Fuzzyred's Marvelous Reading Nook

I got my French AND my Hawaiian Golden Owl today! Yay for having afternoon shifts where I can just sit and babysit the machine!

(Small side note: I did previous have these Golden Owls, but course updates mean I had to re-earn them, so I'm still happy about this accomplishment.)

Well, the gathering with my sister yesterday evening went well. Decorating Friday night wasn't bad and all the cleaning got done. The food came together fine and out of the seven of us there, there was only one person I didn't know. As far as "parties" go, it was actually pretty decent. Most of them are quieter people, and there were more card games than anything else. And no one pestered me to socialize or asked me nosy questions or demanded my energy in any way (which is usually how family gatherings go.)

On the down side, the gathering did highlight the other reason I don't like get togethers with people I don't know well. And actually, is perhaps a downside of fellow introvert-ish people; there wasn't really an effort made to include me, and I rarely approach people to ask. I did get asked to join one of the card games, which was nice, but I still felt a little left out most of the night. (More my sister's crowd than mine.) At least extroverts usually gathering you up in their ... them-ness. Ah well, I guess all things have pros and cons. Though I do think I like this kind of party better than the typical ones. Now I just have to see if I can make it happen with people I can and do want to interact with.

In other news, I did it! I actually got the Finish #1 in the Diamond League achievement from Duolingo! I'm super excited about that, and now I can take things at my own pace again, and not worry about the leader board. To anyone who might also want to try this acheivement, I have found that the league is less aggressive points-wise if you don't do a lesson right away. When I did a lesson just minutes into the start of the new league, I ended up with people who do more than 10K XP in a week. When I waited roughly twelve hours to do one (Monday morning instead of Sunday night at 9ish for me), I got leagues where the top XP was between 3000 and 5000, and I think I won the league today with 2770XP. Now, this might not hold true across the board, but if it helps, I figured I'd share just in case.

In other Duolingo news, the Esperanto course totally called out the fashion sector. 😆 One of the questions I had today was to translate the follow sentence into Esperanto: "Why do clothes for women not have pockets?" Ya guys, why *don't* clothes for women have pockets? We'd all like to know.

for easy XP on Duolingo, and while some of them are silly, they are also at least a bit inclusive. There was an earlier story that was about a woman taking her girlfriend home to meet her family, and I just read one about two male friends and liking the song that was on when they first met, then the other asking him to dance (I'm assuming they are a couple.) These are the French stories, so I don't know if they carry over to other languages, but it's nice to see that bit of representation, instead of always man and woman.

I have been working on the present tense skill in Polish, and it gives a lot of questions as example sentences. In particular, it likes to ask questions starting with "Dlaczego". In English, that means "Why" and is basically what I've been saying to my screen for the entire lesson. Polish is mind-bending in its use of consonants.

Case in point (first sentence in lesson 5/8):
Polish: "Prawnicy pytają ich o tamten dzień."
English: "The lawyers are asking them about that day."


ETA: This one made me go "Awww :("
Polish: "Ten tygrys jest smutny, bo żyje w zoo."
English: "This tiger is sad, because it lives in a zoo."

My poor English brain does not like Polish. I just finished the lesson on determiners, and there are so many variations and interpretations on the words for "all, every, somebody, nobody, everybody, everything, something". Makes translation hard and picking out the pattern even harder. Plus, the word base word for all is "wszyscy". What the fuck even, Polish????

And after that, I started the lesson on numbers, which is ok, BUT Polish is a language that changes the ending of ALL their words based on grammatical case AND gender AND singular/plural. EVEN NUMBERS! So, "one" isn't just "jeden", it can be "jedna" (for feminine things) or "jedno" (for neuter things). And the word for two had even more variations.

I think my poor brain is melting...