While I was offline, I read Harry Potter through about chapter 11 or so?
I noticed that it is much easier for me to understand when I read to myself in my head. When I read aloud, I am usually concentrating on how to pronounce unpronouncable-looking things. When I am listening, I am trying to follow along. When I read in my head, it is much slower and I can go back a sentence or two when I don't get something.
It is weird how dialogue is so much easier to understand than descriptive paragraphs. I wonder why that is? It can't be just because it's shorter; there's a lot of new words that crop of everywhere. I am pretty sure that I only have head knowledge of maybe 30% of the words in this book. From context clues, and from testing my brain to the limits, I can get about 75-80% (but only because I've read this book several times and heard the audio book about a million times in the background because my kids love it).
Also, the version of the audiobook which I have is pretty crappy. It is just whatever some guy uploaded to ulož.to and the sound quality is not very satisfactory. I need to try to figure out how to like, buy it. Unfortunately, I did look into that once, and really severely struggled to figure it out. Maybe I will muster up the courage to try again sometime. It shouldn't be too difficult, but somehow things like managing a website in a foreign language sometimes really are. Ask me how I know this. A long time ago I changed my phone settings to Czech. Most of the time, it's fine. But sometimes, like when I accidentally call someone and can't figure out which one is the button to hang up and which one is the button to videochat and I really, really, really don't want to videochat at that precise moment because I'm nursing a baby or something, then I just wince and hope that they will have the decency to not answer, rather than accidentally press the wrong button. Similar pressure happens when trying to buy books online on Czech websites. I definitely managed it at least once, maybe twice. So probably I could manage an audiobook. Ugh. This is why I like audible or overdrive media player (my local library's audiobook loaning interface).
So yeah, I now get to struggle to figure out how to manage returning to my study. It had been working pretty well, I thought. I found a way to put my language learning into a cycle that did not seem to be too demanding on my kind and generous collaborators, I was memorizing words - things were great. I was slated to finish before the end of the year. I don't think that will be possible anymore, which is a bit annoying to me but whatever.
And now I have a backup a mile long of words to shove through this system I've created. And when I tried to type out all the sentences, they came out with maybe 10x more typos than normal. That was pretty embarrassing. My cousin, "Hey - so - I still have no idea why you're asking me to do this, you're repeating words, aaaand there's lots of typos." [I smack my head in shame] Well, at least he gave me some example sentences even though he didn't see the point. I see the point.
Something, however, which I have noticed - when reading slower, I can really tell that word context is not just about the sentence where it's located, but the paragraph, too. It's hard to explain that with words. It seems intuitive. Yet, like - there are words I've chosen but then later figured out what they meant - later as in, maybe a paragraph or two later, maybe a page later. That's interesting to me.
My husband (who frequently patiently has to listen to all of this kind of meta crap out loud about this subject which can't be particularly interesting to him - good man) suggested that I could just skip these chapters and go ahead with chapter 11. Something about that makes me really frustrated. I want to like, *actually* finish something that I start. Too many unfinished projects! I don't want this to become another one.
So all in all, yeah, pretty frustrating.
The mission to find other female Czech collaborators continues, and actually has proven to be moderately successful. I've been corresponding chitchatty things with some of them, and several have actually started giving me example sentences, which is really kind. If they would ask me to do something similar, I would bend over backwards to do so, but I think mostly people are interested in skyping face to face. I am not really ready to return to the world of videochatting yet. I guess it might seem like I'm really self conscious about my postpartum body or something - that's not really it. I'm self conscious a bit that I am not as...uh...svelt...as I normally am, but I'll get there. I've done it before. I don't need to mentally beat myself up about that. No - the primary factor for avoiding videochatting is the unpredictable nature of this baby's schedule. He's still not really in a set nursing schedule. I feed him on demand. All my free time falls through my fingers like sand anyway - but when it's so unpredictable and bouncy - like 15 minutes here, half an hour there, how can I hope to schedule a set time to talk with my Czech homies? I just...can't. My goal is to be ready to do so again by the new year. That seems more reasonable.
Recovering from having a baby is really hard.
Oh yeah. One other really crappy thing: I can't copy and past from google docs to blogger without the formatting being really crappy in this blog theme. I am not happy at all about that, but after spending about half an hour trying to fix it, I decided it was not really worth it. I don't even know who to ask who would be able to help me. Grrrr. Stupid stupid stupid website design. I hate that part of blogging so much.
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