebrew, was used to suggest some context or action involving the union of genitalia. Ukrainian takes a word that sounds profane or vulgar in other languages (fake or real), and makes it mean something a more neutral and natural.
3. Пю - P'yu - The first person present conjugation of the verb "to drink", as in "Я пю" (I drink, I am drinking). I like it because it's one of the more useful and shorter words in Ukrainian, like "go" and "do" are in English, despite the fact that with my English speaking brain, it sounds like you are doing more stinking than drinking. It's probably purposely made that way as a matter of convenience, and thus indicative of how drinking is a culturally popular thing for Ukrainians to do.
4. Дякую - Dyakuyu - It simply means "thank you" (it literally means "[I] thank").
5. Літак -Litak - A very unique word meaning "airplane". Unique, as in most European languages borrow and incorporate the common initial word (Like airplane/aeroplane/aviation, or things like telephone, or computer) to describe some invention or machine that is so relatively modern in relation to the language. The word for air is in Ukrainian is "povitrya" ([stuff/substance] of the wind), and the word for craft or vehicle is something else very long; they don't compound together to make some single word to mean aircraft. The only other unique language variants for airplane of my set of languages I'm learning that I know of so far that isn't derived from scientific Latin (air/aero/avian/aviation), is flygplan in Swedish, and German's Flugzeug (literally meaning "flight tool")
6. Розумний/Зрозуміти - English kind of denotes the verb "to understand" and the adjective "smart" as two different concepts. However, Ukrainian somewhat depicts them as sort of stemming from the same thing. Rozumniy (розумний) means "smart", and the verb Z'rozumity (зрозуміти) actually means "to be (become) smart with . . . " to reflect and equate to the infinitive of "to understand". "I want to be (become) smart with Ukrainian", does essentially mean the same thing as "I want to understand Ukrainian."
7. Сто - Sto - My favourite Ukrainian numerical word: a nice short word one meaning a hundred, having as many letters to spell it as the number has digits. I just wish the rest of the numbers in Ukrainian were so short with non-tongue-twisting syllables.
8. Хочу, можу, буду - 'I want', 'I can', and 'I will', respectively. Three modal verbs, when followed by a verbal infinitive, save me my lots of time and agony struggling to think of the correct conjugation, and allow me at least limited ability to express future tense.
9. У мене є - oo meneh yeh - It's a rather peculiar alternative way of saying "I have". Я маю машина, literally means "I have a car" whereas the other form (у мене є машина) roughly translates to "(in/at/of/for) me [there] is a car. Weird stuff there.
10. Голодомор - Holodomor - Like on my last language project list, I reserve spot number 10 for the most foul and depraved words, in my opinion, of that language. Even though it technically isn't a form of profanity per se, the word for "famine" draws up a perverse and horrible historical memory in this culture. When this word is said, it instantly is associated with the man-made famine, in the 1930s in Ukraine, imposed by the Stalin regime in that region that killed millions, some speculate even a number equal to that of the number of Jews killed in the Nazi death camps. The word doesn't just mean famine, it means something more akin to "murder by hunger". What could be more profane than a word expressing a political will to reduce millions to starvation by confiscating all their food? The fact that Ukraine at that time was part of the Soviet Union made awareness about the event virtually unknown to the West, either because of the insular and secretive nature of Stalin's brand of communism, or there was no interest or collective sympathy for any human beings living under communism, or because the Soviet Union was needed later on to take pressure off the western expansion of the Nazis, and needling Josef Stalin about this issue at the time wasn't a good measure of diplomacy to gain his involvement as an ally. So, attention about the matter of Holodomor in the Ukraine was purposely and conveniently kept out of the news to placate the tyrannical bastard, who throughout his life, was responsible for exiling and killing more people through his rule, mostly his own citizens, than his rival, Hitler. 

The adventure of learning and collecting new words continues from here onward. In summery, between learning Swedish and Ukrainian, I've been practicing one or more language modules each and everyday since the New Year began, roughly 120 days straight. I've just opened an envelope and revealed to myself the random pick of the next intensified language project to do. The next two month quest for improved linguistic proficiency . . . German! Thankfully, it's something a little more familiar, with the advantage of me knowing someone who could tutor me through some conversation.

*- Looking at language learning through this reverse perspective, I'm a lot more forgiving to my paternal grandparents for not learning very much English. They didn't have the advantage of something like an Open Door Society at the time when they immigrated. Knowing this, I am more empathetic to other newcomers here whose language is vastly different from English, and who are trying to rebuild their lives away from something oppressive.
**- I just noticed that putting the apostrophes in parentheses makes them look like a couple of upside down breasts with an "s" between them. This milk example is creating an obsession.
***- Like languages like Latin, Russian, and Chinese, Ukrainian doesn't use doesn't use definite or indefinite articles like "the" and "a/n". It's convenient in some ways, but not for others.

Earth Day 2017

Earth Day, for me around here, is the more official beginning of spring, in that it prompts me to commit to a better lifestyle not available for me for most of the winter months. That is: less vehicle use, a move to a healthier lifestyle, more engagement with my community, breaking through a bad seasonal trough of depression, and having better intentions for living well in general. That’s a challenge to do around here in Saskatoon from the beginning of November up until the first half of April. Earth Day marks some sort of pivotal point of true alleviation from the stresses of winter.

This is my personal snapshot of conscientiously lowering conspicuous consumption, and basically an audit of the footprint I leave on this region of the planet for this day when I decide to note how to tread lightly on it. Taking account of just how much we really consume in utilities like our power, water, fuel, and the money and resources for which we are using and wasting for these things in our households, and in our communities, is something I think everyone should be responsible for doing, and Earth Day seems like the perfect day to be mindful for doing it.

Earth Day for me is the reminder of the pervasive perversion of what I call the Double F destructive cultural forces we humans indulge in that are killing our biosphere. The first destructive Double F culture is the Fossil Fuel culture, and its role in climate change, and the lobbying by their proponents to make movements towards renewable energy illegal in some cases. The second is the Fast Food culture, and its role in not only making us a toxic, devolving, weakened species of obese diabetics and cardiac disease patients, but it is also an overwhelming source of pollution in terms of discarded containers (bottles, cups, wrappers, straws, etc.) all for the sake of our selfish and foolish sense of convenience, and wasteful and unethical mass production practices which are under the control of a handful of corporations whose ultimate goal is to control all elements of growing, processing and distributing food on the planet, and squeezing out practitioners of ethical animal husbandry, organic food production, and removing natural genetic biodiversity in our food stocks. I could add a third destructive Double F cultural force: the Fascist Fathead culture, of seizure of political control by cretins like Donald Trump, aided by a population so ignorant to allow that to happen, who are not only climate change deniers and not only taking inroads to making this planet worse environmentally, but getting us uncomfortably closer to some reality of an approaching world war. I won’t comment anymore on such things, but I will comment on my initiatives for this day, and see if they lead me to action for a happier place to be.

Morning: Woke up. Washed up. Fed the dog, then fed me. We walked outside after breakfast out to our neighbourhood park and back. Like on previous Earth Days, we took some effort to be mindful to transfer stray bits of litter in the public spaces to a trash bin*, and collect whatever discarded recyclables to cash in along our walking circuit. This year, I must say that the area looks much cleaner. I suspect several positive and negative factors at play:

·         The laws cracking down on DUI drivers in the province, may mean less vehicular boozing, and hence there have been fewer beer cans tossed on the street

·         The earlier thaw this year got people out earlier to do their spring cleaning and less wind strewn litter has been coming out of the yards

·         The City’s street sweepers came through recently, hoovering up the extra stray human made debris

·         The kids from the nearby Adventist school perhaps went early on their own Earth Day programme to help clean up the park and surrounding area

·         The wretched oppressive austerity budget from this government is making people trying every means to save cash; buying less pre-packaged junk/fast food, hence less wrappers, and saving their bottles and cans for SARCAN refunds.

·         More indigent people around who are reduced to picking up waste recyclables as prices/(sin)taxes get inflated

Ella and I still found plenty of litter, but not one bottle or can was spotted along our walk. Mostly paper and plastic drinking cups. A 20 liter bagful was collected and cleared off our path and trashed. A small move for some better karma I hope.

I then cycled to the Farmers Market, bought a local product, and then returned home.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           .

Lunch Hour: Made a pizza – using the ingredients that I’ve either already had here, that were extras from other cooking projects (just like the way the original traditional pizzas in Italy were made, i.e. repurposing leftovers) or bought piecemeal through the week from a shop on the same route as my commute from work, thus no extra fuel expended for a special dedicated out of the way shopping trip for one project.

Afternoon: Reading, napping, daydreaming/meditating, doing sudoku, some house cleaning, language learning, dog-walking, attending a March for Science Rally (too briefly, but I at least got to sign some petitions), I went to the library to make returns and check out more new material. Except for the household cleaning, and language lessons, all of those things required neither power, nor fuel, nor water, nor extra money to do for the day. I’m writing this I suppose to tell those who are Millennials and younger that it is indeed possible to have a life for a large part of the day without electronics.

Evening: Drinking homebrewed beer, ate left overs for supper, more reading, listening to tunes (mostly bass-intense, shoe gaze Indie), writing this entry.

Power Used: Actively deployed power usage that I opt to turn on and off (apart from the constant utilitarian use of electricity like fridge and freezer operation, Wi-Fi router, etc.). One kitchen light, one bathroom light, one hallway light (combined 20 minutes of use), a toaster, 15 minutes of magnetic induction burner use (very efficient), kettle boiled, smartphone charge, 40 minutes of oven use at 170 degrees Celsius, ran the dishwasher, 2 minutes of microwave oven on high, my Bluetooth sound bar for music streams and running my laptop to write this blog (both for 90 minutes). I opted not to use the TV at all today (too much bad news). I read my books by natural day light. Including all my constant essential appliances running (fridge/freezer), I would guess that I used about 5-6 kWh today so far in total for my total power consumed if I interpolate the readings right from my last utility statement. The average Canadian, according to one statistic, uses  around 4500 kWh per year. Sadly, we are the highest per capita users on the globe, for the fact that we use power almost as liberally as the Americans do, but yet additionally have a climate that demands extra heating for homes, and more vast spaces to transmit power between centres where there is a significantly increased line loss. If my personal average use nudges up to close to 10 kWh per day, i.e. 3650 kWh per year, I'm still below the per capita national average for consumption of power.

Gasoline Used: Zero – I walked or cycled to everywhere I went today. As chilly and gloomy as the day was during the time that I was biking, I at least had the invigorating fresh air to breathe, the uncrowded Meewasin trail to use, the peace of not having to hear the awful screeching noises emitted from under my car’s hood (time to change some belts), and not having the annoyance of having to hunt for and pay for a place to park a vehicle.

Water Used: Health and Hygiene (brushing teeth, sailor shower**, and two toilet flushes, so far***), reloading the dog’s drinking fountain, making coffee, making ice, personal hydration, running my dishwasher (on economy setting as always), cooking and kitchen clean up. An estimated 40 litres used, or two brewing carboys’ worth. It’s good to know of this quantity should there be any planned water shutoffs for maintenance, like I already have been warned about coming in the summer months.

Personal Waste: As it is now, after three days, my 15 liter kitchen garbage is one third filled with stuff that is 85% compostable refuse (mostly fruit and vegetable peels and egg shells). I regret that there is no sort of composting station around here, and I wish my condo could be provided with one of some sort so I could reduce this waste volume further still. I’d use the matter to make enough soil to grow my own herbs. I buy very little canned food, but my building at least has the convenience of a recycling bin for such things when I do.

Purchase Today: Just ten dollars at the Farmers Market, for a jar of Sour Cherry Jam. I’ve been hunting around like crazy for this stuff (I have a special project in mind for it, which I may blog about later). It may be much more expensive than other commercial jars of jam, however from the perspective of living happily on the Earth while doing it a favor, and building stronger communities:

·         This is a unique commodity that I have not found anywhere else but the Farmers Market. For today, it seemed right to get something that came from nature. And it is delicious. Never willingly buy anything that doesn’t fix a problem, doesn’t educate you, or doesn’t give you pleasure! That is the essence of frugality.

·         It would still be more expensive if I were to try to make it all home, plus I’d still have to wait until the cherries were in season, if I ever actually had the time to commit to make this stuff (home economics issue)

·         It was made here locally, from produce from a local orchard, and not trucked in from a half a continent away, or from someplace across either ocean (fossil fuel conservation issue)

·         You support a small business and not a giant corporation (corporations which are generally polluting on an industrial scale, and you directly help them to do it by buying their products)

·         An added bonus is that I have gained another reusable Mason jar to fill with my own crafted canning recipes later this year

The cost break down of my day is actually very different once I tabulate the information on my SPL Check Out Receipt. It tells me the monetary value in savings I made by loaning the books instead of outright buying them. I saved $81.89 today, adjusted to $71.89 subtracting the cost of my wares at the Farmers Market. I’ll whittle down that figure again accounting for the real cost of the ingredient proportions for the pizza I made, and the beer I brewed myself ($6.50 for the pizza, and $0.67 for the beer) the savings of the day is now $64.72. Let’s compare that with the likes of an impulsive spender, let's call him Joe Schmuckjob, who is probably the same kind of stupid bastard who's living in my neighbourhood and throwing his cups and food wrappers all around on my block. Let's pretend he is going to have himself the same sort of “cheap” weekend of entertainment as I am. He buys the $81.89 worth of books (though I doubt he really reads, we could substitute that material with the same value in dope and video games), he spends another $25.00 for delivery of the same quantity of pizza I made at home, drops another $20.00 for a six pack at an offsale place, for his beer ration, and let’s not forget the yummy $10.00 Sour Cherry Jam. His cheap weekend is turning out to be costing him $136.89 so far, and I haven’t even factored in the fuel his lazy ass is using, and all the extra trash he is making, which has an extra civic cost to clean up and dispose. Sloth, blended with impulsivity and stupidity, is expensive. Bringing all these facts to mind is making it a happy Earth Day for me.

I don’t want to get too sanctimonious about these measures I used, because I’m certain there are areas of improvement I could still work out, especially for my water usage and power, plus I also still lazily exploit food services at times when I don’t want to cook – I just don’t do fast food or delivery. This factoring of the SPL receipt also makes me pissed off even more that the Sask Party is taking measures to defund library services throughout this province as an austerity measure, hence my effort to sign petitions.

*- I’m like the average typical Canadian who thinks you’re a scum of the earth if you openly choose to litter.

**- Moistening the body first, shutting off the water, scrubbing down thoroughly with soap and a loofah, and turning water back on only long enough to rinse off shampoo and soap. Less than six litres used with a high pressure-low flow system.

***- Sadly, I don’t have a low flush volume tank.

The Swedish Project/Svenska Projekt: 50 Days/Dagar, 15 % Fluency/Flyt

Jag har varit lärande mig några svenska för sju veckor nu, och jag har använde mellan tjugo till trettio minuter per dag sedan starten av den ny år att lära det. Det var en speciell utmaning: eftersom jag ville se om jag kunde lära mig och använda de elementära delarna av ett ny språk inom två månader.

That's enough of that. Hunting for the Alt characters to make these accented letters is becoming bothersome. The translation of what I typed beforehand is this . . .

I have been learning some Swedish for seven weeks now, using 20 to 30 minutes each day* since the start of the new year to learn it. It was a special challenge: because I wanted to see if I could learn and use the elemental parts of a new language within two months.

This is my progress with the first of my self-imposed two month language programs. I have six of them lined up for the year. I tried a 100 day program before, but I was learning slightly skimmed modules of 10 languages at a time, to get a feel for both what I was most proficient at, and what was most challenging for me to understand in terms of grammar and other difficulties. There's not much that can be retained that way. So this time, I'll be diving into one language at a time, for two months at a time, with more intensified focus. Some of you are asking, "Why Swedish exactly?"

I present for you the following reasons:

1. It's one of the closer sibling languages to English -  The real test of this project, before I even selected a language to learn, was to see how competently I could master learning a new language with minimal effort. It's been a while since I made an effort to really learn something new. I'm taking the road to ground zero of language acquisition, since it has been a long time that I practiced any language. I don't want to start with, or have anything to do with, the messiness of extensive verbal conjugations. To sort of gain a sense of my maximum range of my potential, I thought I would put some effort into learning a language that's more similar to English than not. That is, something new (for me), yet loaded with enough common cognates to make it look a bit familiar in certain ways. According to one index I found, Swedish ranks as one of the top nine languages that are easiest for English speakers to acquire. It might not look like it when you compare the two languages from the sample I gave from what I learned to process so far, but English and Swedish are more similar to each other than French is to English, or Spanish compared to English, or even German to English. Even for those who are linguistically challenged people, who are completely talentless at using foreign languages, they might possibly read a Swedish phrase like, "Dessa män här är hungrig." and may be able to deduce correctly that it does indeed mean "These men here are hungry."  Many common words exist between English and Swedish, and the other Nordic/Germanic languages like Danish, Norwegian, and Icelandic, due to the historical fact that the Vikings invaded the British Isles, and along with the raping and pillaging they did to that land, they impregnated the forming English language itself with a lot of common loan words. English words like they, them, their, egg, shirt, skull, stick, whole, wake, break, sky, skirt, law, and even the word earth, for example, are actually Scandinavian in origin. There are also lots of common words between Swedish and German. For the record, I've found Swedish a lot easier to learn than German. So, Swedish is also going to be helpful in bridging some vocabulary with that other language I already know a bit about, and would like to learn more of in the future.
2. It's multinational - There are only about 10 million speakers of Swedish in the world, but if I wanted to learn one of the languages that's closer to English, I would want to be able to use it in more than just one country when traveling. Norwegian is spoken by a smaller population, plus it's restricted to Norway, and as I understand it, there are so many dialectic deviations and differences even between communities that there are multiple dictionaries in that country for translating one form of Norwegian to another. That sounds too cumbersome and impractical to me. Danish is restricted to Denmark (and some of Greenland: a miserable looking island I wouldn't bother to ever visit anyway). More about Danish later. Icelandic is more archaic, more complex, and limited further still to just having a few hundred thousand native speakers of that language. Then there is also Frisian, which is said to be the living language that's most similar to English (although I can't see it), but it is also almost moving rapidly towards extinction. However though, Swedish is not only used in Sweden; it is also used in Finland (another place I'd visit) by a few hundred thousand more people. Therefore, it's perhaps the more practical of the Scandinavian languages to learn of the languages most closely related to English that I narrowed the choice down to.
3. The several easy things about it - Speaking as an Anglophone, along with the many common words and similar cognates, there are greatly simplified things in the Swedish language that are wonderful. The verbs are great; only one conjugation per tense form across the personal pronouns, quite unlike something as dreadful as a Latin language like Spanish, which has eight different conjugations to memorize for each person form [I, you (singular, informal), you (singular, formal), he/she/it, we, you (plural informal), you (plural, formal), they]. The syntax and grammar are more similar to English than German is. When using numbers, the Swedish ones accord to the way the English ones are used; not like the crazy way the French say quatre-vingt or "four-twenty" to say eighty, or the weird way German places the ones before the tens, as in einundzwanzig or fierundsechszig [one and twenty (21), and four and sixty (64), respectively]. It was one of the factors that eliminated Danish out of the picture also (for now), as I found out that Danish has number counting oddities like those of the other languages I mentioned. There is also in Swedish, different rules for grammatical gender to deal with. In fact, in modern Swedish, there is a movement to introduce a gender pronoun that denotes a person with no specifically known gender. There is the word man (meaning either "man" or more generally "one"), but for some Swedes that word seems to be too biased for the masculine side, and not entirely gender neutral. There is han (he), hon (she), and now hen simply to mean any one man or woman, or to refer to someone whose specific gender isn't known, or for the transgendered. I couldn't say how eagerly that word is being adopted there, perhaps it's even controversial. It would be useful in those awkward "Pat" situations where you can't figure out what the hell someone is supposed to be gender-wise. It's strange, yet true, and perhaps somewhat progressive in some way.
4. More Orthographic Spelling/Pronunciation- Like the blissful thing about German, Spanish, and Ukrainian (once you learn the Cyrillic alphabet), there are relatively fewer anomalies when comparing how the language is spelled and how the words are pronounced in Swedish than in English. Both of Canada's two official languages, English and French, are terrible ones to learn because of too many instances of the lack of concordance between pronunciation and spelling. I also eliminated learning Danish when singling out a language for this project as well because of this same issue in their language: just like English and French, it's polluted with so/too many words with silent letters. There are fewer stupidities in spelling/pronunciation in Swedish than in English, which has crazy things like the eight different pronunciations of words with "-ough" in it. So, I ended up with Swedish as my choice Nordic language to learn.
5. The accent is interesting and beautiful - Forget about the garble you hear from the Swedish Chef on the Muppet Show, and the "bork bork bork" stuff. The actual rhythm and cadence of the language is quite pleasing to me, plus it's that rhythm that is very helpful in audibly differentiating each of the words, quite unlike for me listening to the horrendous rapid fire staccato output of languages like Spanish or Tagalog, where the sentence sounds like one long word. Plus, Swedish sounds far less guttural (to me) than the other Germanic/Nordic languages, like Dutch**. Perhaps because Swedes seem like a more relatively introverted cultural group, the lack of guttural sounds comes from sounding more low-key, and not being so bold, loud, and boisterous. It sounds like a more intellectual language to me in that respect.  
6. The relatively very few hard things about it - The only trouble I have with its pronunciation is the one unique sound that Swedish has, denoted with the diphthong "sj" which sounds nothing like an s, or a j, or anything else in English, or any other language I heard. The other thing, as I complained about earlier, is the multitude of accented vowels, which unlike the French ones, actually do function 100% of the time, thus they become important to include in correct spelling. Swedish seems to have more vowel sounds than English and necessitates being more of a stickler to correctly pronounce them more so than in English. It makes typing Swedish a pain in the ass with my English keyboard, leaving me to use a hunt and peck method of typing using the Alt key characters. The other thing that throws me off, that's even trickier than the use of other languages' gender specific indefinite articles, is the more arbitrary use of "en" and "ett" (the so-called common gender, and neuter respectively), of which both are more gender non-specific (e.g. both "man", "woman", "boy", and "girl" use the same common "en" gender indefinite article). There is no distinct pattern or system in how to use them that I can recognize, although fluids (water, coffee, tea, beer, oil) seem to favour the neuter "ett" indefinite article. The other tricky thing is changing the noun itself to represent a definite case, in singular and plural form, (e.g. dog = hund, a dog = en hund, dogs = hundar, the dog = hunden, the dogs = hundarna). Along with using some prepositions correctly, those are about the only issues I find really grammatically challenging about the Swedish language.
7. It will serve as a useful cognate database for learning the other tricky Nordic languages - Maybe, if I do travel around someday, I'll get to use Swedish as a bridge language for learning German and those other tricky Nordic languages*** that are supposedly mutually intelligible to each other.   
8. Because I genuinely want to travel to Sweden one day - Therefore, it isn't impractical to learn it. I always feel a certain shame for North Americans in general (less so for Canadians, some of whom are bilingual; more so for Americans) who have so little interest in trying to be bilingual, or multilingual, compared to the Europeans. I hate the lack of consideration by such people failing to learn at least some basic greetings, manners, and polite request phrases, coupled along with this absurd and arrogant expectation by some to automatically be served and accommodated in English when traveling to someone else's nation. I find such behaviour burgeoning on being disrespectful and disgraceful. If you have a capacity to learn and express yourself in at least a few words of a foreign language, by all means, do it!
9. Possible Sanctuary - Sadly, it's also coming to a point where I'm also seriously thinking of places to exile myself to if the political situation on this continent really goes to shit. If Americans are trying to get into Canada because of the Trump situation, where would a Canadian go to if a Trump-like political catastrophe happens here? Certainly not to the US; not for me! The worst case scenario I can think of is Trump somehow getting a second term in the US presidency, and then one of the worst possible candidates for conservative party, up here in Canada, becoming the Prime Minister in 2019 (i.e. Kelly Leitch, or Kevin O'Leary). I sure as hell wouldn't want to live in a nation that is becoming more like how America currently is now politically, and if the remaining English speaking nations of the British Commonwealth or Ireland wouldn't have me, or become just as deplorably divided politically and socially as America is now, I would opt to live in a place like Sweden, a country that tops a lot of the social wellness indices and scales, along with the other Nordic nations***.

So far, throughout my study of the language, my list of favourite/interesting Swedish words I discovered through my linguistic tour of it is as thus:

1. Lagom - the Goldielocks word which concisely means "not too much; not too little, but just enough. It is a unique word to Swedish. I already mentioned it in a past post.
2. Orkar - A verb (present tense here) that means roughly "to have enough energy to do something". Example: Jag orkar inte jobba i dag. Jag känns sjuk! Translation: I don't have the energy to work today. I feel sick! I myself personally would be applying this verb in the negative to mostly housecleaning, anticipating encounters with drama queens, doing my taxes, and, of course, hangovers.****
3. Samboskap - With so many Swedes opting not to live as married couples, this word summarizes a common-law household living arrangement.
4. Fika - a nice little word that's used as both a noun and a verb for "to break for coffee and snacks"
5. Dog - It simply means "died" in Swedish. It leaves me to wonder if the Swedes listening to the song Hound Dog are perplexed as to why Elvis is singing so merrily about his dog dying.
6. På - Sort of pronounced like "paw". It's like the Swiss Army knife of prepositions, mostly meaning "on", but I notice in some cases that it can be substituted for the English equivalents of "in", "at", "with", and  "by". When I get confused while running through the online test quizzes about which preposition to use, I can whip out på and have about a 63% chance of having it be correct or acceptable.
7. Klockan - it literally means "the clock", but it's also a conveniently simple way to express hourly time. Just as we say "It's six o'clock.", to say the same thing in Swedish you'd say "Det är klockan sex." Incidentally, sex is both the word for six and sex in Swedish, and it leads me to wonder if Swedes habitually have sex at six o'clock. Man kan alltid hoppas att hitta det för sig själv (One can always hope to find that out for oneself).
8. Sjuk - If you didn't figure it out already from the example in point 2, it means "sick". However, with the ghastly, God-awful sounding, unique phoneme this language has for the "sj-" pairing, combined with the "Ook" sound from the "-uk", this word becomes a perfect piece of disgusting onomatopoeia for sounding like you are genuinely becoming sick: like you're trying to stifle yourself from puking on your shoes.
9. Varandra - A much more lovely word than "sjuk", that's for sure. It's a nice, concise, almost poetic, word that means "each other". It flows so smoothly and nicely in a sentence like Vi älskar varandra (We love each other). Awwwwww . . .
10. Jävla Jävel! - I was going to reserve spot number ten to include the foulest, rankest piece of profanity I could dig up from this language, but honestly I think I failed. When I sound out these two words together, they sound too lyrical and musical in my English thinking mind to be even considered nasty and offensive words. If someone yelled this at me, I wouldn't even flinch at all. However, read or said together, they roughly mean "fucking son of a bitch!"  

Exercising the mental task of acquiring another language is one of the most beneficial, enriching, practical, and not to mention cheaper things one can do to improve the brain's physiological health, and to prevent it from aging too rapidly and harshly. The injury I had last year, plus the trauma my lungs and heart took the time before that has made me wary that my work life has to probably veer away from physical labour to doing more cerebral stuff, so it's even more important to keep my wiring in check. It's to retest my mentally ability to adopt and adapt to things. It's also one of those great and cool Jason Bourne type skills to add to one's repertoire. Most other foreign languages intrigue me, and I am very envious of people who are genuinely talented polyglots. It's not just learning another language to me, it's gaining another world perspective and seeing what is enhanced or diminished with the addition and boundaries of another foreign vocabulary. Combining this, with more math skills and logic exercises gives me more of a clearer avenue to test out machine language programming and coding later on. I'll see and hope that my interest in this doesn't wane. As for now, I've applied it to playing against native Swedish speakers in Trivia Crack (. . . and beating some of them to at 6-0, hehehehe).

*-Finding 20 to 30 minutes a day to commit to a project like this is easy once you consciously start breaking the negative habits of watching junk TV and avoiding depressing news, avoiding toxic people, and dropping using other apps that aren't productive.

**- Dutch has some similarities to English, at least that I can see in written form, but it sure isn't pleasing to listen to with my ears. No offense intended to the Dutch; I'm sure there are some practicalities and nice and sensible inherent qualities about the language, but for me, it's like listening to someone talk while they are struggling to swallow a mouthful of live cockroaches. Afrikaans, being closely related to both Dutch and English, sounds just about as weird, and is further impractical for me to learn because South Africa isn't a place where I'd care to visit. Please note that I'm not touting English as a superior language. I get that it has lots of flaws and deficits.

***- I have Danish friends, and I don't want to demean their mother tongue, but I'm simply working at this project empirically. I simply find that between listening to and reading samples of both languages, Swedish is the one that is more comprehensible to me. It's so strange how a phrase translated into both languages, which in my eye have close to identical spellings in some cases, can yet sound so radically unlike each other. Sorry Danes; it's not you, it's me. I've even committed to trying to follow episodes of Dicte on Netflix, to study spoken Danish a bit, and I find your language far less inferable or intelligible than Swedish is (otherwise, it is a good show once you slap in the subtitles). It sounds more mumbled or slurred than Swedish does to my Anglo-Canadian brain/ears. Both are probably loaded equally with their own unique idiosyncrasies that I have yet to learn more about. I'm certainly not perfect linguistically, and I'd probably butcher the pronunciation badly of either of them, no matter which one of the two I dare myself to speak. Regarding point 9, I'd eagerly move to Denmark too were it not for the fact that the language is much more challenging.

****- I thought I should add an example reply (past participle): Med än, du hade orkat att dricka en hela flask av Absolut vodka i kväll går! Så, hur kan jag vara ledsen för dig? Komma, låt oss gå fika. Translation: But yet, you had managed to have the energy to drink a whole bottle of Absolut vodka last night! How can I feel sorry for you? Come on, let's go grab some coffee.

The Power of a Prisoner with a Nail

I should be trying to sleep for longer, but finding a moment to sit outside on a wonderfully calm and peaceful Sunday morning in early summer is the next best thing. It sets a fine stage for a lot of mental clarity, so I thought I would write. It has been a long lapse since I wrote anything on this blog. I’ve had nothing that I would have cared to come forth with and share for a long while. I’ve been working a couple of months now in a position in which the daytime hours are much more agreeable to my physical and mental constitution. Before that, I was suffering all sorts of things between last entry and now that I would rather not post. Thankfully, most of those conditions from back then have since improved.

I accomplished a goal a couple days ago. I managed to commit to learning nine language modules each day: one for each different language I’m learning, for a hundred days straight. It is a sub-goal to apply to the greater mission; that is to get to tour Europe someday* (without the insanity of being confined in a bloody tour group). As for now, I’ve only been able to apply them to the odd text now and then, and answering questions in trivia games now and then. Retaining absolutely everything that I’ve learned is doubtful. The real prize is knowing that I’ve been able to get this far into it. I’ve been able to translate some foreign phrases from Facebook posts more instantly in my head with less effort; even in Russian, the hardest (I find) of the set of languages I’ve been trying to learn. I caught myself even dreaming in Spanish one night. Hopefully that’s a sign that some things are being integrated mentally and thus sinking in; but more likely, it is probably because it is the only other language, besides French and German, with which I have had the most practical experience in using.

The new position is a bit more rigorous, but I have no complaints about it. The extra rigour prompts me to think of how to do things more efficiently to save my energy. Thoughts of exercising efficiency along with improving skills with hacking languages has prompted interest in me to start thinking about ways of hacking other things that are more practical and applicable. Learning, applying and entertaining myself with tricks and shortcuts for mental arithmetic is becoming a renewed fascination for me. It comes at an emotional price though. When I review them I get extremely pissed off when I find brilliant hacks and mnemonic techniques, some of which are actually centuries old, that were never shown to me during my elementary/high school/university years which could have made life so much easier. I hate the so-call modern education curricula because so many things that are truly practical and brilliant to learn are rarely included in them. These tricks and hacks become repressed because it conflicts with what is institutional. It’s a sign of a system that really doesn’t want you empowered; just controlled and conforming. After entering “mental math hacks” in a search engine, I found links to the Trachtenberg system. I tried out a few tricks with it, and I must say that I’m impressed (and I don’t impress easy). As interesting and unique as the techniques for calculation are with this system, the background story of its creator is far more intriguing. I’m pleased to say that I have found a new hero who merits his story being shared. It’s like a story akin to something that Ian Flemming could have wrote. It’s a story of a heroic champion nerd who challenged and came out on top of defying the worst of the “schoolyard bullies”. The next couple of paragraphs is my precis of it**.

Jakow Trachtenberg was an engineer by vocation, an aspiring and brilliant one, who began of his career soon after the beginning of the twentieth century in a shipyard in the Ukrainian port city of Odessa, which was then ruled by the Romanov dynasty of Tsarist Russia. During his rule, Tsar Nicolas II was very intent on having a modern navy, and Trachtenberg was put in charge as Chief Engineer of this project, managing up to 11,000 workers to build those ships and their armaments. Despite this particular assignment, he was a dedicated pacifist, going so far as to found a society of Good Samaritans when World War I broke out: preparing others for the care and treatment of the wounded. All of that changed though. The course of his life was interrupted by the Russian Revolution in 1917. When the Communists took control of Russia, and all the lands within its empire, Trachtenberg soon found himself out of work because their mandate didn’t include building ships (or perhaps it was just because since it was the former Tsar’s plan, they had to be contrarian to it). Being appalled by the violence of the revolution, and the brutal and widespread killing of the citizenry, Trachtenberg became quite an outspoken critic against the Communist regime. As this choice act clashed with Communist ideology, it pissed off the respective authorities enough to make him a target dissident whom they were going to detain and most certainly do harm to. They had already killed some of his family members. So, under disguise, he fled to Berlin to make a new life. There, he managed to have enough charm to woo and then marry a woman of aristocratic status; he applied his intelligence into developing an inventive system for teaching foreign languages, and also started to publish a pacifist magazine. If he rolled any dice for deciding to move to Germany, he wouldn’t have guessed that he was going to crap out given the way its history was about to unfold. It undoubtedly seemed like a good idea at the time, since Germany had just ended a horrible war that cost them millions of lives, and the folks there might be interested in learning a thing or two about how to live in peace. However, the National Socialist Party that was coming into power under Hitler had a bit of a different take on such things.

Trachtenberg, once again, found himself falling ass-backwards into bad luck by preaching peace and non-violence under the watchful eye of the wrong sort of political opposition. Being some kind of guy who was doing all this crazy-talk about peace, which conflicted with the crazy-talk of a dictator who was planning for world domination – well, it kind of brought him under a lens of suspicion at that time. Strike one for Jakow! Doing that as an Auslander (foreigner) no less in the beloved Fatherland no doubt didn’t sit well with the new Nazi party either. It was probably perceived as a lot more intensely negative being that such a foreigner was originally from one of the lands east of Germany, which were supposedly full of those inferior Untermenschen, like Ukraine was regarded to be in the propaganda. Strike two for Jakow! And just to be really screwed with bad luck, the fact that Trachtenberg was ethnically Jewish had thrown another few shovels full onto the shit pile of trouble that he was already buried neck deep in with the Nazis. A smart fellow like Trachtenberg saw that he needed to make some tracks . . . right the hell out of Germany. So, he fled to Austria and worked with a science magazine there for a while; but then the Nazis started the Anschluss, annexing Austria into the Third Reich, so that had him on the run again. The Gestapo and the SS had sought him out everywhere, as his reputation put him high up on Hitler’s shit list of people to be arrested and detained. Although he did his best to evade them, he was soon captured in Yugoslavia, and then was shipped off to a Konzentrationslager.

During that time of his imprisonment, to keep his sanity and wits about him, while witnessing and enduring the despair, and the horrific ruthlessness and brutality of the concentration camp, Trachtenberg mentally retreated into the abstract world of mathematics and numbers. They couldn’t take that away from him. Possession of paper or writing implements was risking severe punishment or worse by the guards, as well as having any other arbitrary thing that could be assumed to be used for forbidden communications. Since he didn’t have any access to even simple materials to help him make complex calculations, he devised his own system of algorithms that he could use to make mental shortcuts to compute large numbers mentally. The only other calculation instrument he had (besides his brain) was a nail he found somewhere in the camp, which he used to scratch in the dirt, or on wood, to do ciphers and devise his theoretical algorithms. He regarded that nail as his best friend and his salvation while he was in that camp. When he did find paper to write on, it was bits of wrapping paper and old envelopes, and because it was so scarce, he used it only to secretly record his finished theories of his method.

His real salvation to escaping that camp was the action of his aristocrat wife, who managed to bribe a guard to get him out. It happened just before he was given a death sentence. Long story short, he managed to escape with his wife to a refugee camp in Switzerland. He and his wife remained there after the war, and established a mathematical institute in Zurich, based on the theories and mental shortcuts he devised when he was in the concentration camp. He began teaching it to children who were once failing miserably in classes based on the traditional math teaching methods, who then began to excel at solving math problems using his system. He instructed children who were deemed “mentally retarded” who, after being taught his system, were doing arithmetic that challenged most average adults. His institute was highly regarded as the best the place to be if one wanted to pursue an advanced career in architecture, engineering, and anything else math related in Europe since its founding in the 1950s, at least until the tech and computer revolution.

It’s a shame that this triumphant bit of history isn’t more well known. I guess that’s why I chose to share it here. My youngest nephew will be graduating soon, and going into post-secondary education program in the fall that will be more intensive for learning maths and physics. I hope he has the sense to do his own bit of hack-seeking, to find out what works best for him mnemonically, and in practice. He should be at least thankful that he has more than a nail at his disposal.

*- Knowing so many languages might be a bit impractical, I am not OK about touring any place where I’m plunged into an environment where in essence I’m rendered functionally illiterate; no matter how well I’m accommodated with services in my native language. Misunderstandings will inevitably occur: one should know some manners and polite greetings, and basics at the very least to help smooth things over when that happens. Numbers are an absolute must to learn, since math and counting money is universal.

**- Given that it’s close to the anniversary of D-Day, sharing something that is somewhat of another victory during World War II seems right as well.