Literature & Languages plus a glass of wine

A.S. Byatt - Possession

2012-01-13T21:43:00.003+01:00

I finished a book that could have been quite spectacular. It deals with classic literature, a mystery and a pair of academics. They're all obsessed with a great English Victorian writer and/or his wife and a less known female poet. How can that go wrong? I'm not saying it went wrong, I just didn't fall in love with the book. I found it while browsing a list of long books worth the effort on Goodreads. First I wanted to read The Historian, but after reading some reviews where people went on about how historically incorrect it was, I decided not to read it. So I settled for Possession.

I like the book, it was interesting and the story is good, but it's full of boring poetry that I was completely unable to read and that went on for pages and pages and pages... The other parts I enjoyed. It's a dual story, so if you don't like the characters in the 20th century, you may at least like the ones in the 19th.

Since I've been listening to music from the movie Drive (absolutely beautiful movie, but not suitable for people who can't stand blood) recently I couldn't help but team up this song with this book:

Desiree's Under Your Spell

Some people can't read with music. I guess that must be the kind of people who actively listen to lyrics. I don't, so I prefer to listen to music when I study and read literature. Sometimes I end up matching songs with books. For some reason, Aqua's Good Morning Sunshine goes along with The Valley of Horses (Auel) that I read and loved when I was 11. Tears Never Dry (Stephen Simmonds) matches up with Mother Earth Father Sky by Sue Harrison. I know there must be many more, but I've forgotten them. These songs end up being like a soundtrack.

Anyway, I actually started watching the movie Possession from 2002, but only saw 30 minutes or so. If a movie bores me I have no problem at all shutting it off. Watching movies is not an accomplishment, reading books is, so generally I finish books even if they bore me. I think I shut off something like a third of the movies I watch though. Therefore I can't really say all that much about this movie, other than that it seemed silly in a way the book wasn't.

I'm really not good at updating.

2012-01-11T21:12:00.004+01:00

As usual, I spent most of Christmas worrying about the things I had to do for the next term. Difficult books to read and all that, whereas all I wanted to read was fiction. And I did read some books, The Thornbirds and Wild Seed, both of which I recommend. For those of you who don't already know what the first one is about, suffice it to know that it's an old-fashioned epic drama of the kind that can't go wrong. The second is a somewhat more curious book, about immortality and what it does to morality. I have read some other books as well, but nothing worth commenting on just yet. If I don't get overwhelmed with university in the next couple of days I will try to write a bit about some other books as well.

Good stuff.

My classes haven't actually started, but since I have a very good supervisor for my master's thesis, I'm actually starting to work on it now and not in the fall, when I'm supposed to start. I'm planning to go spend the fall in the Ukraine with a friend of mine, so naturally it would be a good idea to get the work started already at this early stage. This means I'm reading far heavier books than those previously mentioned, like Christopher Lyon's Definiteness and Michael Flier's Aspects of Nominal Determination in Old Church Slavic. Naturally, it's quite frightening. I haven't written anything beyond 25 pages so far during my time as a student, and now I am going to write my master's thesis on long form and short form adjectives and participles in Old Church Slavonic. I'm also annotating a new saint vitae from Codex Suprasliensis for the corpus that I get my data from, Житие и страдание святого мученика Конона Исаврийского.

That's in addition to my classes, which are Variants of Russian, Russian written culture - origins and history up until the 18th century, and a double class on ancient Greek! I hope all of this won't be too overwhelming. I have a goal of reading 35 books this year and on keeping up learning Ukrainian very slowly. Writing this out I feel the need for a second glass of wine, and perhaps a whiskey (cheap, of course, I am but a student).

Today I got myself a second desk! I'm very thrilled about it, because ever since I got my first desk (and I was very happy about having a desk at last after having lived in tiny apartments in Oslo), the entire surface has always been covered by my huge keyboard, my ergonomic mouse, my laptop and my extra monitor. So I end up studying on the sofa. And falling asleep. In our new apartment, my office is so big I can have two desks, a cupboard, a bookshelf and still fit in a guest bed when someone comes to visit (something that never happens, but it may). Fabulous, isn't it? The best part is that I can avoid the awful assigned seats at University for master students, that you have to apply for and go to four times a week if you don't want to lose them. You find them in small rooms with bad ventilation and you sit at half a meter's distance from the next person. And you can't eat, drink, play music and all that. How can people study in that kind of environment?

Much better.

Mixing it up.

2011-10-29T12:46:00.003+02:00

Thanks to the wonder that is Goodreads, I got interested in reading the classic The Island of Doctor Moreau by H.G. Wells. It was found among the recommendations for me based on previous Science Fiction and Classics that I have rated. At the same time, I have too many "ordinary" books to read so this one would have to wait... unless I read it in another language!

So I thought Ukrainian. But, if I read it in Ukrainian, it will take me a year. So why not French? A bit too easy perhaps. Russian? Yes, that would do it. Although Hungarian, which would take me five years, would be cool as well.

So I decided to mix it. A couple of pages in each language here and there, and I will print the whole thing piece by piece and mix it together in all my languages (which is why I need it as a text document). I wonder what this will do to my overall feeling of the book, how I perceive it once read, and in what language I will remember it. It will be a nice experiment.

The problem? I only have the book in Ukrainian and French. A friend has been looking for it in Hungarian for me, but haven't been able to find it. Even though the original is out of copyright, the translation may not be, etc. If anyone with awesome Hungarian searching powers is out there and can find it in the depths of the Internet, please (please) do. I figure finding it in Russian will be easy. Oh! German! I will include German! Any German e-book sites out there?

Popping by to say hello.

2011-10-17T22:09:00.006+02:00

This is a poor excuse for a post, but I'm incredibly busy these days and never find the time to write about anything. There are some things that must be said though.

1) Ukrainian is a very sweet language, and I really enjoy writing semi-retarded texts in it.
2) Linguistics has the potential of being interesting.

Furthermore, I have discovered the site Goodreads thanks to Thom. I find it very practical and it further motivates me to try to squeeze in some reading every now and then. If you sign up, feel free to add me. I am especially hoping to discover some new french literature soon. Hopefully that means discovering that some book I already own is awesome.

I'm quite happy to announce that there is a new very impressive Swedish author out there, and her name is Åsa Linderborg. If you get the chance to read her debut novel, do it. There's actually a Russia-Soviet link in it that I had no idea about when I bought the book.

Åsa Linderborg. Foto: Scanpix

With regards to reading, I read this article today, "Zoran Živkovic and the plight of non-English authors", which was very interesting. The title says it all. Luckily, I'm quite sure I don't conform to the norm ;)

Oh Kiev...

2011-09-15T17:03:00.005+02:00

This blog is turning very hard-core Slavic... It's quite natural since I nowadays don't have much time for anything else. I visited Kiev during the last week together with a friend. Since going to Russia is such a hassle, and since a friend from Russia wanted to meet up in Kiev, we decided to go there for a couple of days. I fell quite in love with the city, which has an absolutely fantastic monastery area and a huge book market! I was hoping to find an OCS dictionary (preferably Старославянский Словарь by Цейтлин) but... no, it's Russian apparently and even though they had tons of other books related to OCS, the place wasn't exactly drowning in dictionaries. I did find one single (full) dictionary, but it was outside of my price range. I got myself several grammar books though, both in Russian and Ukrainian, several decorative items for my study (I may end up looking like I'm highly religious!) and an old book in old church Slavonic (that one wasn't expensive!). I'll leave you to the pictures.

This and the two following are photos from inside the Lavra, the monastery area in Kiev. This area was built by Yaroslav the Wise's sons in the 11th century and includes caves where monks lie "buried". The old man's tomb, however, is found in the Saint Sophia Cathedral (where, unfortunately, you aren't allowed to take photos).

Books bought at the book market at Petrovka metro station. My pile is the one to the left.

This one I bought in a store with... random old stuff! I don't really know how old it is, if it is really very old or not, but it wasn't expensive and it's fun to have something that feels authentic.

Part of my new interior decoration ;)

Potpurri.

2011-07-27T21:42:00.006+02:00

This is a post about many things. First of all, I don't really feel I can write anything without saying something about the massacre that took place here recently. Everyone knows everything about it already, so I thought I would just mention the spontaneous march of roses that took place the day before yesterday. I think it is what most people would prefer to remember from this week, and it was truly impressive. Some guy started a Facebook event, encouraging people to join in a march in honor of the victims. When I signed up, the same day the event was started, we were 37,000. The next day at six, 150,000+ people showed up. Oslo has 500,000 inhabitants. Shops, even grocery stores, closed so that the staff could participate. Of course, there could be no march, because the entire city was jammed with people, so there was no space to actually march on. I don't know how long it took us to even get from the City Hall to the Cathedral (usually a five-minute walk or so), where a great collection of flowers had been started day before. When we got there, we had to spend perhaps 10 minutes trying to get to the front row in order to put our roses down (that someone had given to us at the City Hall since we did not have any of our own). People also had sunflowers, orchids, lilies - there were no more roses to be found in the city. Flowers were put everywhere around the city, on police cars, on statues, along the roadblocks put up around the bombed area, etc. You should really have a look at the pictures presented here ("A City of Love"), it's quite impressive. I wonder who's going to clean it up. Especially the sea of flowers at the cathedral makes me wonder (Check out no 25). I will just add one pictured here.

UPDATE: This is the link you really want to go to! 360 degrees panorama of the sea of roses in front of the Cathedral of Oslo (there's actually a trafficated road there!).

Now - other things.

Rita and Zhenja, the second generation of the series.

I finally finished И всё-таки я люблю. In the beginning, I thought this was going to be a cheerful, cute kind of series. How wrong one can be. If something sums this series up, it's "shit happens, life goes on and then you die". Somewhere around episode seven everything started going to hell, and continued to do so until episode 25, with some brief periods of hope in between. I always thought things would just fix themselves, but quite obviously Russia is not Hollywood, and things do not necessarily end happily. Still, I'm quite impressed with this series. The actors got better and better, the setting is extremely well done, and you really get drawn in, more so than by many other series I've seen and enjoyed. The story is very complex and so are the characters. A lot of them are frighteningly unsympathetic, and then all of sudden show some sort of humanity - and you start liking them. The main characters (on whose side you are) also have moments of... "weakness". In the first part, which deals with Vera, I actually started thinking about Justine (which I still haven't finished!). Again and again she is fooled into something, deceived by people she trusts, driving her deeper and deeper into misery. I'm really happy I'm finished with this series now, cause it was a bitch to watch and kept me up too late some evenings, but I'm also very glad I got to see it. I regained some respect for Russian TV and I got lots of listening practice. And I fell completely in love with Zhenja.

So how about Tadoku and old church Slavonic? Well, I haven't been reading a lot the last couple of days, and since finishing my last Russian book, I have somewhat lost motivation for the competition. After trying a couple of different books I am now finally reading Раковый Корпус (Solzhenitsyn). Most of all I want to read something in Norwegian or English, but I guess that has to wait a couple days. After seeing the new version of Jane Eyre yesterday (I really liked it!) I want to read some more Brontë, because there are actually a couple of books I haven't read yet. Staying Russian/German is veeeery difficult right now.

The reason I haven't been posting a lot is that I'm constantly busy working (I never seem to have time off, and when I do, I have to go somewhere or do something). More and more Russians have been coming to Oslo, meaning I get to speak more Russian at work, and when I get home I have to try to analyze some sentences for the university project. I'm really hoping I will benefit from it when I start my old church Slavonic class, because I don't really feel like I have any time to actually study the language now.

The second Russian book I read for the competition was Реки by Гришковец. It's more like novella, and it didn't take very long to read. I can't really say it has touched me greatly, even though it has some stylistic things I like. I was sometimes annoyed by the narrator's narrowmindedness, his failure to relate to things as long as they touched upon another reality than his. He did have some interesting remarks on identification and group mentality.

I've also been listening to some Russian music lately. I find Anna German very soothing and somehow uplifting.

Another attempt at modern Russian literature.

2011-07-12T09:43:00.002+02:00

I finally feel like I have actually read a novel in Russian. Not that I haven't read many books in Russian before, but either they have been classics or I haven't liked them. This book I actually like. I don't like it as much as I like the books of Magda Szabo, who also writes these kinds of books (dealing with life in all its variations), because I feel like Rubina sometimes just goes a little bit too far. It is still within what is plausible (most of the time) - you don't necessarily start thinking about how improbable the story is or something like that, but you aren't too far from doing it.

Even though I like it, I have some comments to make. Firstly, the author is a bit too fond of using metaphors, something that may turn out to be a bit tiresome. Describing something does not always have to imply comparing it with something in order to get your message across.

Another thing, which is much more serious, is that I have some trouble keeping up with the different parts of the book. Some are in the first-person, some in the third, and for a great part of the book I was sometimes confused, believing I had misunderstood who I was reading about. It does become clear in the end, but somehow this still felt unsatisfying. At one instance, I thought I was reading about the character in the female first-person narrative that had previously appeared (a woman connected to the United States) when all of a sudden I realized that past tense verbs were all in the masculine... I'm still not really sure who it was or about. It doesn't help that the author tries to interweave these stories, the destinies of different people, by the means of introducing characters that appear in the separate parts. Common friends, people randomly met on the street, etc. Perhaps it's because I'm not Russian, but I can't remember the random names mentioned here and there with intervals of perhaps 50 pages. Often I know I'm supposed to recognize the name, but among the perhaps five female names that have popped up somewhere along the way, I just can't remember which one it is.

Somewhere in the middle of the book, something weird happened. I think I lost focus for a while, and this may have been somewhat detrimental to my continued understanding of the book. All of a sudden, one of the characters starts telling the stories of different people that she or he has somehow been connected to. I found this both a bit boring and confusing.

I'm guessing the main problem I have with this book is that it tries to be a bit too complex. It could have dropped a lot of the "let's make this an epic drama"-attempts and been none the worse off for it. This is what I feel is the difference between this book and Magda Szabo's books - Szabo doesn't try so hard. She keeps it rather simple. All the people in this book have fantastic destinies, accomplish great things and go through huge changes in their lives. As such, they kind of come across as not really... real people.

Still, this was a very nice read. It wasn't necessarily very easy, and sometimes, when the author strayed away from the ordinary narrative - even though I was understanding what it was reading - I could read three pages without getting anything substantial out of it because of the metaphysical (or whatever) character and endless metaphors. So what do I like? I absolutely love that it's about Tashkent, so that I get some insight into other parts of the Soviet world. I also like how different people perceive Taskhent differently, and how there seems to be so much hospitality and so few connections to ordinary subjects often touched upon in books set in the Soviet Union (and there is a hint that that towards the end of the book). There is no lack of interesting characters, and it's interesting how, in changing from one generation to the next, the first becomes through and through evil, whereas you previously did have sympathy with it. There is, as a matter of fact, no lack of unsympathetic characters.

Now, the ending... I think I'm just going to forget about that one. It was not at all what I expected, and not in a good way, more of a "oh please, don't go there, don't ruin it now". So I'll just forget about it. It didn't add anything to the story and was completely irrelevant.

Of course, there's a movie. And I must see it, even though it doesn't look very good (poor acting). The actor playing Vera is a very good match. The one playing Lenja, on the other hand...

Ridiculous.

2011-06-27T20:23:00.003+02:00

I had the feeling that I was supposed to remember that French book I read some time ago when I wrote my last post. Today, a couple of friends came over and we made an apple pie. One girl told us about how her grandmother had been somewhat ahead of her time when she was young, being already engaged to another man when she met her husband and all, and therefore naturally considered a somewhat loose woman. My friend exclaimed "I wish someone would think of me as a hussy" (makes complete sense in our little group, and in this country), and I all of a sudden remembered what book it was. In the book, the main character is afraid of being perceived as a slut if she has more than one boyfriend. The story probably takes place around the same time as when my friend's mother was young, not as far back as her grandmother.

I really can't believe I actually forgot I read this book, since the author is one of my favorites.

Embarrassing.

Anyway, this book is just as good as all the other Ernaux books I have read. I could have underlined half of it to use as quotes. It's really a quite sad story. The narrator tells the story of her life, of how she started out as an ambitious little girl who did very well in school and who had great hopes for the future. She came from an unusual family where the mother worked in a café and the father did all the cooking at home, so she never learned how to be a good wife. Then as she grows older, her prospects grow poorer and poorer, and all of a sudden she has a husband, who at first supports her a great deal and seems to be very much in favor of the liberation of women. But then he becomes more and more important, and she has to step down. She is but a woman, after all. All of a sudden there's a baby, and the narrator has no life anymore. All she sees of the town she lives in is the sidewalks where she pushes the baby's trolley. She lives, briefly, when the child is asleep. And when he comes home, he is tired from work, and needs other distractions outside of the home (perhaps just once a week, at first, then more and more often). He cannot be expected to take care of the baby then, so she is stuck with it. More or less, this is the story of how joy and thirst for life are slowly quenched by traditional family life, and how the narrator ends up being one of many frozen women.

I love quotes, so naturally, I'm going to fill this post with a couple of them. How many cannot recognize this one, for example? Puis l'enthousiasme s'effiloche, je n'ai pas de vocation, découverte consternante. You know how everything seemed so simple when you were a kid, how you were so certain that when you grew up you would just magically end up having a job that you liked? How you would just magically know what to do with your life? Mmm. Right.

A lot of the book is about how she feels unjustly treated by society. How she can't feel that there is something different between herself and the boys that would somehow make them superior.

Ne pas vexer les garçons, tu ne sais donc pas ? Ce que je ne sais pas, c'est cacher à un garçon qu'il me plaît. Les hommes aiment choisir, ma vieille. Que m'importe, moi aussi j'aime choisir, je ne comprends toujours pas la différence. La bourde, l'inversion des rôles, tout de suite taxée des fille facile, dans la poche. Il n'existe pas de garçon facile.

And this I absolutely love. Même silence en histoire, aucune voix mâle, de celles qui braillent dans le couloir, n'interrompt le soliloque triomphant de Froinu, ça ne les gêne pas plus que les filles d'être traités en demeurés par le prof. A moins qu'ils n'aient peur de se faire remarquer, examen first. Pour le conformisme et la passivité, l'égalité des sexes était parfaite à la fac. Mais je découvrais qu'il existe des études pour femmes et des études pour hommes, « la littérature, les langues, rien que des nanas », j'entends ce mot pour la première fois aussi. « pour un homme il vaut mieux faire des sciences », c'est une fille qui me l'assure. Je ne voyais pas pourquoi, toujours le même mal fou à admettre les différences que je ne sentais pas. J'en entendais des phrases étonnantes, « la création littéraire ressemble à une éjaculation », prof de lettres, cours sur Péguy, « tous les critiques sont des impuissants », assistant de philo, l'écriture cent fois ramenée à l'activité du pénis, mais je n'y attachais pas d'importance, je traduisais, ou plutôt ça m'arrivait tout traduit, la création littéraire était orgasme sans distinction mâle ou femelle et quand je lisais Éluard, « moi je vais vers la vie, j'ai l'apparence d'homme » c'est à moi que je pensais.

Berlin, Norway, Books and Work.

2011-06-24T22:34:00.007+02:00

I finally consider summer to truly be here. Not because of the weather, but because the last exam results are in and the spring semester can finally be called a closed chapter. I've already had the time to squeeze in two vacations, even though one was more of a work thing and quite exhausting. Pictures from both will naturally be presented in this post!

Sadly, my reading was slowed down significantly towards the end of the semester. I'm slowly getting back to it though, in particular by the help of some fantasy. I haven't read fantasy in years, but a friend recommended some books to me on the basis of our mutual appreciation of George R.R. Martin's A Game of Thrones (2nd season please come quickly). The series in question is Joe Abercrombie's The First Law trilogy, and I have so far read the first book and a third of the second. It's both interesting and amusing. Abercrombie is not hiding the fact that he is borrowing things from all over the place. Some things are actually taken directly out of of Martin's books, some from traditional fantasy, and others from our world. A group of mismatched people setting out on a mission, a center land threatened both by forces from the South and from the North; racism, colonialism, cultural differences, south/North oppositions - you have it all but it does not feel old. I'm reading these books on my Kindle, which suits me fine since they are something like 600 pages each and I prefer not dragging books that size around in my bag.

I really have the impression I read something in French recently. But what was it?

But yes, we went on an unplanned vacation to Berlin. I fell in love with the city and got very much inspired to learn German. Of course, I bought at least one book and a magazine. I thought I'd keep it quite simple and got myself a Marian Keyes book. I'm really looking forward to reading it- whenever I find the time. My two summer jobs - Old Church Slavonic text analysis at the University and Oslo Tourist Information - are proving quite time-consuming. But in July, everyone I know leaves Oslo (including myself - going to Sweden for a couple of days), so then I will have somewhat less to do.

Not only have I finally visited Germany for real, I have also seen the postcard version of Norway. It is somehat odd to have lived in this country for four years without having seen the fjords, but getting to said fjords is a rather expensive affair. It is not when work pays for it. So with a group of 10 people from the tourist information I went on a tour called Norway in a Nutshell. The schedule was very tight, but as you can see from the photos you get to see some quite spectacular scenery (the funniest part of which is that you actually find houses in some of them!). Of all the things we did (various boats, trains and buses non-stop for 2 days) and I would say that that bus trip out of Bergen among the mountains through countless tunnels (which is, as a matter of fact, how you travel across Norway) early in the morning was the most impressive by far. Quite appropriately, most of the members of the group fell asleep :-)

Just one more exam to go.

2011-05-29T23:35:00.002+02:00

I haven't finished a book in ages. But let forget about that, it's only making me depressed. I'm in the middle of four now. Perhaps more. Gngh.

I always kind of envy people who study Japanese, because they have a ton of anime they can get addicted to and thereby get lots of free exposure. I'm never able to find anything interesting in Russian (just like I can't find any fabulous novels in Russian). Buuut, luckily, other people occasionally find things for me. Vera recommended the series И всё-таки я люблю, and finally I have something to watch. I once tried my luck with a modern version of Dr. Zhivago, but I found the horrible overacting insupportable. This series is much better, and even though I have only seen two episodes so far, I think I'm already a bit hooked. Which was exactly what I was looking for.

Try it for yourselves.

Of course, other suggestions for Russian series are very welcome.

Other than that, I can mention that I got my first "Russian" working at the tourist information the other day. Of course, I have never spoken Russian so badly before, but that's life. My job is proving very useful for my French, because I get French tourists almost every day, and I realize that my spoken French is perhaps not what it used to be. Children, never forget the importance of maintenance!

More cat.

2011-05-08T21:32:00.004+02:00

Norwegian has one word that is very cute: ymse. In Swedish, I would use a far less exciting word, notably diverse. This word suits this post very well, because it's just a little bit of everything.

I have almost caught up with my book reading. With almost I mean that I've been cheating a bit. In order to be able to say that I have read anything at all, I decided to throw in the tiny volume Mordre au travers by Virginie Despentes, and since I finished reading Three Sisters in Russian, I will count that as well.

So what do I have to say about Mordre au travers? This is a collection of short stories written in the 90s; most of them in classical prose, two in a semi-poetry format. First of all, I must say that Despentes is not the kind of author that is suited for collections of short stories. Her short stories are always sensational, and they are best enjoyed one by one in some obscure literary journal. When you read them in a collection like this, you get used to the format and you know that whatever the topic is, it's going to end very, very badly. And it does. This collection of short stories contains the most provocative material I have seen from Despentes so far. Sometimes, it's too provocative and it loses parts of its literary value because of it. But some of these short stories contain very good stuff. Despentes is very skilled at creating frantic inner monologues. And she can paint a picture that will stay put in your mind for quite some time. These short stories talk about sex, prostitution, poverty, murder, weird stuff and self-hatred. Sale grosse truie is among the saddest things I've ever read. A terme is definitely one of the most disturbing things I've ever read - but it may be going go a bit over the top (people with children should probably not read it). A little bit less sensational, and it would have been better. I very much like the touch of... fantastique, that she quite unexpectedly threw into two of the stories. I see myself rereading these stories sometime in the future, and that's a really good sign. As I was reading them, I did however feel that something was missing in them, that they could have been better than this. Or other, that they should have been.

And today I happened to visit a flea market.

A friend of mine didn't know who August Strindberg was during our bi-monthly Quiz at University, so for her birthday - as a joke - I gave her one of his books in Norwegian. Since I have been wanting to re-read Röda Rummet (the only novel of his that I have read), I was quite pleased to find it today in Swedish (together with three other works by him). I'm not reading Swedish classical literature in Norwegian. Anyway, I find it quite strange that Norwegians should not know who Strindberg is, when they are so obsessed with Sweden. Now, I'm not sure if regular Swedes know who Hamsun and Ibsen are, but I "always" have. As a funny side note, when the Russian author Aleksej Slapovskij visited Oslo during the Russian days at the House of Literature, he spoke of how Russians are interested in the culture of other countries. He said that they are familiar with Norwegian authors, and listed Hamsun and Strindberg ;) The audience began laughing (it happened to be an educated one, with people who know who Strindberg is and where he comes from) and then he corrected himself with "of course I meant Ibsen". Alexander Kielland is a classic Norwegian realist author, and I have already mentioned Bjørneboe a thousand times. I haven't actually read anything by Rainer Maria Rilke, but I've understood that I should, and I have Lettres à un jeune poète in French.

I got a request for more photos books, and since a cat happened to climb into this particular bookshelf, I couldn't resist taking a photo of it. A second cat came to join it.

Even though I should be preparing for exams and writing essays, I have been flirting with... Lithuanian. It's a very cute looking language, and it is a very interesting one because of its archaic character. I haven't been doing anything serious with it though, I've just done a couple of lessons over at http://ikindalikelanguages.com - a great site for easy going introductions to languages. The site happens to be owned by a Lithuanian, so the Lithuanian course is quite extensive, and very much fun!

Busy times ahead.

2011-05-02T09:22:00.005+02:00

I promised Vera I would show some photos of my notes from my Slavic language history class. The exam is in a month, so I had better start learning all these rules. I'm not at all worried about the part where we have to read a text in old Slavic, but memorizing rules... not my favorite thing to do, unfortunately. Posting may become somewhat sparse here in the time to come since I have to write two more essays (one includes reading quite a lot), prepare for this exam and the translation exam, pass a smaller literature exam in eight days and somehow try to read some fiction. I have now missed two 1-book-a-week books :S

This is the most recent text I've been reading, on how Oleg took Kiev in 882. Doesn't it look pretty?

And happy news! I got my Bible from the Ukraine a couple days ago. Once again, I love eBay. When exams are over I'm going to have some fun with this one and the old church Slavonic textbook I read through.

I never post photos of my cats anymore. Let's change that.

Also, I kind of have a problem with Blogger. Every time I use the non-HTML version of the text editor, the text changes into some Indian script every time I press space. Anyone know why that is?

Novgorod photo post.

2011-04-27T22:33:00.009+02:00

I started a OCS language learning log on the HTLAL forum, but since you aren't supposed to post photos over there, I will continue to post things related to that subject here as well. And since there has been some talk of Novgorod in my log, I thought I should post some photos from our one-day trip there last fall. If any of the names are wrong, please feel free to correct.

Novgorod is one of Russia's oldest cities, from back in the days when there wasn't even a Russia, but a Kievan Rus' consisting of princely states. Especially in Novgorod the Prince's power was quite limited; the veche (town assembly, prominent in Novgorod) and the boyar duma (council) had considerable power as well. A displeased veche could actually throw out a Prince; there was no autocracy, and because Rus' suffered from political instability this has been used as an excuse for autocracy later on। Rus' can seem quite civilized actually। There was less corporal and capital punishment, less torture and women's conditions were better. Compared to what? To the brilliant West of course ;)

The city was founded in the 10th century - perhaps the 9th according to Wikipedia, but I'm quite certain our Professor claimed it was the 10th. The problem can be that those who wrote about the city did so centuries later (notably Nestor in Kiev, which is quite far away), when Novgorod was already one of the biggest and most important cities. They may therefore have supposed that any important things that took place in their prehistory must have taken place in Novgorod. However, Novgorod is literally "the new city", and there is an even older city not all that far away: Staraja Laduga. So what may have been referred to as Novgorod in later writings can have been Staraja Laduga. Archaeology can only back up claims of the city's existence to the 10th century.

In 1951 a lot of old writings were found in Novgorod, written on birch bark. Someone provided me with a link to photos of these in my log. According to estimations, there may be more than 20,000 such writings in Novgorod, but it's hard to find out since the city is most likely standing on top of quite a lot of them.

Sources: Wikipedia and a book from our university, "Older Slavic texts" by Bjørnflaten (my professor) and Walter G. Moss' A History of Russia.

The Kreml of Novgorod.

Statue inside the Kreml.

Софийский собор. Built in 1045-1050. That's OLD.

(Very cuddly) dogs playing inside the Kreml. :)

Dog in dire need of attention.

Swedes being boiled.

I can't remember exactly where these different churches were, but I think these ones are outside of the Kreml.

Church of St. Paraskeva Piatnitsa on the Marketplace. 1207.

And a monastery close by.

Спасский собор Юрьева монастыря. 1119.

More on my new infatuation.

2011-04-24T15:46:00.007+02:00

(No, it's not the iPad.)

As I mentioned earlier, I have had an iPad2 at my disposal during the last week. Since I am already the owner of a Kindle, I have always had some trouble imagining what I would use an iPad for. Halfway through the week, I realized what they were made for: reading language related PFDs. OF COURSE! The Kindle is no good for this; it can read PDFs, but the screen is too small and you have to flip it over, and each PDF page is then cut up into three Kindle pages. Not ideal when you are dealing with documents containing tables and pictures.

But just look at this...

Incidentally, in this photo you can glimpse a new cultural magazine that is being published in Norway. Yay! The country is not dead yet!

Now I'm sad about having to return this thing :-(

The document displayed on it is a new Old Church Slavonic tutorial that I found. It's meant for people who want to read prayers and such in OCS (cause it's heresy to translate these texts :P), but it seems very thorough and I am just reading through it right now, currently at page 70 or something like that. There are lots of exercises but I'm not doing them now, because it would only get me stuck somewhere and I would most likely not finish reading the actual text. It's a good book though, and the exercises look good, so I will try to do them later.

Delightfully sinister, don't you think?

In order to make preparing for exams somewhat less painful, I have also dug up my old bloc notes from France and done some fiches de révision. These things shouldn't be underestimated - provided you actually look at them after making them. And they kind of make me feel like an actual student again!

I would also like to go ahead and recommend a book that was recommended to me some years ago, К истокам слова.

This is a great book on etymology, for a non-specialized audience. Something that amazes me with many Russian nonfiction books is how easy they are to read. The authors actually go to the trouble of writing complete sentences and of not leaving out a lot of information, supposing you will get it yourself. I don't know how many of the examples presented in this book I will actually remember, but it's fun to read and you get a general picture of how words can be formed and change over time. I have only read half this book, but I hope to finish it before my Slavic language history exam ;)

Is your background important?

2011-04-24T10:19:00.001+02:00

This is a post where I hope to get some participation from any readers I may have. This blog is way too particular to attract any great amount of people, but I figure there must be some people who have something to say.

What I want to know, is what kind of background you have with either reading or languages (or both). If you are very interested in literature, how much contact did you have with books when you were a child, when did you start reading, etc., and what kind of languages were you surrounded by? If you are today fluent in four languages, did you grow up in a multilingual environment or are you the only one in your family who has an interest in languages? Those kinds of things. I will provide an example by answering myself.

Before I could read, I did have some weird kind of attraction towards books. I would play librarian with one of my friends and tell her what the books were about, without being able to read the title, or by just looking at the cover. I'm not sure I read all that much as a child though, I'm not sure I read more than others (I was part of a book club though and always read the books I got), but I did probably write more than other children. My mother used to talk about my older brother who would read and write for hours and hours when he was a child, and I tried to copy him because it sounded like such a sensible and intelligent thing to do. Since my mother is a teacher of English and Swedish, she had a great deal of English books at home, but I was always convinced that I would never ever learn that language (I can remember the exact position I was standing in, the form of the book I was holding, the room I was in, when I was six or so years old and thought "this is impossible"), so I would just sit and look at the words.

Then I learned English as by magic. But I didn't show any great interest in languages that early. I didn't start learning any until I realized I should be able to read books in French when I was 18, since I had studied that language in school for years. And when I started putting books and languages together it was a done deal.

One can safely say that I was surrounded by books as a child, and to a certain degree by at least one language, but how about the rest of you?

Oh szív! Nyugodj

2011-04-23T17:23:00.001+02:00

Most of the people who usually take up my time are not around right now, so I'm spamming the blog. I thought it was about time I posted something related to Hungarian, and I also wanted to "keep" this particular video that my Hungarian language partner showed me: Óh szív Nyugodj, a poem by József Attila, "sung" by Ágnes Vanilla.

Fegyverben réved fönn a téli ég,
kemény a menny és vándor a vidék,
halkul a hó, megáll az elmenő,
lehellete a lobbant keszkenő.

Hol is vagyok? Egy szalmaszál nagyon
helyezkedik a csontozott uton;
kis, száraz nemzet; izgágán szuszog,
zuzódik, zizzen, izzad és buzog.

De fönn a hegyen ágyat bont a köd,
mint egykor melléd: mellé leülök.
Bajos szél jaját csendben hallgatom,
csak hulló hajam repes vállamon.

Óh szív! nyugodj! Vad boróka hegyén
szerelem szólal, incseleg felém,
pirkadó madár, karcsu, koronás,
de áttetsző, mint minden látomás.

Fegyverben réved fönn a téli ég,
kemény a menny és vándor a vidék,
halkul a hó, megáll az elmenő,
lehellete a lobbant keszkenő.

Hol is vagyok? Egy szalmaszál nagyon
helyezkedik a csontozott uton;
kis, száraz nemzet; izgágán szuszog,
zuzódik, zizzen, izzad és buzog.

De fönn a hegyen ágyat bont a köd,
mint egykor melléd: mellé leülök.
Bajos szél jaját csendben hallgatom,
csak hulló hajam repes vállamon.

Óh szív! nyugodj! Vad boróka hegyén
szerelem szólal, incseleg felém,
pirkadó madár, karcsu, koronás,
de áttetsző, mint minden látomás.

Mostly Russian literature.

2011-04-23T16:25:00.003+02:00

The Easter holidays are coming to an end :-( I never manage to read as much as I want to doing any holidays, but I do have the impression that I have done something - besides playing Bejeweled - this week. I haven't been able to finish a book, but that's because I've been reading half of the Fountainhead. It's equally inspiring this time, so I consider it time well spent.

In relation to this, I wanted to mention books on literature and biographies. Since we are reading Three Sisters (in Russian) by Chekhov in class, I thought I should 1) Reread Three Sisters and pay more attention to it this time around, and 2) Read up on Chekhov. I have found that I actually enjoy reading about authors; usually it creates something of a stronger bond to them. Reading about Tolstoy (Married to Tolstoy) had the opposite effect since he turned out to be rather unsympathetic. Reading about Chekhov, on the other hand, greatly encouraged me to read more of his works. When I started studying Russian I read 10 of his novellas in simplified form and was not very impressed. Yeees, simplified literature usually isn't all that good, but the simplified Idiot by Dostoyevsky that I read was actually excellent, so never say never. Then I also read Three Sisters in full, and honestly found it quiiite boring... but that's the point of reading about authors and about works of literature; it usually adds many perspectives and makes you see things you hadn't noticed before.

After reading Walter G. Moss' essay The Wisdom of Anton Chekhov I find myself intrigued by him, and my respect for him as an author has greatly increased. Sadly, the essay by Moss seems a bit... rushed. Like it was thrown together last-minute. This kind of disappointed me since I'm a fan of his historical books.

Delightful reading, I tell you.

But I also wanted to talk about another book, The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature. I found it while looking for something on Russian literature, and then our teacher recommended it to us, so that pushed me even further into its welcoming arms. Or pages. I have now read a fourth of the book, and it's very good. However, I'm not really sure it's an introduction... I don't think you get all that much out of it unless you have read a great deal of the classics that are mentioned. I would say the level of this book is rather high, it can be quite abstract and... not really all that straightforward. It's organized around themes - some more understandable than others - but I am of the opinion that you should know both some Russian and some Russian literature before you read this book. But when you do, it's most likely going to be great.

Many years ago I found a book in my mother's collection. I have had a tendency to take books from her bookshelves and put them in mine, and now a lot of those books are residing with me in Oslo. This particular book, Pushkin, Balzac and Heine by Kurt Friedlaender (from 1949, originally written in German), I picked out because I was reading a lot of French literature at the time, but my mother just said "but that's ABOUT the authors, and it's boring". I guess this kind of stuck with me because I actually never opened the book. Now, 10 years later, I opened it and realized it's very easy to read and very interesting! I'm reading about Pushkin of course, and I plan on continuing with Balzac later on. Does anyone have anything to say about Heine? I'm now close to nothing about German (or Germanophone) literature. I know I should read Stefan Zweig's The World of Yesterday, but I haven't been able to find it yet.

And as a closing note, is this a horrible failure at a classy multilingual design, or is that Slavic thing there actually correct in some other Slavic language? I wouldn't know since I only know Russian. As far as I can tell the Hungarian should be Levelezőlap.

Some new pearls for my collection.

2011-04-20T16:13:00.003+02:00

This year for my birthday I got some books! This may be a bit difficult to believe, but I don't get books all that often, I mostly just buy them myself.

And no, the books on linguistics (Linguistics - An Introduction to Language and Communication and Women, Men and Language) are not course literature. They will constitute my self-study this summer when I'm not taking any summer classes. Thom in Paris was kind enough to send me the Despentes books (Baise-Moi and a collection of short stories entitled Mordre au travers) that I simply can't wait to start reading! They are perfect additions to my small Despentes collection. The book on top, Art Poétique, is a book I always imagined as extremely dry and boring whenever it was mentioned in literature class in France. As I was writing an essay on Anna Akhmatova for my Russian literature class, I started thinking about Boileau and decided to check out his Art Poétique (instead of just reading about it) on GoogleBooks, and realized it was highly amusing and actually fun to read! So, thank you eBay for this tiny little book!

And how delightful is not this absolutely beautiful Russian tea cup? I can safely say it's the most awesome teacup I have. Thank you Sasha!

Since it's my birthday today I thought I should do something that I sincerely want to do, and the one thing I could think of was to read the Fountainhead. Yesterday I picked out my "Book Book", a relic from when I was younger and much more diligent. Doing a year or two or three or four I used to write two pages on every book I read in a book entitled "Bokboken" (The Book Book, and I even created a website based on it, "The Library"), and I was quite surprised when I realized yesterday how much I actually wrote in this book. The sad thing is that I can't find the first such book I filled. I'm really hoping it's hidden somewhere and not lost forever. This second book contains 164 reviews, on 328 pages... numerated, and with an additional index so that I can easily find the book I'm looking for. The reviews date from the 28th of January 2004 to the 10th of August in 2006, with very little posts from my time in France (autumn 2004-summer 2005). Before and after that the average time span between reviews is two days. And now I'm struggling to read one book a week.

The reason I wanted to find this book again was to find out what I wrote about the Fountainhead back then. I was quite conscious of the fact that my opinion of books changed over time, so I wanted to preserve my instant impressions so as not to be fooled into believing I liked or disliked a certain book later on. Reading these "reviews", I realize how severe a critic I was back then. And how absolutely right I was about how opinions change over time. Upon completing the Fountainhead (on March 25th 2004), I wrote "Overall, I like this book, but not that very passionately, not as much as I could have liked it. [...] There is probably quite a lot to complain about concerning the literary quality and the characters. For example, Roark and Dominique seem far too similar. Both of them annoyed me in the beginning because of their indifference (which reminds me of some of today's youth), but as for Roark, this passed rather quickly. [...] But the feeling of disappointment is still there." Hah!

Well, I re-read The Secret History not that very long ago, and thought that I loved it just as much as the first time, but when I finished reading that one on the 23rd of May in 2004, I wrote "I'm in love. But just a bit. I love everything about this book, but still there is something that stops me from calling it a new favorite." Yet I call it an old favorite now.

I am going to try to pick up this habit of writing about books again.

Other than that, I have a iPad 2 at my disposal during the holidays, so naturally I'm spending far too much time playing Bejeweled ^^

Ayn Rand.

2011-04-18T17:46:00.003+02:00

Since I finished another essay I thought I could afford another blog entry. Because this is important.

As I suppose most of you already know, Atlas Shrugged is being turned into a movie. A movie that actually looks really good and promising - which is hard to imagine considering the magnitude of the book. Luckily for me, it was ages ago since I read Atlas Shrugged, so any inaccuracies won't be that painful. To be honest, I didn't actually finish it. Rand's books are notoriously difficult to read because they exhaust you emotionally, and this book is over a thousand pages long so there's room for lots of exhausting material. Rand does not like her characters to be happy. What I read (800-900 pages or so), however, was brilliant. Naturally, I'm going to finish it one day. The movie that is out now is, after all, only part one, so I figure I have some time.

It can be difficult to adapt to the actors that have been chosen to play characters from a book, since you already know what those people looked like in your head. I must say, however, that the actors appear to be extremely well-chosen for Atlas Shrugged. Dagny may be a little bit too beautiful and soft around the edges - I can't really remember - but Rearden is perfect.

I think I discovered Ayn Rand when I was 15 or 16. Perhaps 17. I can't remember who mentioned the book to me or how I ended up reading it, but I borrowed it at the library and I remembered it was huge and had a somewhat weird cover. This was in high school, when we didn't have all that much to do and I could spend a lot of time reading. And I remember falling ill. I think it was a throat infection of some sort, I'm quite prone to those. Since I come from a family that waits until we start to decompose before we go to the doctor, I was in a rather miserable state and could absolutely not sleep because of the pain, so I read The Fountainhead until 5 a.m. or something like that and forgot about how miserable I was. Ever since then I have loved Rand's books, and it's only a shame that there are so few of them.

In Russia, I stumbled upon We The Living in Dom Knigi on Nevskij Prospekt. I think I just cast a glance towards a pile of books and noticed that the name of the author was very weird-looking in Russian. Then I realized that name was Ayn Rand, who is actually Russian to begin with. And how appropriate to read her first book, set in St. Petersburg, in Russian! I very much enjoyed the book, even if it does not reach the same standard as the Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged.

In other news, HBO is turning A Game of Thrones into a TV series. This is also very, very interesting.

Dangerous literature.

2011-04-15T10:40:00.005+02:00

There is definitely a reason why I have to keep a list of the books I read. In my last update I completely forgot to mention the most recent book I read: Uten en tråd (Without a Stitch) by Jens Bjørneboe!

This is not a fabulous work of literature. It does not compete in the same league as his Moment of Freedom, Powderhouse and The Silence, which are all part of a trilogy, but it's worth reading anyway.

The title of the book provides a hint as to what it's about: sex. The story is that of a 19-year-old girl (Lillian) who suffers from inhibitions when having sex and who cannot achieve an orgasm with a man. One of her friends tells her to go to a doctor who specializes in the area. We get to follow Lilian's treatment with this doctor and a subsequent backpacking trip in Europe where she puts some of what she has learned to practice.

Except for the very beginning this book is highly amusing. The beginning loses some force due to it being a bit too serious; you don't really get the feel of the rest of the book, which is really quite sarcastic. It was written as a criticism towards conservative sexual morality that turns sexuality in general and feminine sexuality in particular into something shameful. A recurring theme is Lillian seeing the face of her mother and grandmother at inappropriate times, and the doctor asking her how she can be so ashamed when she isn't harming anyone.

Perhaps I should mention that it was written in 1966 and was banned by the authorities? It was actually the last book that was ever banned in Norway, and what happens when your book is banned? You get lots of attention! As a side note, I think it was John Cleese who thanked Norway for banning Life of Brian...

"Banned in Norway!"

What I liked most about Without a Stitch was actually the text found at the end, "Instead of a defense speech", which is an attack on Norwegian society and double standards. Why is unlimited violence and sexual violence towards women permitted (he mentions some other publication involving women and baboons that was not banned), whereas sexuality seen from the point of view of a woman is so despicable?

Right now I'm very much in the mood for classics, so I think I'm going to stay in the 19th century for a while. When I come back, I will read more of Bjørneboe's books.

Hiatus.

2011-04-13T10:25:00.002+02:00

This blog has been somewhat silent recently. One could say I went on a holiday called "writing ridiculous amounts of essays". Soon I will go on another holiday called "start working full time and prepare for exams", while naturally neglecting all my languages.

The good news are that my class on Slavic language history got me interested in taking things a little bit further and learning Old Church Slavonic. In this class we are reading snippets in OCS, but I wouldn't say we are actually learning it. I thought it would be fun to do so, so I'm currently doing my best to get an overview of the verbal system. It feels incredibly weird to have different past tenses all of a sudden, and to have past tenses that change according to person and not just according to gender.

Luckily, it is quite easy to find material for Old Church Slavonic as long as you understand Russian. One of my teachers at University also provided me with some very useful links.

Old Church Slavonic dictionary, parts 1 2 3

The Laurentian Codex.

Different versions of Повесть временных лет.

Some English translations of the texts.

And a Russian/old church Slavonic bilingual version here.

Even though I have been very busy, I haven't missed one single book for the 52 books in 52 weeks challenge. I must say this was an excellent idea, and it doesn't matter that much that I may not be reading the longest books around... right now I'm halfway through Knut Hamsun's Sult (Hunger), which I'm enjoying very much. Unfortunately, the main character is something of a moron (I just can't stand people who cannot plan ahead) but it's brilliantly written. It's not the fastest thing I've ever read though, since the language is neither Norwegian, Danish or Swedish, but rather yet another variant of the three.

I thought I would say a couple words about the other books I have read so far.
Magda Szabó's The Deer - absolutely brilliant, just like The Door. Magic.

Maskeblomstfamilien by Lars Saabye Christensen - Also proves that there is a great amount of excellent literature in Norway. A very dark story about... gender I guess. There's even a Wikipedia page about this book, with the following description "The novel is about a troubled boy and his voyage to a total and certain downfall after his father dies young, and his mother consequently becomes mentally ill. The book is written in the author's highly poetic style, and is distinctive in its enigmatic issues and obscure messages."

Ирина Муравьёва's Любовь Фрау Клейст - GAAH. The only reason I actually finished this book was that it was in Russian, and if it hadn't been in Russian, I think I would've thrown against the wall a long time ago. The language kind of put up a barrier between me and the poor prose. Simply a very unbelievable story, written in what I suppose is supposed to be an innovative manner. It's not innovative, it's stupid and messy. And almost nothing that happens in the book is even slightly believable. I'm losing faith in modern Russian literature. Seriously.
La fête interdite by André-Marcel Adamek - This had so much potential! And by saying that, I think I've said it all. I love Carnival stories, stories about freaks, stories about this kind of environment with small mountain villages (which very much made me think of Le Roi Sans Divertissement by Jean Giono), but it took the author more than half the book to get it started. Only then did I actually get involved. Such a shame.

Sofi Oksanen's Stalin's Cows - Now... why is it Purge that gets all the attention when this book is so much better? I wasn't actually sure I wanted to read another Oksanen book straightaway since the first one I read was quite... heavy. Then I found this book on sale (a classic, I know) and started reading it immediately since I think I may be able to use it in one of my never-ending essays. And it's brilliant. It should be read.

Other than that I could just continue with my old habit of posting a picture of my recently purchased books। Six books for something like €12. Exactly, you can't say no. And how freakishly appropriate isn't the Deforges book?

There was a sale on the sale and I am still a woman.

2011-03-11T20:51:00.004+01:00

The front batch of tulips are mutant-tulips. Unfortunately, this is difficult to see on this particular photo.

And every time I get new books I have to post pictures of them. Perhaps my relationship to books is not really healthy, but since we just moved, and I don't see us moving until perhaps in... two-three years from now, I somehow think I can buy new books. Excuses, excuses... But they were cheap, okay? And I actually put two away, Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and another book I can't remember the title of.

The French book I bought indirectly. A friend of mine went to Belgium, and a friend who goes to a French speaking country without buying books for me is not a real friend. Reading the blurb (it hurts my soul to use that word...) made me think of Jean Giono, which made me realize I want to read more of his books (I may have some, perhaps, possibly). I think I need to go to France soon, anyway.

I have posted earlier about Jens Bjørneboe (#1, #2), the magic Jens Bjørneboe. Three of his books on sale? Irresistible. One of them is an erotic tale that he got prosecuted for. Mmm, free-spirited Norway.

I have previously read Dreams Of My Russian Summers by Andrei Makiné, and I enjoyed it. Seeing another one of his books practically for free made it an easy decision...

I leave you with this, which I found thanks to one of the members of the LanguageLearners Forum.

A round of applause for Mobipocket!

2011-03-07T21:53:00.003+01:00

Everyone is reading nowadays. Vera and my Hungarian tandem partner are reading and listening to Harry Potter in Swedish and Norwegian, and Doviende is reading Polish without much prior knowledge of the language. Just a couple of days ago, my Hungarian tandem partner sent me the link to Alice in Wonderland, both the text and audio (I wrote about it on lang-8 today). I immediately thought that it would be too difficult, and I had already started another book in Hungarian. I changed my mind today though, and gave it a try. Just a bit. My last try was with Jane Eyre, but then I had a parallel text in Hungarian and English. Now I just have the Hungarian.

First of all, I downloaded the .lit e-book, and converted it to mobi-format (so that it will be readable on my Kindle) and started reading it in the Calibre e-book reader on my computer while listening to the audio (Kindle, after all, isn't all that flexible...). I soon realized that I wanted to take notes though. Some words kept appearing, and I thought it would be great to be able to add a note to those. Unfortunately, I couldn't find any way of doing this in Calibre. Mobipocket Reader came to my rescue though! If anyone wonders why I don't simply read a Word document, I just have to say that e-book format is 1000 times more pleasant to read even on the computer. Changing the background color from white to beige, for one, helps a lot, and you get the text divided into appropriately wide columns so that you don't lose focus and don't have to move your eyes all that much. Flipping pages is ever so easy (space key), which is excellent when you are concentrating like mad to keep up with the audio while trying to make clever reflections on what you read. In Mobipocket, you can very simply highlight words, copy them, and add notes to them that are saved in a column to your right (perfect if you want to add them to ANKI later).

(Click to enlarge.)

I've read the first chapter, which was 15 minutes of audio, and I can't say I understood all that many words. I know what happens in the first chapter since I have seen the movie, so I was able to tag along, so to say. I find that what may be even more important than actually understanding all the words is to get a grasp on word order. Word order is, like in all languages that claim to have "free word order", annoyingly difficult in Hungarian, more so than in Russian. Also, I think that you pick up correct usage of small particle words, multiple negations, possessive constructions (these things aren't as easy in Hungarian as in all the Indo-European languages I've studied) from just pure exposure.

Oh, and Alice in Wonderland turn out to be much easier than I thought, since I was set on not understanding anything.

Правильно?

2011-02-27T22:38:00.003+01:00

(Этот текст вообще не написан на правильном, русском языке, и я сама это отлично знаю, но я надеюсь, что он понятен всем русскоязычным людям.)

Как вы думаете, чем больше языков человек знает, тем больше он станет терпимым к ошибкам других? Вот такая у меня есть идея. Люди, знающие лишь один или два языка, или вообще не мыслят о языках, о правилных формах слов, о грамматике, и так далее, или этим очень сильно интересуются. То есть, интересуются ошибками других. Или язык совсем не очень важен (это на самом деле просто инструмент коммуникации), или он почему-то станет дело чести (так или так говорить на красивом, родном языке нельзя, это стыд!). Везде есть такие люди, в каждом веке они откуда-то возникают, и постоянно их раздражает то, что н о в о е.

Как мне кажется, всё это логично. Когда ты просто одно дело знаешь, именно это дело для тебя станет очень важным. И вот здесь речь идёт о языках. Когда ты выучишь больше языков, ты обнаруживаешь, что везде по-разному устроены слова, предложения, грамматика. Возможно ли вспомнить, как поставить запятые правильно на десятых языках? Когда человек после немецкого, итальянского, арабского, румынского, и так далее, выучит свой Х-ый язык, это, может быть, больше не так уж важно? Я по какой-то причине надеюсь, что это так. Где-то, на самом деле, мысль важнее всего, не правда ли? И, может быть, красота языка. Но красота - это не всегда то же самое, как правильность. Если перед тобой есть слово, которое любой человек понял бы, как оно может быть неправильным, просто потому, что ещё никто его не поставил в национальном словаре?

Я хочу видеть больше свободы в языках. Когда мне было 15 лет, для меня грамматическая правильность была очень, очень важной. Конечно, она всё ещё важная, чтобы сохранить мысль и чёткость языка, но язык также должен быть чем-то личным. Меня по-прежнему раздражают те люди, которые не умеют писать даже три слова правильно на родном языке (потому что там есть какое-то неуважение к тому, кто будет читать). Но есть большая разница между тем, кто ничего не знает и кому на всё наплевать, и тем, кто знает, но не хочет писать как и все другие. Каждый человек использует свой язык по-разному, и по-моему, это так должно быть.

По этому поводу, вот интересное видео Стивена Фрайа. Он лучше меня объясняет, в чём дело.

Le français au féminin.

2011-02-23T11:28:00.008+01:00

Pour une raison quelconque j'ai toujours voulu que le mot « silence » soit du genre féminin. Il y a quelque chose dans la sonorité du mot qui fait que je pense automatiquement « la silence ». Ensuite, je suis toujours un peu énervée quand je me rends compte que ce n'est pas grammaticalement correct. C'est la même chose pour « problème », mais là, la connotation est moins positive...

L'autre jour, quand j'ai écrit ici à propos de mon premier dictionnaire électronique, j'ai énuméré quelques auteurs français. Ensuite, j'ai commencé à réfléchir un peu plus aux auteurs français que je lis. Je me suis rendue compte, que parmi les auteurs modernes (ou disons plutôt contemporains) il y a une forte majorité féminine. J'aime beaucoup Zola, Maupassant, Balzac, Giono, etc., mais quand je lis des livres plus ou moins contemporains, et quand je veux donner des recommandations de livres français, il y a un tas d'écrivaines qui surgissent. Et elles ont toutes quelque chose en commun, notamment ce que l'on pourrait appeler « la sensibilité féminine », même si, en principe, je déteste de telles choses. D'habitude, c'est quelque chose que l'on méprise parce que « sensibilité » est fortement liée à « faiblesse », et c'est ça que, je pense, fait que la littérature féminine n'est pas beaucoup estimée (hors des cercles de femmes).

Je ne sais pas pourquoi c'est comme ça, si c'est uniquement une coïncidence que j'ai trouvé de tels livres en français et non pas en anglais, en suédois ou en norvégien (pour le russe, je ne trouve jamais quelque chose que j'adore vraiment et ça me déçoit énormément).

De quels auteurs parle-je donc ?

Annie Ernaux, Françoise Sagan, Anna Gavalda, Amélie Nothomb, Anaïs Nin, Virginie Despentes. Parmi ces écrivaines, je regrouperai Annie Ernaux, Françoise Sagan et Anaïs Nin dans un groupe, et Anna Gavalda, Amélie Nothomb Virginie Despentes dans un autre. On pourrait peut-être se demander ce que fait Virginie Despentes là-dedans, vu que elle est certainement d'un autre genre que les autres ; plus sexuelle, plus vulgaire, moins « haute littérature » (comme haute couture :-)). Despentes est là parce que elle sait écrire d'une manière stupéfiante, d'une manière à rendre aimables des personnages que l'on aurait peut-être autrement détestés, et elle écrit souvent des choses qui parlent de femmes troublées. Tout à fait comme Annie Ernaux et Françoise Sagan, d'ailleurs. Despentes est un peu plus concrète ; ses personnages ont des problèmes réels, tandis que les problèmes des autres sont souvent d'un genre beaucoup plus insaisissable (lassitude, indifférence, désir trop fort, parmi d'autres).

Virginie Despentes
(Dont j'ai lu Bye Bye Blondie et Les Chiennes Savantes.)

Annie Ernaux
(Dont j'ai lu Le Journal Du Dehors, Passion Simple et Les Années)

Françoise Sagan
(Dont j'ai lu Un certain sourire, Aimez-vous Brahms ?, Le Garde du coeur, Le Lit défait, Un sang d'aquarelle, Château en Suède, Les violons parfois, La robe mauve de Valentine)

Anna Gavalda
(Dont j'ai lu Je voudrais que quelqu'un m'attende quelque part et Ensemble, c'est tout)

Anaïs Nin
(Dont j'ai lu trois journaux et des nouvelles érotiques. Maintenant je suis en train de lire Les Enfants De L'Albatros.)

Amélie Nothomb (Dont j'ai lu Stupeur Et Tremblement et Attentat.)

Cela fait que pour moi, le français c'est une langue très féminine. Et c'est sans doute une des meilleures pour la littérature, même si je ne saurais pas dire exactement pourquoi.

Je me demande quand même où sont les hommes. J'ai lu Michel Houellebecq, mais là... je ne sais pas trop quoi dire, j'ai plutôt eu l'impression qu'il écrit pour choquer. J'ai aussi lu Emmanuel Carrère, qui m'a plu uniquement parce que je pouvais le comprendre. Romain Gary, bien sûr, est excellent. Mais où sont les autres ? Il me faudra peut-être un magazine de littérature française pour me tenir à jour avec la situation littéraire en France. Sinon, pour ceux qui comprennent le Suédois, il y a le blog Camillas Läsdagbok, d'une professeur d'anglais et de français qui lit quelque chose du genre 100 livres par mois - français, italien, suédois et anglais. Mon seul problème, c'est que j'oublie souvent de lire les blogs que je suis, mais je pourrais peut-être faire un effort.

Sinon, est-ce qu'il y a des recommandations ?

And there was much rejoicing...

2011-02-22T18:50:00.003+01:00

It happened. I got a Hungarian text that I can actually read, look up some words per sentence and understand without too much trouble. All thanks to my Tandem partner! It's even a funny text. An extract for the Hungarians (from Bezzeg az én időmben by Fehér Klára):

Hálóingben nem lehet iskolába menni.

Nem. Akárhogy nézem, nem lehet.

Esetleg levágnék az aljából egy fél métert, akkor nem lógna ki a szoknyából. Múltkor, amikor nem volt időm rendesen megfésülködni, a hajamból is lekanyarítottam a kimaradt fürtöt. Igaz, hogy másnap a fésülködésnél éppen ez a hajcsomó hiányzott... Nehéz az élet. Még egyszer körül kell néznem a lakásban.

A konyhában, a ruhaszárító kötélen két árva zsebkendő lóg. Igaz, tiszta zsebkendőm sincs. De ezek még vizesek. A fürdőszobában, no persze, a fürdőszobában, a kádban, mosóporba áztatva ott vannak a kombinék és - engedelmet kérek - a bugyik, amiket este könnyelműen én magam hajigáltam bele.

And speaking of languages, I'm toying with the idea of writing in Russian here. Not sure if it's a good idea, if I should keep it English (with the extremely occasional French) or turn it more multilingual. Time will tell. I'll go French first, anyway.

Me and my iPod.

2011-02-20T19:06:00.002+01:00

This weekend has been a rough one. I decided to finish both essays that I have to hand in on Friday, since I don't know how much time I will have next week (I got another job on Friday and will have to go through some training for it, spanning over several days). So I put down an offer of X glasses of wine at a cozy café in Oslo with a friend yesterday (more or less my vision of paradise) in order to read about cosmopolitanism and democracy and inclusion. Bitter, who, me? I'm making up for it by going to the movies tonight with some assorted partners in crime from St Petersburg to see Black Swan and working on my Hungarian homework. Yes, I got homework from my Hungarian language partner! I'm translating a snippet of Norwegian into Hungarian, because she thinks I'm reading too difficult books anyway. She's most likely right, Hungarian has me completely defeated.

BUT ANYWAY. My language learning life has become significantly easier since Christmas when I became the proud owner of an iPod Touch. Naturally, I should've gotten one ages ago, but I have a problem when it comes to spending money, so I usually just wait until someone gives whatever I want to me.

So, how can you use your iPod to make your life easier as language learner? Well first of all, and obviously, dictionaries! I have always been very interested in electronic dictionaries, and I had one as early as 2003. It was perhaps what made me interested in languages to begin with (come to think of it, I've only been a language enthusiast for five or so years) since it all of a sudden enabled me to read books without dragging a dictionary along. All of a sudden I could read French books and I went way past my class all the way to France! Back then it was a C-Pen scanner dictionary. Since those naïve days of Marguerite Duras, Anaïs Nin, Emmanuel Carrère and Guy de Maupassant painstakingly read with grim determination I have invested in an Ectaco Arabic handhold dictionary that didn't work (worst piece of crap I've ever bought) and a C-Pen scanner for Russian that didn't work either since it could only look at words in their dictionary form...

With an iPod Touch you never need to buy another device for this purpose. I have bought the Oxford Russian dictionary (pricey, yep, but you can save flash cards and all the words have pronunciation), a Hungarian-English dictionary that's absolutely brilliant and that cost almost nothing, and I will most likely acquire a serious German dictionary as well when I get more serious about German.

Naturally, there is an ANKI application for iPod. Need I say more?

It is as easy as it gets to find Russian or Hungarian or whatever radio stations that you can listen to whenever you have Wifi.

There are several language courses for iPod, but I have not looked into those since that's not really my kind of thing. I have only downloaded a one Hungarian word a day (with pronunciation!) application, and I'm sure there are loads of others for other languages.

What more can you do with an iPod? I want suggestions!

When I started working with the book Standard Arabic (terrifyingly sexy in its absolutely hard-core approach) I was quite annoyed at how one of the first words they introduced was "diligent". Who on earth uses that word anyway? Now I find myself thinking "diligent" rather often, and feel that I have some of my diligence to thank my iPod for. I think it may be brought me back to "our world". Soon I'll be back on the Forum as well, just you wait.

There was a sale and I'm a woman.

2011-02-17T18:30:00.004+01:00

Well actually, I did not buy all of these books at this year's book sale. Usually I buy more, but that's just because the Swedish book sales are actually cheap...

Speaking of Sweden, I visited a bookstore with my boyfriend the other day, and we went by the Swedish corner. There's always lots of Swedish crime novels in Norwegian bookstores, but this particular one also has a table with a sign saying "Swedish paperbacks are extremely cheap". And with paperbacks that cost 75NOK instead of the usual 100NOK, I guess that's true. For me, that's still a lot of money for a paperback. My boyfriend snatched up a book, went and paid for it and told me it was about me. It's the book in the picture that says "Duktighetsfällan", with a mirror on it. "Duktig" is one of those Swedish words that I always have some trouble translating; it's both "good" (as in "Good boy!"), "skillful", "dutiful"... lots of things! "Fälla" is much easier: trap. "The trap of being too good." The book deals with the problem of burning yourself out doing too many things, a problem that mostly affects women in today's Sweden and that leads to some only being able to work for seven or eight years before becoming permanently ill. It's about perfectionism and high demands. Even though I don't think all of it really applies to me, I do recognize many things, like for example how all the women in the book (patients) get annoyed by how little their boyfriends do, at how they can just exist. There are actually two sorts of "duktighetsfällor", the female kind and the male kind. The female kind is more about pleasing everyone, never saying no and neglecting yourself until it makes you break down. (Boring.) The male variant, however, is about measuring worth in achievement (you are what you achieve), and never being satisfied with the results - a sort of perfectionism that women are taking over. Quite appropriately, everyone I know who fits this description are women. But I've only read half the book so far, so I'm no expert yet.

During our three hours in Kiel on Tuesday, I naturally had to visit a bookstore. Again, my boyfriend just went and picked up a book that he liked the look of, Mängelexemplar by Sarah Kuttner, and suggested I get it. And I did, because I found the synopsis appropriate.

"Karo lebt schnell und flexibel. Sie ist das Musterexemplar unserer Zeit: intelligent, selbstironisch und liebenswert. Als sie ihren Job verliert, ein paar falsche Freunde aussortiert und mutig ihre feige Beziehung beendet, verliert sie auf einmal den Boden under den Füssen. Plötzlich ist die Angst da."

I love things that have something to do with anxiety!

Let's move on to my book sale shopping! I never buy hardcover books, simply because they are ridiculously expensive and there's always a paperback that's cheaper. But when there's a sale... Funnily enough, the last time I bought hardcover books was when my boyfriend entered a book club and got three books for free. I got (yes it was more like me joining the club) Per Petterson's Jeg forbanner tidens elv (I curse the river of time), Magda Szabó's The Door, and another book. What did I get this time? Per Petterson's Ut og stjæle hester (Out Stealing Horses) and Magda Szabó's The Deer! What a coincidence. I can't wait to read some more Szabó. I got a third book as well, perhaps the most spoken about Norwegian book in many years, after Ut og stjæle hester I guess. Min kamp by Knausgård. There are six or so books in this series, and everyone reads them. There's been lots of scandal around them, because they are based on the author's real life - and he hasn't gone too very much trouble to dissimulate the other characters in the book. It will be fun to finally read it.

2011 - The year people started taking me serious?

2011-02-11T16:31:00.003+01:00

I kind of stopped posting simply because I ran out of time. Just as I predicted, keeping up with the one book per week thing is proving increasingly challenging, but I haven't failed yet. My biggest issue is that I want to read in Russian, and that slows me down considerably. Starting Любовь Фрау Клейст is strategically more or less retarded, but I do need to read some more Russian now.

I was speaking to a friend the other day, and he mentioned going completely off a language after having spent some time in the country speaking it. I wonder if that's what happened to me with Russian. Before going to Russia, I read all the time. I've hardly read anything since coming back. That's about to change now though! And I could perhaps just skim through a small Russian book and perhaps make it in a week, but now I'm reading because I want to increase my vocabulary. The translation class at university does not offer me any new vocabulary, and I want to push further ahead into the region of "wtf you know that word!?"-vocabulary.

And as for Russian, I was also at a mini Russian movie night the other day with three friends. We drank the Hungarian national alcohol Unicum (and I was not the one who brought it!!), ate Norwegian carrot cake and watched the brilliant and absolutely absurd movie Город Зеро.

If you see it somewhere, buy it.

I kind of feel like I'm filling up my quota of things Russian. I just have to increase my expertise in some other areas as well, notably in linguistics... Ьy linguistics vocabulary is sorely lacking, and I think it would be a wise investment on my behalf to perhaps dedicate this summer to linguistics self-study. Getting a Master's degree in Russian language isn't the most lucrative thing to do, and our student advisor (a very helpful Russian lady) always mentions how the alternative of our program (career wise) is really a better idea: Russian area studies. There are actually some jobs attached to that one, and you can't do a thing just knowing Russian - there are plenty of Russians in Norway who do that. Getting a Master's in Russian language is, in my opinion, rather pointless unless you do it brilliantly. My dream is to continue working at university, to get a Ph.D. and then just go from there. So I was very pleased when our student advisor told me this was what I was supposed to do based on my grades, without me mentioning my plans to her.

If you plan on going deep into language, you have to know your linguistics. And I'm quite curious to see how this may accelerate my language learning. I already see how being very familiar with some changes in Indo-European languages can be greatly helpful in acquiring vocabulary. The same words really are everywhere, they are just hard to spot unless you can track their development. Naturally, this particular bit doesn't help me at all with Hungarian :-) And I am actually back on track with that one, speaking it twice a week and everything with my new language partner from Hungary. If things go according to plan this weekend, I will even be opening up Üvöltő szelek. For the third time, in a third language.

But as usual I have lots of plans, lots of great ideas. I also have lots of work. Not only did I have to take an extra class outside of my full-time studies this term, but I also got a job as a translator. The job wasn't supposed to take all that long, but I think they greatly underestimated how much text there actually is. Yesterday, I got registered as an interpreter for an interpreting business in Oslo as well. So it does actually look like I'm finally getting a bit of experience to make up for my lacking formal translation/interpreting qualifications.

Well, I have an essay on linguistic agreement to write since we go to Kiel in Germany on Monday. But before I leave, I wanted to share two links for the truly nerdy.

http://www.ruscorpora.ru/ - The National Corpus of the Russian Language - perfect when you're searching for occurrences of words, grammatical features, exceptions, anything.

Vasmer's etymological dictionary of the Russian language - find out where all the words come from! Our Slavic language history teacher teacher told us this was a book (actually, four books) any serious student of Russian should have. But hey, it's online!

Universities...

2011-01-25T10:40:00.004+01:00

While I procrastinate some more and avoid translating next week's text for my Russian translation class (I'll do that tomorrow anyway) and also avoid lying down on the couch to continue reading Amy Chua's World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability (not because it isn't interesting, it's very interesting, but I am afraid of falling asleep at this time of the day) I thought I'd write a little bit more about studying languages at university.

Visit any language forum and people will be telling you that there's no point in wasting your time at university; you can learn a language much faster by yourself. And I completely agree. For those lucky few who have some self-discipline and some motivation, languages are best learned outside the dusty walls of academia. For those lacking self-discipline, a university may be helpful, but if you also lack motivation, I think we can safely say that you will never be fluent anyway. This is not always the issue though. If you somehow want to use your language professionally, you are most likely going to need a degree of some sort in order to "prove" that you actually know the language in question. This makes things even more funny since anyone who has studied a language at university should know that, for example, a bachelor's degree in Russian doesn't mean crap. Especially if you study at the University of Oslo. I can very safely say that no one without prior knowledge of Russian can show up at the university one day and graduate three years later with 80 Norwegian credits in Russian - and claim to be fluent. Certainly they will have knowledge of Russian, but at the present time I even doubt you could say those people would be able to read a book in Russian. Now, here it is very important to note that you don't spend all those three years studying Russian. Actual Russian studies only make up half that time. And who, besides some remarkable exceptions, ever learned Russian to fluency in 1 1/2 year?

Now, we don't have to demand fluency from these kind of studies. Perhaps we can hope that something resembling fluency will show up after a Masters degree, but after a Bachelor's degree you would think students would be able to at least feel a bit comfortable using the language. Right? There's no point in comparing these kind of language studies with those that are preceded by high school language classes (usually French, Spanish, Italian, German), since a person with the same amount of credits in any of those languages should actually be able to call himself or herself rather fluent. But those are easy languages, and students usually have more experience with them, no matter how useless high school language learning is. The question is then - how do you get comfortable with a language you never use?

In between beers the other night at a student pub, a fellow student of Russian said that the grammar class we are now taking is actually mostly a class that enables us to study more. More than anything else, it's a preparation for Master studies. Is that what language studies at university should be all about? Study in order to study more? Personally, I'm not against it since my interest in Russian is rather academic and I am going to pursue my studies at higher and higher levels, but I don't think the solution is optimal for the majority of students. Several students in our group (the same group that went to St. Petersburg, so we all know each other) have pointed out that the Russian classes this semester are more or less suited for me and another student in the group, who is very interested in grammar. That's 2 out of 15. The students who want to learn to speak Russian are not thrilled (one friend simply changed major to area studies instead). Certainly, all sorts of grammar study is somehow useful, and this semester we are going to write academic papers on smaller grammatical features of the Russian language. I get the feeling we mostly do this in order to learn to write about grammar; how to use the correct methodology and the correct tools. For academics it's brilliant, but how practical is it? When you go to a university to study a language, you do expect to learn that language. The "dry" grammar nerdery is balanced with a heavy dose of translation exercises, and that, combined with the fact that our translation teacher is actually Russian and speaks Russian to us helps a lot - especially since we have no oral part. As I mentioned in an earlier post, the other Russian class of the semester is a class on Slavic language history. Perhaps I should repeat, just for emphasis, that the University of Oslo offers no actual Russian speaking classes. Ever. (I think). You get one in St Petersburg, but that's it, 3 months.

Let's compare the 2nd semester Russian classes of some universities (without preparation classes, so 3rd semester at Uni of Oslo). One semester is 30p.
Uni. of Oslo (St Petersburg semester) - Theoretical Russian grammar - 10p, Russian translation & Spoken Russian - 10p, Practical Russian Grammar - 10p (or Russian politics 10p)
Uni. of Oslo (in Oslo) - Russian grammar II - 10p, Russian translation and language use - 10p
Uni. of Umeå - Russian grammar 8p, Russian text 8p, Oral and written Russian 6p, Russian literature 6p, Russian society 4p
Uni. of Stockholm - Syntax and written Russian (incl. translation) 6p, Oral Russian 3p, Russian history of literature and literature 3p (this includes reading 5 books in Swedish and extracts in Russian), "Lecture" - on research and debate on the subject (doesn't count in points), Fiction and Non-Fiction and individual task, including translation and oral presentation 8p

Somehow I feel that Oslo's version is not really optimal (Stockholm's and Umeå's kind of make me want to change country again though). Shouldn't there be some sort of option for those who want to develop more practical skills, versus those who plan on staying at university and who need to be more... academically competent? You can speak perfectly fine Russian without being able to write dissertations on aspect and without being able to write three pages on the formation of the imperative. Conversely, you can be able to write those fancy papers without actually being able to hold a normal conversation in Russian. The idea is most likely that you are supposed to acquire those practical skills after you have perfected the theoretical part, but that forces people to stay ages at university. You could perhaps think that the solution is to go to Russia. But nah. You only get to go to Russia at the Master's level if you study Russian area studies, not if you study language. And you have to pay some serious tuition fees.

Well, that being said, I am applying for the Masters program in the fall, and I think this spring's classes will be the most interesting ever, but then I am not really the average Russian student either. Now I have some books to read, some (absolutely perfect) biscotti to put in jars and an apartment to clean, before I go to this semester's first class on Russian literature.

Polyphasic sleep.

2011-01-20T14:32:00.001+01:00

Now, this is not something I would try myself. First of all, I am way too fond of sleeping and you have to have very much control over your daily routine in order to be able to follow an unconventional sleep pattern. But it's very interesting to read about other people who try it and I'm very much looking forward to seeing what happens when more time has passed. Read more about it on these two blogs:

Judith's language learning blog

Language fixation

Carrying a Secret in My Heart.

2011-01-19T14:00:00.004+01:00

I just finished reading Carrying a Secret in My Heart, and thought I should post some quotes here. I always enjoy saving quotes, because reading them one year later is always a fun reminder of what I liked about a certain book. However, I have realized that when I write down quotes on old-fashioned pieces of paper I just lose them ;)

I chose a couple of quotes from the chapter dealing with the 1956 revolutionaries' children's opinions of their father's actions and of the return from prison. All of the interviewed children have fathers that were either thrown in prison as a consequence of their participation in the events or by being there by accident, or who were executed. The women who participated were either too young to have children or too old, and very few were executed.

"I cannot feed proud about it because such pride involves spending 10 or 15 years in prison for the ideal of 1956 and getting away with it. But what can I say? I lost my father, and my mother had to suffer twice as much as other women. That's really something to be proud of!" (Ferenc Z.)

"After I learned that my father had been executed I was really ashamed. If he had been executed he must have committed some horrendous crime. If someone is given a sentence like that, he must be guilty or something terrible. Even later on I didn't see him as a hero or as someone who had changed history, but as someone who had abandoned his family." (Katalin Földesi)

"There was a photograph of my father on the desk, but it only showed his face. And when my grandmother said that if daddy came home he would teach me to ride a bicycle and to swim I suddenly burst out crying: 'How will he play with me when he hasn't got any legs?'" (Krisztina Lukách)

"When we went on holiday I spent the whole time sitting on a tree waiting for my father. I became a past master at waiting. But no one could tell me when he would come back. Nor did they realize that they should have told me that we would be informed in advance when he was coming back. They should have said something at least to stop me being permanently on the lookout for him." (Zsuzsa Mérei)

"I remember being afraid when we talked about him coming home. I was apprehensive, partly because we got along so well at home and partly because I have come across many bad fathers. Another reason was that in the end I had no idea what kind of person daddy was. Of course, mom always loved talking about him and it was clear that she loved him a great deal and wanted him home. But in reality I still didn't know what kind of man he was. I was afraid that someone would somehow upset my world. Mom, for example, never smacked me. As far as I knew fathers smacked their children. I was afraid that a man would come who would start hitting me. But it soon turned out that he was a really nice bloke." (Péter Zsámboki)

"My mom's nerves gave out completely. She cried all the time and it was very hard for us. Then she got all kinds of illnesses and had some serious operations. The doctor said it was all due to her nerves. She suffered a great deal. She was always afraid and always sick and we were always having to run to the phone to call the doctor. On many occasions when mom was in hospital we three children were left alone and I had to look after the little ones. Then I got an ulcer and I was taken to hospital several times." (Jószef Andi)

Guilty pleasures.

2011-01-18T11:46:00.002+01:00

So, yesterday I rendered myself even more of an invalid than I already was to begin with when I smashed my elbow in the stairs. Rather dramatic actually, and since I am now extremely reduced as to what I can do around the house (no making of the bed, no cooking, no vacuuming, no nothing really), I have much more time for reading. Possible fracture. My first ever! I'm so proud. And I'm very happy I have got Dragon NaturallySpeaking :-)

But anyway, this is an excellent excuse to indulge in guilty pleasures. I love guilty pleasures, and I love people who can fess up to them. My guilty pleasure when it comes to TV series is Bones. I don't actually think the series is any good, but it's amusing to watch and I like the main character. For music, I like German techno. For books, and I rarely indulge in guilty pleasure books I must say since I always have so many other things to read, I've got the True Blood series.

I'm not really sure what the adequate English term for this kind of literature is, but the friend who lent me the books (asserting that they were much more dirty than the TV series) appropriately named them "housewife porn", the Norwegian term for this kind of books. And that's exactly what it is. The style of the books is rather annoying, and just like American TV series the author constantly repeats the same things, as if the reader would have forgotten them after already having read them five times... There are also some annoying comments about Americans and American character, and some stuff that is just plain stupid. But reading the books is fun. The TV series is actually a bit boring in comparison - you could say it's the kid version, where the main character is much more virtuous and gullible. She gets saved a lot in the TV series. In the books, she saves herself.

Guilty pleasure books are excellent for language learning, and I really regret not having these books in either Russian or Hungarian.

But without further ado, I will continue on book 5.

Sofi Oksanen.

2011-01-17T15:16:00.003+01:00

It's week number three and I have finished book number three. I'm pleased to say that it's another good one! My expectations were rather high, and I did actually think that it would be more of the kind of book you can't put down (my mother said something of the kind, but that just shows that I'm harder to please than her) so from that point of view I was a bit disappointed, but the book is so skillfully written that it makes up for it.

The story in this book takes place in the 1940s and 50s in Estonia, as well as in 1992. You follow the Estonian girl Aliide and her sister Ingel (who is the beautiful one, the successful one, the desirable one) when the Germans and then the Communists arrive, and at the same time, interlaced with the story of Aliide's sad youth, you follow Zara, a victim of trafficking and prostitution who, bruised and afraid, ends up on Aliide's lawn in 1992, after escaping from her pimp. It's a rater complex story. Zara is, as a matter of fact, Aliide's sister's granddaughter, who has grown up in Russia. It's not a coincidence that she ends up in Aliide's village, but she didn't exactly get there the way she planned. Aliide's relation to her own sister is not what it should be though, and Zara, in dire need of help, is not really certain if it's a good idea to actually enlighten Aliide on her identity. For some reason, Aliide has no sister, and Zara's mother has no aunt... But she knows that she has little time, that soon she will be found and there will be no more escape.

Aliide is a fascinating character. It's hard to dislike her, even though she is not at all sympathetic. She's obsessive and she smells of onions. She is oddly hard, certainly not afraid of the young men who come to throw rocks at her windows and who she is certain will one day burn down her house. She is the victim of rape and abuse at the hands of the Communists, but she looks down on other women in her own situation and cannot bear the idea that her shame should be made known, so she becomes one of them - the Communists. Her own jealousy towards her sister has driven her to commit acts that should really trouble someone's conscience for the rest of their life, but she seems oddly untouched by it. And she has the impulse to beat people rather often. If I'm not mistaken she imagines beating one man until his intestines are all mush.

In a way you could say that this is a book about betrayal and lack of love that slowly breaks down people and turns them into something they were not originally meant to be.

Rekindling dead interest.

2011-01-17T15:14:00.000+01:00

What are you supposed to do when you fall off the motivational wagon? Or when you just get out of the habit of doing something? Up until now, this hadn't happened to me in a very long time because I have always had rather strict habits, but three months of breaking those habits had certain effects. So what to do?

The other day I had a friend over for a visit. She is very interested in things connected to politics and knows more than the average person about many odd countries, so I asked her how she goes about to acquire this knowledge. It's not really obvious (besides Wikipedia) to know where to start when you all of a sudden want to read up on... Turkmenistan. She said that along with factual texts and books, she also explores literary productions from the country in question in order to get more of a feel for things. Of course, this is a person who probably reads faster than anyone I know, and when you do that, this approach is not that time-consuming, but as long as you have free time what's the problem?

It is not the first time this idea strikes me, but it kind of felt like a revelation to be reminded of it. Novels are an excellent way to get loosely acquainted with history and this is one of those instances when I think you should not underestimate the use of literature (you know all those people who ask what good literature can do?). When you read a fictional book about something it usually gets an emotional hold on you, more than any nonfictional book ever could, and when you combine it with hard facts from other sources, I think your chances of remembering things increases dramatically.

Now, I belong to that group of people who learn languages and who also want to learn things about the country the language is spoken in and its culture. For a long time, I have been wanting to read up on Hungarian history. Now that I can't really make myself study Hungarian, I thought that perhaps by reading about Hungary I could trigger the spark of motivation. At the same time, I'm studying democracy at University, so why not combine all three? Yesterday I found the book Carrying a Secret in My Heart, dealing with recollections from the children of the revolutionaries of 1956 in Hungary. If all goes according to plan, I'm going to follow this book up with another one on the development of democracy in Poland and Hungary, entitled From Elections to Democracy: Building Accountable Government in Hungary and Poland. Hungary is an extremely interesting country at the moment, but sadly I have extremely poor knowledge of what is actually going on there and the historical explanations to it. But it's not like you have to go to school to get educated! At University you get a diploma, study you can do at home ;)

And it goes on.

2011-01-13T15:53:00.002+01:00

It's time for a new semester at the University, and I think it is going to be a very interesting one. I have kind of agreed to try to read 52 books in 52 weeks this year, and so far I'm doing good since I have read two books, and I guess everything would have been good for the coming semester if I had only stuck to the plan of my program.

Now, in my opinion, this is probably the most interesting semester so far when it comes to Russian. Just have a look at these classes:

1. Introduction to Slavic and Russian language history
*DROOL* I know!
Reading material: a stapled book by the same name and a stapled book called "older Slavic texts", both written by the professor holding the class. In addition to this, some reading material and so on will be handed out during lectures. The University of Oslo presents a lot of its reading material in the form of stapled booklets (sometimes very big, but these two booklets are surprisingly slim), since this is cheaper than printing real books (you simply pay 1,34NOK or something like that per page). You end up with lots of ugly "books", but it's cheaper in a country where everything is extremely expensive anyway. So we can safely say that this course has not ruined me!

2. Russian grammar and translation III
Not all that exciting, I know... But this year, we actually hand in our translations and get them corrected! For me, this is sensational! Sure, we did that in Russia, but there we paid for our classes.
The reading material for this class is a horribly expensive (€96) grammar book that we bought last year and another slim booklet entitled "Russian syntax, the complex sentence". This class includes writing what corresponds to a bachelor essay on grammar.

3. Russian literature I
Everyone tells me this class is ridiculously easy and that the professor really does not want to be there. It's very basic since you can actually take it without having studied more than one semester of Russian, and you do the reading in Russian, so you go figure how much reading we will have to do... And of course, since we're talking of (mostly classic) Russian literature, anyone with any sort of connection to Russian things know that you don't go out and buy those texts. Actually, the University even provides us with links to the online texts. We're reading Pelevin as well! No books of course, just a short story.

So you see, my academic semester would have been extremely cheap and rather relaxed. That is, if I had stopped there. Since I am working towards double bachelors, I need more classes, so first I added this one:

4. Democracy, Human Rights, and Gender – Global Perspectives in Education
This is a distance class in English, and sure as hell the reading list includes like 10 books. The University of Umeå is excellent at including tons of books in small classes, but at least those books tend to be normally priced ones, as opposed to the horribly expensive ones the University of Oslo always use. Still, in my current economic situation I can't buy all those books and for the first time ever I have actually gone and borrowed them at the Library. The ones that I could find at least. I don't like doing this since I always underline and take notes in my books, but meh, what can you do. This class seems to demand a lot of work, and to be honest I'm a bit scared of it. The books do seem interesting though, and I'm going to read the first one over the weekend, Robert Dahl's "On Democracy".

Obviously that's not all. Yesterday a (fellow language enthusiast) friend came to visit to have a look at our new apartment and our new cat, and he told me that the University of Oslo offers an Icelandic introduction class this spring, so of course I'm signing up for that one with him!

I'm not signed up yet, and perhaps there will be some sort of problem with me taking the class, but I'm at least going to try to sign up for.

5. Icelandic I, introduction to modern Icelandic
Books - probably of the expensive kind :(

I am probably underestimating it, thinking it will be a breeze, but it doesn't really matter since I can always drop out of it if I have too little time. I won't be cut off from any student funding (which is already so tiny that it hardly matters) anyway since I am way beyond a full-time student. A couple of summers ago I had a fling with Icelandic for two or three months, but then I stopped, and it will be fun picking it up again. Speaking of languages I have to pick up, Hungarian and German can be found in death throes on the floor...

Keep 'em coming!

2010-12-29T20:45:00.004+01:00

Isaac Bashevis Singer, who received the Nobel Prize of Literature in 1978.

The book I chose to read after The World According to Garp is A Little Boy in Search of God/A Young Man in Search of Love by Isaac Bashevis Singer. I visited a secondhand store the other day with my mother, and as I was looking for more books by John Irving I happened to see this book, also by an author that I have always seen the name of but that I have never actually read. I didn't buy the book since I'm very restrictive these days when it comes to book buying, but what did I see as I was looking through my mother's books for a new book to read later that same day? Yep, exactly.

I wasn't exactly enamoured with this book to begin with, but as I am approaching the end of it I find myself liking it more and more.

This image is the one I get in my head when reading. There are these very conflicting thoughts and characters that appear all the time in the narrative, and I find it very hard to get a grip on the essence of the book, but I kind of like it. It's somehow fleeting. I am surprised by how quickly Singer can make my sympathies swing around, all within just a couple of pages, leaving me a little bit confused as to what I am supposed to believe, if I sympathize with him or not, if he's a decent guy or a spineless excuse for a man.

Basically, it's Singer's autobiography. Or part of it; it's not a very long book, he just describes his youth and his encounter with religion and love in the time after the first world war in Warsaw.

Funnily enough, this book is also about an author, however this time the author actually exists - and contrary to the last author I read about (the fictive Garp), this one proclaims himself an antifeminist since modern women make fools out of honest men! He can't resist femmes fatales, at the same time as he despises them and wishes he could find himself a chaste Jewish girl to marry. He sees the contradictions himself. The more I think about it, the more clever I find the book. There are lots of little things where I can nod in agreement, especially when it's a question of literature or monogamy. You will just have to read yourselves to find out exactly what, since I myself hate to know what a book is about before I start reading it I also do not like to talk in detail about books with people who have not read them.

And I just love how I find the same ideas in different books. In this one, an editor tells Singer that Yiddish authors have an obligation to write books that strengthen the position of the Jewish community. I have read the exact same thing somewhere else, about another specific group, but I can't remember where...
Singer, however, questions that a work of art that serves such purposes can actually have an artistic value. I have read this exact same counter argument as well, but where? Gah, annoying...

Well! I kind of got curious about Yiddish literature from reading this book. Any suggestions?

The World According to Garp.

2010-12-28T23:53:00.006+01:00

The title "The World According to Garp" is perhaps one of the best - ever। It fits the book in a rather subtle way, not as blatantly as you may think. It tells you something about the book before you start reading it, and then the book eases you into it, that is into this "world". This will be something different. It's not just a tale about the world, but the world
according to Garp. A subjective, openly subjective narrative, without any pretensions at objectivity. But it is somehow subtle, it does not scream "THIS IS DIFFERENT", it just provides you with a feeling of alterity, of not really belonging. In the beginning I didn't really understand why it was the world according to Garp - it felt more like it should be the world according to Jenny Fields (read it to find out why).

I often think about the point of literature, the meaning of it, and I never reach any conclusion. I have different approaches to literature depending on my mood; I can be businesslike ("this must be read, but I may not like it") or sentimental ("in reading this I exist in two places - physically here and mentally in the book", the same thing that happens when you watch a good movie). Because of this duality I have a hard time always applying the efficient character I wish could be the "trademark" of my reading. Reading fast and reading a lot. I can't really do it, and it's not for fault of trying. You are supposed to sit upright in a silent place and not waste time flipping pages in an inefficient way in order to read truly fast, but I prefer to lie down, listen to music and eat chocolate while I slowly and clumsily turn over the pages... So I guess my reading is often quite sensual, and I somehow feel that this is connected to the point of literature.

Garp actually thinks about the meaning of literature, somewhere in the middle of the book if I am not mistaken. What leads him to literature is at the same time different and as old as it can get when it comes to motivation: a girl. I don't want to say "love", because I don't think he was actually in love with this girl when he decided to become an author in order to marry her. He is not only different in his approach to things, but also in his actual existence - in his time that is (the book was written in the 70s and not in today's Sweden...). He is a somewhat failed author, self-centered and obsessed with his kids, the perfect stay-at-home dad (he doesn't want to see other people anyway) with a successful and brilliant professor-of-literature-wife and an eccentric mother. Garp does not believe literature should serve a purpose; it is and should be an item of luxury. This is an old question in literature, much debated and an obligatory aspect of every course on literature at University I guess; should literature and authors take a stand in society, or should their art just exist? I kind of believe that literature, by purely existing in all its forms (from Zola to Kafka, or let's say JK Rowling) fulfils its own purpose, one that is not instrumental, but without being an item of luxury.

John Irving has not had me gasping in suspense while reading this book, but he has impressed me deeply. It has been quite a while, I believe, since I last felt that a book was as deep as this one, as complex as this story. John Irving makes a rather incredulous story feel purely natural, and this is the sign of a good author. I was not questioning the probability of any of the happenings as I was reading, whereas I was actually questioning the probability in the stories Garp wrote himself (you get to read parts of his writings as well, which is a first for me I think). I can't really believe my luck in having discovered so many great authors this year: Magda Szábo, John Irving, Jens Bjørneboe, Per Petterson... I have so many books that I look forward to reading, and I recommend all of these authors very strongly.

And now some tunes...

2010-12-28T20:17:00.003+01:00

There hasn't been much music here lately, so perhaps it's about time for some new songs. Two new favourites.

Uh Huh Her - Dreamer

Marina and the Diamonds - Numb

John Irving.

2010-12-25T21:42:00.003+01:00

Going home for Christmas for me usually means having lots of time off. No laundry to do, no cleaning up to do, no dishes... I have wasted a couple hours on a rather hilarious, albeit depressing, misogynic blog (unfortunately Swedish, which makes me a bit ashamed of being Swedish) debating with the kind of mindnumbing people you only find on the Internet, that which only made me realize even more what I actually want to spend my time doing: reading. I finished reading The Diary of a Chambermaid, but I can't finish Justine, because it's left at home in Oslo. Funnily enough, considering what I've been debating the last day or two, I started a book that actually deals somewhat with feminism (without knowing it beforehand). I got one book for Christmas, and it couldn't have been more perfect - Utrensning by Sofi Oksanen (in a delicious edition). But since I'm taking that one home with me anyway, I decided to read a book from my mother's collection, and since The World According to Garp is one of those books I have always seen everywhere, I decided to give it a go. I'm reading it in Swedish.

So what can I say about The Diary of a Chambermaid? I LOVE the love-eroticism-crime connection, and I think that's what I will remember about this book. I'm very curious to see how that plays out in the movie. It was surprisingly easy to read, at the same time as I learned many new, quirky words. I bought this book years ago so I'm very happy I finally actually read it! The only thing that I kind of have against this book is the fact that the main character isn't always very sympathetic. The main characters don't always have to be, and the fact that I did actually end up liking her, despite her faults (such as occasional stupidity and inability to plan ahead), perhaps only speaks in favor of the author. I'm not actually sure whether she was supposed to be likable or not... can someone else read the book and tell me what they think?

The World According to Garp is very amusing, but way longer than I thought. I had my doubts about actually being able to finish it before going home, but then I read 40% of it today, so I guess that won't be a problem. I can already recommend it.

Illustrations.

2010-12-24T16:33:00.010+01:00

In an attempt to very shortly illustrate my stay in Russia (not Russia in general), I have chosen a couple of photos. Adding as I find them!

Need I explain?

The law abiding citizens of Russia.

Churches. In cold places. Toes leaving this world in protest and me wondering why my winter shoes aren't more wintery.

Endless glasses of beer. Baltika, Nevskoe, my dear Dr. Diesel...

Food AND beer, and cheerful people.

Christmas decorations in unnatural, non-Christmas:y colours!

Nevskij prospekt, the eternal Nevskij prospect!

Drunken friends! Utterly Scandinavian, 4 Norwegians, one Dane and a Swede!

I ended the Paris photo post with me and Sasha. Quite appropriately, this photo post should end with my partner in crime in Russia, Maja, and me! Russian style :D

Coincidence?

2010-12-24T13:29:00.006+01:00

I made it back from Russia. With what? Well, better knowledge of Russian grammar (способ действия, in particular - very handy for reading literature! But for the life of me I can't incorporate any of them in my speech...), perhaps some improvement in my spoken Russian - which to my great surprise was deemed better than my ability to translate! I always thought it was the other way around. I'm happily back though, after all, although I currently find myself in the north of Sweden where it's OMFG cold and I'm doing... nothing but reading.

While in Russia, I got inspired to read more, and as a consequence, languages are on hold for the moment. I'm reading instead. I will write a post on my "guilty pleasure" reading later, but this post is about two books that have quite some things in common, even though I hadn't really realized it until last night.

Let's make a list! Both books...

* take place in 18/19th century France (exact years escape me)
* are written by Frenchmen (one in 1787, the other was finalized in 1900)
* deal with the lives of young women
* deal with the lives of young women who constantly get into trouble
* are highly subversive
* reveal the hypocrisy and debauchery of the "fine world"

Perhaps I should have picked up on those similarities a little bit earlier?

I'm reading one of them in Russian, because I found it in a 2nd hand book store in St-Petersburg, the other I found at the top of one of my book boxes that haven't been unpacked yet in our new apartment.

1. Justine by Marquis de Sade
2. Le Journal d'une Femme de Chambre by Octave Mirbeau (The Diary of a Chambermaid)

Octave Mirbeau's book is of course of a somewhat higher literary quality, even though the style is made out to be that of an actual chambermaid. Marquis de Sade has never really struck me with his awesome prose, not even in Russian (reading in foreign languages tend to make miserably poor prose seem better since you're too bad at the language to realize what crap you are reading)... I'm not saying Sade is THAT bad, he's just no... Emily Brontë. Reading Sade is always a case of curiosity, for the fun of it, not because he's a great author or because his philosophic ideas are breaht taking. Moral relativism is after all as comfortable and easy as it gets within moral philosophy!

The misfortunes of Mirbeau's chambermaid are of the "naww, poor girl" kind, plus dear Célestine doesn't complain all that much and is not trying to dissimulate her true nature from the reader. Justine, on the other hand, runs into the kind of stuff that goes two thousand miles beyond "naww..." and is, herself, a Saint (at least so far). So, yes, Mirbeau's books is a *bit* more nuanced and interesting. Sade's book makes you finally understand why sadism was given his name - some of his other books certainly don't, nor does his life - but I hardly doubt you will finish it with a sense of "oh I can so totally recognize myself in the characters" or "oh my god, this book has changed my life". Mirbeau has some points, and I find myself wishing I had a book to write down quotes in.

Okay, just one! Just one!

L'habitude agit comme une atténuation, comme une brume, sur les objets et sur les êtres. Elle finit, peu à peu, par effacer les traits d'un visage, par estomper les déformations; elle fait qu'un bossu avec qui l'on vit quotidiennement n'est plus, au bout d'un certain temps, bossu...

So I have this tendency to write about books I have yet to finish... I will write again once I have read them до конца, and see what I think about them then. Mirbeau's book is full of anti-Semitic stuff (one of the characters is an anti-Semite) and was written during the Dreyfus affaire, so I have to look into that more, and there's a movie with Jeanne Moreau. Fun fun!

The so-called, and so sought after, immersion.

2010-10-05T18:07:00.004+02:00

People are always complaining about how they get so little exposure to their target language in their home countries, pointing out what great progress they would make were they to find themselves in a situation of immersion. Since I have been through immersion once already, or twice if you count Norway, I have no real illusions about how much progress I expect to make. Three months is not a very long time.

I have now been in Russia for almost a month, and what kind of progress have I made? I have no idea. I don't think my spoken Russian is all that much better, however I find it easier to use since I am in contact with it in a more natural way every day. I don't speak all that much Russian though, and the occasions I have spoken most Russian on here have been while meeting my old Russian friends Alexey and Sasha, who neither of them lives here. We have speaking classes, but they are often used for reading, something I find weird, and a lot of the time is used on defining words. Luckily, the class was divided into two groups after 1 1/2 week, so we don't have to explain all that many words anymore, but it is still almost driving me crazy. If we are given as an assignment to read a text, then surely people can look up the words they don't know at home and learn them before the lesson? And then the teacher can just assume that we know them? Or is this pure insanity on my behalf? The actual time we end up speaking during our speaking classes is very limited, and of course the teacher speaks very slowly. And that's it for speaking Russian, the rest of the time we speak Norwegian, even though some classes are in excruciatingly slow Russian. I can't really blame anyone though, I'm the one who is here with a group of students who have studied Russian for one year, but I did expect it to be much, much more difficult. I expected to be constantly busy, but I'm actually more busy when I study in Oslo, since we don't have any reading to do here, except for some grammar in our fabulously dry and boring grammar book. What takes up a lot of time for most people are the translations, but I did them before I even left Oslo, so even though some of them are going to be replaced by other texts (because the first ones were too difficult), I saved myself lots of time. The other thing people seem to find time consuming is writing short essays every week, but since I have been a fan of writing essays for a long time that is something I do in 30 minutes or so...

And now that I don't have all that much to do, I'm going to try to resist that old temptation of over studying everything, and instead try to read and watch Russian television and movies, and of course see more of the city. Getting to and from school reduces my amount of free time, but I try to use it as best I can and read on the way, that is what I can get a place to sit or when we don't walk. Actually being in Russia beats most things, so I don't really care all that much about school.

St Petersburg Book Market.

2010-10-03T16:45:00.003+02:00

Today we visited the book market in St Petersburg, located nearby the Elizarovskaja metro station. I found the line of tables *outside* the actual market, which is an indoor three floor arrangement, the most interesting part. I am really much more interested in actually OLD books, not just new ones, or modern editions, which are easy to find and not the slightest bit unique. And since I'm looking for classics most of the time, book markets with old dusty books are much better suited for me. Unfortunately, only the outside of the market was like that. Lots of books for 10-20-30-40 roubles! I bought a stack of books for 130 roubles in total within a couple of minutes, and a St Petersburg comic for 50 roubles inside the building (mostly just because the seller was so charming and bubbly enthusiastic about her books). I was a bit annoyed at finding Татьяна Толстая's Крысь for 50 roubles there, because I bought it for 140 yesterday...

Накануне - Тургенев
Записки охотника, Рудин - Тургенев

That is, for those who don't speak Russian, On the Eve and A Sportsman's Sketches by Ivan Turgenev. Ever since reading Fathers and Sons, Turgenev has been one of my favorite Russian authors. I got the impression that he writes in very understandable prose, and I have read one short story from A Sportsman's Sketches before, years ago, and I still remember it, which is surely a good sign. So I am very much looking forward to reading his books, and I'm absolutely thrilled that I found them for just a couple of rubles.

"Сквозь жар души, сквозь хлад ума..." - Некрасов

Not even sure what this is, but I knew that I was supposed to know Nekrasov from somewhere, and the book was just extremely cute.

Стихитворения, поэмы - Лермонтов

Lermontov was one of the first Russian authors I read in Russian, albeit in a bilingual French-Russian edition that I bought in France once; A Hero of Our Time. I really liked it, and since I have been trying to read more poetry for the last five or so years (unsuccessfully) I decided to give his poems a go.

По дорогам Венгрии - Дружинин

I don't really know what this is either, I'm not too sure if it's fiction or not (I think it's fiction, or autobiographical, but I haven't really looked into it very much), but it's about Hungary, it didn't cost a thing, and true to my habit I gave in to the temptation :-)

Мелкий Бес - Федор Сологуб

A long long time ago I read a very strange short story by Sologub, and I am a bit curious about him.

Река жизни - Куприн

Just before leaving Norway I read a short story by Kuprin, after having received recommendations on lang-8, and since I liked that short story, and since I always want to discover new authors, this collection of short stories came in very handy.

Полный пока

This is a highly modern booklet with comic strips from St. Petersburg. They seem to be all black humor strips, and language wise I thought it could be a nice challenge.

These are of course not the only books I have bought so far. The book I'm currently reading is actually not a Russian one, but the author is originally Russian and the book is about St. Petersburg and the Revolution: We the Living by Ayn Rand. I will wait with my judgment on the book until I have read all of it. I also bought a Russian translation of a Francoise Sagan book; Un orage immobile. The edition was just so cute I couldn't help myself. The same goes for Любовь Фрау Клейст by Ирина Муравьёва. I have no idea who this author is, but the book was extremely cheap and it appealed to me somehow. The list goes on with The Idiot by Dostoyevsky and finally a tiny hardcover bilingual poetry collection of poems by Rainer Maria Rilke (German/Russian).

As far as the rest of my stay here is concerned, I haven't actually been in the mood for writing about any of it. I think what I would say would be inadequate anyway. Of course everyone knows that St. Petersburg is an excellent city. I even put up with overcrowded public transport here, and that is saying a lot... ;)

Star Trek

2010-09-06T18:59:00.002+02:00

Since I am soon going to the big country in the East, I kind of felt like I should write a couple of posts here first, just in case I don't get the time to do so this fall. St. Petersburg is after all St. Petersburg so it needs to be visited, we will have lots of homework and the alcohol will be practically free compared to what we're used to.

But I wanted to talk about Star Trek today.

Star Trek seems to be a rather popular way of getting some instant immersion. I know of at least two other people/bloggers who have used Star Trek to practice their understanding of their target languages. It's quite easy to understand why; there are tons and tons of episodes, each episode is 40 minutes or so and contains some sort of adventure, making them very easy to watch. Since I am on episode 23 of season one of Star Trek Enterprise dubbed in Russian I can affirm this :-) What is so great about having this amount of episodes is that you grow accustomed to the voices of the actors, to the manner of speaking and the rhythm, so the progress in understanding can be very motivating.

For Scandinavians in general, dubbing is quite close to being a mortal sin. I don't think I know anyone who can watch anything dubbed without cringing, but it only takes some breaking in, and then you're good to go. The Star Trek I am watching has kept the English voices and only added the Russian ones on top, which can be rather disturbing at first. The Russians speech is always a bit delayed, so you get the two or three first English words as well, and then there is no real illusion about the Russian voices somehow being the real voices. Dubbing in Swedish is awful. This may have something to do with Swedish being rather chopped up in the kind of movies were dubbing is used (children's movies), making it look absolutely ridiculous as the actors voices move completely out of sync with the way too perky Swedish speech. I somehow imagine this could be less of a problem with a language that has less clear boundaries, such as Danish, but I'm not sure. I also watched the Star Trek movie (I love it, I do, Spock is pure perfection), and it was done very professionally, without English voices, but I hardly even noticed that it was actually dubbed. This is a major motion picture though, and I guess the budget is somewhat bigger for those...

Has anyone else tried watching Star Trek? Any favorite series? :-)

Per Petterson and the gang.

2010-09-06T13:47:00.005+02:00

I have always had something of a problem when it comes to keeping up with modern literature. There are just so many classics left to read, so I have never really understood when I am supposed to find time for modern prose. Especially when I started reading in multiple languages, and often quite slowly, this became an even bigger problem. Therefore I am quite proud of how much modern Norwegian literature I have been reading lately. Yesterday I started reading (and read half of) Jeg forbanner tidens elv (I curse the river of time, supposedly a line from a poem by Mao, but I don't know what the "official" translation of the phrase is) by Per Petterson. Funnily enough, this book makes me think of a couple of other brilliant Scandinavian books, and I think it embodies exactly what I like about Scandinavian literature. This particular author uses a rather simple language and some of the forms feel rather like spoken language to me, something I'm not sure I appreciated at first, but then this is Norwegian and Norwegian abides by like 10 different sets of rules. What makes it rather typically Scandinavian, at least for me, is the general sadness that prevails throughout the entire book. There's a sort of weight placed on top of every word, adding a depressing tone to even the happy recollections, but sad books don't bring me down, quite the opposite.

The topic of this book is the life of the narrator, who is now an elderly man. Throughout the book you get to follow different episodes from his life, cut up into different chapters and intertwined with each other, ranging from when he was a child to his divorce and the cancer his mother suffered from as an old woman. Absolutely everything in this book feels typical for me. Since I am very familiar with Oslo now, I recognize all the places he speaks about and I have even lived and worked in them, something that doubtlessly brings me closer to the story, but the people he describes also feel extremely real. His mother, the weird distance she keeps between herself and her son, her constant shortness, her apparent indifference and self-sacrifice do not appear strange at all, nor the weakness (male) of the main character and his father. I get the impression it could have been anyone. His wife, who is divorcing him and whom he cannot look at anymore, and who tells him to stop being so ridiculous, also feels... right.

Other books or authors this one reminds me of are Elisabeth Rynell (Till Mervas especially), Mare Kandre (Aliide, Aliide) and Herbjørg Wassmo (Tora Trilogy). These are the kind of books I enjoy studying foreign languages for. You can certainly read quite a lot of books translated, but there is always a big part of literature that never gets translated, and when it comes to Swedish literature, detective stories seems to be what gets translated and sold abroad. The good literature stays in Sweden.

Jeg forbanner tidens elv has, by the way, won the literary award of the Nordic Council and has been called the best Norwegian book of 2008. In 2003 he wrote another book that became absolutely huge, not only in Norway but abroad as well. So I think that's what I'm going to read once I get back from Russia.

Jens Bjørneboe.

2010-08-19T18:24:00.003+02:00

I have almost finished Bjørneboe’s trilogy Bestialitetens historia, and I thought I would provide you with an extract from the end of it, just like I chose one from the beginning when I started reading the book. The books are great, by the way. For me it's the essence of literature, this is what it should be all about.

Jeg ser meget annet også inne i meg, når jeg ligger sammenkrøllet under teppet, full av sovepiller og alkohol, mens jeg kjenner den milde varmen i kroppen, og vet at bevisstheten ikke lenger er av piggtråd og smerte. Jeg ser meg selv som barn, da jeg drakk vin for første gang og visste at dette, det var min drikk... at den hjalp... lindret... at den var levende vann... tryllevann... Da jeg var eldre, ti år gammel, drakk jeg opp et helt vinanker, mens mine foreldre var bortreist. Jeg hadde mine første hallusinasjoner da; jeg så en løve sitte i min fars lenestol, en stor, gul og prektig løve. Og ved siden av den satt en ung mann i blå skjorte og grå bukser. Stolsetet bøyet seg under vekten av løven. Jeg følte ingen angst hverken for dyret eller for mennesket. Det var tvert imot slik at min vanlige angst var borte, og blodet rant ikke langs vinduspostene og ned på gulvet, og alt var mykt og varmt og stille. Luften mellom gutten og løven og meg var full av blomster og ranker, og når jeg la meg om nettene alene og full, da var jeg ikke redd for mørket, og hylingen fra kattene ute i de våte høstnettene trodde jeg ikke lenger kom fra barn som ble pint. Jeg la meg som nu, med varme og likegladhet i kroppen, med det indre fylt av gode bilder, jeg trakk føttene opp under meg, slik som nu – i fosterstilling – og flettet armene om hverandre, med hendene under armhulene eller i skrittet, og alt var mykhet og mørke og alt var godt, men jeg visste at oppvåkningen kunne bli ond, hvis jeg ikke satte en krukke med avtappet vin ved siden av sengen. Jeg gikk ikke på skole, og jeg ga satan i alle kameratene jeg var redd for og i lærerne som jeg hatet. Jeg drakk av vinen med en gang jeg våknet, og alt var godt.

Hva som skjedde, vet jeg ikke. Men etterpå kom det en tid av den vanlige sorten, hvor mørket var vendt tilbake og hvor skolebøkene var klistret sammen av blod, hvor jeg gråt om natten og drømte at jeg ble jaget ut på bryggen av pøbelen og kastet i oet svarte vannet, som drev av kordonger og fiskekadavere og slim. Det hjalp ikke å holde hendene i skrittet eller under armhulene; kattene i den kalde, svarte haven var ikke lenger katter, men lemlestede bam som gråt... allikevel gikk det forbi, da jeg igjen kom over et større lager med alkohol; jeg blomstret opp og levet igjen som et vanlig bam. Bare da det tok slutt, opplevet jeg noe nytt: for første gang drakk jeg opp min fars barbervann, og han skjønte ikke hvorfor det var blitt borte.

1 Month Until St. Petersburg.

2010-08-10T09:53:00.000+02:00

This summer hasn't really been my most productive one. I am slowly getting back into some sort of routine, and that will soon be disrupted again as I leave this country for three months. I am finally going to Russia for a longer period of time, but I'm too much of a worrying type to be able to enjoy the thought of it before I know all the practical details are sorted out (we still don't know exactly where we are going to live, we haven't paid the fees, and so on...) I have read the only course book we have that is not all about grammar, Мы похожи, но мы разные (I'm not entirely sure that's the title of the entire book, it may just be the first chapter), so I do feel like I have done at least something. Fortunately, I found the book extremely easy to read and I finished it very quickly. I have added all the unknown words I could find to Anki, so I should know them all before I even leave.

After having thought about it for quite some time, I did finally start rereading The Secret History by Donna Tartt, and I'm loving it just as much as I did the first time, eight or so years ago. I am a bit puzzled as to how so many language enthusiasts have managed to miss this book. Seriously, it should be a rather natural book to read for anyone who is overly interested in some language. When I read a really good book I always want to read more, and even though I want to read more Russian before I leave, I also have some very interesting books on Russia and I would really have liked to read at least one of them before leaving. Naturally, this doesn't make it any easier to squeeze in any German and Hungarian, especially since I have a final essay to write for my women's history class as well.

And I think Yandex fixed that problem dealing with automatically starting to type in the search field after a search! :D

Yandex, WTF?

2010-07-01T21:21:00.005+02:00

I've been wanting to write this post for a couple of days now, but I've never gotten around to doing it. Sometime ago, Yandex all of a sudden became a little bit prettier, and way more useless. Yandex used to be my absolute favorite Russian online dictionary, it was more or less perfect. The only thing it lacked was accent marks, but you can find those by clicking the middle box in the translation field, instead of the box to the right (I no longer remember what that box said). Now I have a couple of things to complain about though.

1) By changing from "только перевод" to "только энциклопедии" when doing your search, you can sometimes get accent marks, if there happens to be one in one of the articles that you get as results for your search, but that is not always the case. Actually, I've only managed to find accent marks for a couple of words... for a Russian dictionary, this is very bad. (Can you somehow find stress marks on Rambler?) You need to be able to see stress changes from singular to plural, stress patterns in the past tense, irregular stress patterns for short form adjectives, and so on... and this used to be possible on Yandex.

2) I really have the impression that with the older version, you could just start typing after you had made your search, whereas you now have to click the search field again in order to be able to type. The only positive thing is that the entire word is marked as soon as you click the typing field, but it still makes for way too much clicking.

These are small things, but incredibly important if you want to get anywhere with Russian.

Are there any other good Russian dictionaries that provide plenty of examples as well as a user-friendly interface? I absolutely need a dictionary that will auto-complete as I type, that's the number one criterium, and at least that is still working on Yandex...

The other Russian dictionaries I use are The Russian Dictionary Tree and Multitran, but none of them are good enough. Oh, and this one, which is excellent for all the details.

Happy reading days.

2010-06-30T19:34:00.009+02:00

You are supposed to read in the summer, aren't you? I have recently finished three books: La vie devant soi by Romain Gary, Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut and Frihetens øyeblikk by Jens Bjørneboe (part one of the trilogy). I recommend all three. The French book is very sweet (see quotes from it in this post), and I really enjoyed it all the way through. It's a lovely book about the "difficult variant" of life seen from the eyes of a child. When he finds out that he isn't really that young, he accordingly starts viewing things differently, just because, and throughout the book you get these wise little insights about just sucking it up and accepting things as they are. When you are used to living in a certain way, you don't perceive yourself as a victim even though others may do so, and I think you should be rather careful about patronizing other people just because you wouldn't be able to handle what they handle daily.

Cat's cradle is a rather absurd book, an insane story about the end of the world, or about two ends of the world. I really like how Vonnegut has just abandoned all rules of probability of such things and has gone ahead and written something that is truly fiction, where anything is allowed. It's a really quick read, and very amusing, and I guess a class on literature could analyze this book to bits. I'm rather curious about Vonnegut's view on religion, because this could be seen as a satire on religion, illustrating how random they are, and how weak human beings are. I guess it could be many things though. I won't speculate any further.

"One of the oldest games there is, cat’s cradle. Even the Eskimos know it.”
“You don’t say.”
“For maybe a hundred thousand years or more, grownups have been waving tangles of string in their children’s faces. “
“Um.”
Newt remained curled in the chair. He held out his painty hands as though a cat’s cradle were strung between them. “No wonder kids grow up crazy. A cat’s cradle is nothing but a bunch of X’s between somebody’s hands, and little kids look and look апd look at all those X’s …”
“And?”
“No damn cat, and no damn cradle.”

I also wanted to provide those who understand any Scandinavian language with an extract from Frihetens Øyeblikk. The book is rather hard to describe, but it's kind of the autobiography of a man who is writing... the history of man, seen in a different light. He keeps a "protocol" (on everything) when he is sober enough to know what he is doing while traveling around the world (or Europe) - he sees things and he notes things down. The book is mostly just bits and pieces of his experience of the world, of his alcoholism, of the people he meets, of the stories he hears and in general bits and pieces of the awful nature of men. This extract is from the beginning of the book, and I find it absolutely excellent. It really illustrates the rest of the book.

---

Folket her i dalen kan neppe sies å være oppfylt av Den Hellige Ånd. Under synet av de umåtelige fjelltoppene og de evige snebreene har de ikke vokset til storhet. De tenker ikke vidsynte og klare tanker. Folket her, i landsbyene, i dalen eller nede på vertshuset hvor jeg vanker og drikker mine daglige glemselens glass,- det er et folk uten sang, uten folklore, musikk, dans. De har sine kapeller, men ingen religion. Samtidig er de på sin måte skarpsindige, nesten intelligente. De er listige. De bor i sin dal, og de har fjellene og evigheten omkring seg. Av og til tenker de. Man kan se det på øynene deres. Da regner de. De legger sammen eller subtraherer i hodet. De aller listigste multipliserer eller kan til og med dividere. Folket her er sant å si – ja, for å si sannheten: på sett og vis, delvis, på sin måte, og til en viss grad, temmelig lemurisk.
Når de leser, da er det ikke Kabbala eller Vedaene eller salmer de studerer. De leser sine bankbøker. Eller til nød sine lover, - for å vite hva de kan tillate seg mot sin nabo. Alle er i strid med alle, men allikevel holder de på en underlig måte sammen. Det er et lemurisk samhold. De har frembragt dommere og til og med leger. For ikke å nevne overingeniører. Men de hviler ikke ut ved å lese Dante.

Som sagt har de ingen folklore.

Allikevel – de er med på å opprettholde verdens likevekt og be- stand. De er en flokk små, lodne bjørner.

Det finnes absolutt ingen uskyld i dem. De er istand til å gjøre hva som helst mot et medmenneske. Samtidig er de veldige skiløpere, og om vinteren lar de seg trekke oppfor fjellsidene med stålwirer, høyt opp, - derpå sklir de nedfor fjellsidene helt til bunnen av dalen. Dette gjør de om igjen og om igjen. De holder på i uker og måneder – opp og ned – opp og ned. Og de har sin glede av det, men de er ikke glade.

---

I also thought I should provide a quote from the German book I'm reading, Feuchtgebiete by Charlotte Roche, just to illustrate the difference in genre.

Ich würde mit jedem Idioten ins Bett gehen, damit ich nicht alleine im Bett sein oder sogar eine ganze lange Nacht alleine schlafen muss. Jeder ist besser als keiner.

Women and literature.

2010-06-16T17:09:00.002+02:00

In discussions with people about literature, I have often encountered the question, or the remark followed by a question, that women have played a very small role in world literature, and why is this? There is often an implication of women's lack of literary quality or talent. We needn't even mention the fact that differences in education and upbringing are extremely influential here (oddly enough, most people I have spoken to seem to have very little knowledge about such matters in the past), we can just jump to the forgotten women. The number of productive women was naturally much smaller than that of productive men since most women were busy giving birth to children and raising those children, but those women that did actually produce something are often not even mentioned. Even I haven't heard about many of the women I am now reading about for my summer class in Women's History, which perhaps stresses the importance of this branch of history (which is often questioned and made out to be irrelevant and uninteresting).

Reading the books I am supposed to read, listening to the lectures from the University, I have all of a sudden been seized by the desire to learn Latin! Latin has never before interested me, but I would very much enjoy being able to read texts from the middle ages written by women who were successful enough to actually be remembered up until this day, even though they may often be neglected, but that is another matter. I did not know for example, that the nun Hrotsvitha was the one who reintroduced the drama in the West in the 10th century, and that she didn't only write one play, but that actually three books have been preserved to this day. I had no idea that she was also the one who reintroduced the Faust myth!

Another interesting woman was Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179), another nun (back in those days, being a nun was a good alternative to getting married, since you could then educate yourself and actually become someone, but this was made more and more difficult from the ninth century onwards when misogyny started kicking in, and up until this point, there were several very important women that helped build up Christianity) wrote the world's first opera, as well as numerous plays, but also books on medicine, zoology, botany, geology, all in all 14 works that belonged to the most important scientific writings of the middle age.

A woman that is sometimes given the role of having written the world's first novel is a Japanese noblewoman, the author of The Tale of Genji, Murasaki Shikibu (early 11th century). This lady is not part of my class it seems like, at least not yet, and that may have something to do with Eurocentrism...

Troubadours could also be mentioned, because there were actually quite a number of female ones. All in all, approximately 400 troubadours are known today (by name that is), and among those there is for example Marie de France, the Countess of Dia, Lombarda, Castelloza and Bieris of Romans, etc, (and a bunch of nameless women). While studying French, we went through troubadours, but the only female name that sounds familiar to me is Marie de France. As one of my books point out, the female troubadours never wrote anything about man's bravery in honor of ladies, which was otherwise a popular theme. Their depictions of love is considered to be more realistic and sensual, even though in many aspects their works are similar to their male colleagues' works. I was trying to find an English version of a poem from my book, the name of it should be "Alais, Iselda and Carenza", but I wasn't very successful. I wanted to share it because I found it rather amusing, but there is probably little point in sharing it in Swedish... However, in searching for it, I found this page which may be of interest to anyone interested in female troubadours. I am intent on reading it clear when I have finished the things I actually have to read for my class. It's in French.

Most people probably recognize the name Christine de Pizan (1365-1434), who made a living out of writing and who was the only person who wrote about Joan of Arc at that time, besides from her writings the only things that are preserved about Joan are protocols from the trials. Christine also instigated a debate about women that would last for 200 years, la Querelle des Femmes.

What I am also learning, and which is very interesting, is that the Renaissance isn't necessarily a positive period of time in all aspects. From a male perspective, it is, but for women it generally meant reduced freedom and being dumbed down, and we mustn't forget the witch hunts (in which 40,000 to 100,000 women were executed, at least according to Wikipedia), which could either be said to belong in the middle ages, or in the Renaissance. The "Hammer of witches" was written in 1487 by two monks from the Dominican Inquisition, and following this any woman who did not meekly sit by and act chastely could be considered by witch. I'm thinking that this is no point in time when you choose to raise your voice as a woman (even though Christine de Pizan actually did this earlier, protesting that if woman was as vile as she was made out to be by some of the men of the church, then why on earth would God have made her?). The Reformation and counterreformation weren't either all that positive for women.

To sum things up, we could go back even to the time before Christianity and nuns, and remember Sapho, who wrote a large number of poems and who was actually famous in her own time (she lived around 650 B.C., and 300 living conditions for women in the antique world started getting more restrictive). Not Sapho is actually one of those women who are mentioned today, so I won't say anything more about her.

I better stop now, but there are many more individuals that could be mentioned. And I find all of this very fascinating! If women had nothing to do in literature in earlier times, then why do they constantly pop up as the instigators of this and that genre?

Russian blogs. Blogs in Russian.

2010-06-11T16:20:00.001+02:00

Every time people mention how they have increased the amount of foreign language input they get from their blogs (the ones they read that is) I always think that, hey, that's a great idea, but I never do anything about it. Because looking for blogs can be tiresome and I try to avoid browsing as much as possible. However, there is The Forum, where there are people who can recommend things. I finally decided to add some Russian blogs to my blog roll, so I asked for some recommendations from the fellow language enthusiasts on the forum. Lindley recommended some Russian blogs, and through them I found some others. All of a sudden I'm reading much more Russian, and I'm writing a little bit more as well since the blogs are very interesting and I often have something to say on them :-) I have posted these links on the forum as well, they (and other links) can be found here, but I thought I would crosspost it on the blog as well.

http://lingvomania.info/ - I don't think this blog is about any language in particular, and I haven't read that many old posts yet, but it looks very good!

http://amikeco.ru/ - this blog seems to deal with Esperanto, but also with language related things in general, and it seems to be updated very regularly. It also looks very interesting.

http://www.lingvotutor.ru/ - quite a lot about English!

I can't remember how I found this blog, but I find it amusing:

http://www.la-ja-femme.ru/ - "a blog for women, and for men who understand them" - a blog with lots of short articles about... just about anything related to beauty, health and so on.

And I gladly accept recommendations for more blogs! (As long as it's not about English.)

Since it's a rarity.

2010-06-10T19:00:00.001+02:00

Swedish music in Swedish, that is. This is not a new artist (Lars Winnerbäck, here together with Miss Li), but for some reason I have never listened to him until now.

Hungarian resources.

2010-06-09T11:53:00.010+02:00

This here is mostly a motivational post for myself (if there is such a thing as a book fetishist, I'm one of them) since I don't think very many of the people who read my blog are interested in Hungarian. It's a resource post and I will discuss the materials have for Hungarian; what books are use and what books I don't use. It may be of general interest as well, even if you are not interested in Hungarian.

Let's start with vocabulary. I visited Hungary, or Budapest that is, in the summer of 2008, and before that I had never really thought about studying Hungarian. It kind of felt like too much of an opportunity to miss to not buy materials while I was there though, and once having bought these books, I just had to start studying it. I bought the dictionaries, the big ones and a small one (and then before leaving Budapest, the friend of my boyfriend, who was studying medicine in Budapest, gave me the "Say It in Hungarian" and another mini dictionary). I also bought the flashcards and the dictionary with pictures, but I haven't used these much. I used the flashcards in the beginning, but then I switched to using Anki.

Of course, you need some grammar! I only bought the PONS books in Hungary, and oh how I regret not buying a verb book with full declension of verbs. It would really be useful to have a "500 Hungarian verbs" kind of book. There is the site HVC, but in order to use that one, you have to be sure you are using the correct verb stem. I got my Assimil from a friend in France, and I think I did 40 or 60 or so (no idea really :P) lessons in it, but the book kind of annoyed me sometimes (it's quite misogynic) and as usual, I got bored with it... right now I'm using an all Hungarian book called Lépésenként magyarul, which I only have as a PDF. I prefer this book, but I use it rather slowly, since I work with many other things besides workbooks.

I just got my blue Hungarian grammar book the other day, and I really love it. I am going to index it completely and read it from page 1... to 300 and something. I have a big fat book of Russian grammar as well, but it has never really tempted me that much to lay down in bed and flip through it. Just no fun, and that grammar book is... actually rather boring. I really like this Routledge one though, I think it's very nicely made and it's pleasant to read.

The book "Hungarian verbs and essentials of grammar" was just a book I bought because it was cheap, and because I couldn't find anything else that seemed to deal with verbs specifically. It's really rather useless though, it's way too shallow. It could be useful as just a quick reference, but if you're going to buy a book anyway, go for the blue one.

By the way, I really like how it says on the PONS books "comprehensive and user friendly" and "easy" while the guy on the cover is hiding on every book :D I haven't used the noun-declension tables book yet, it's actually rather intimidating and so far I have managed without it. I figure it may become useful when I get better at Hungarian though.

I am dreaming of getting the book Gyakorló magyar because it has exercises in it (that kind of stuff is difficult to find for Hungarian), and overall I like the site Magyaróra, which is where it comes from. With a bit of luck, my colleague will be able to find it when he goes to Budapest in a couple of weeks.

Naturally, I had to buy some literature while in Hungary! Since I didn't know anything at all about Hungarian literature back then, I bought stuff that I recognized, translations of works I had previously read. That's why there is some Jane Austen and Emily Brontë in there :-) I also bought the Montgomery book, because I thought it would be a nice steppingstone between children's literature and full-grown adult literature, but actually it's very difficult. I am also reading Jane Eyre in Hungarian, but for that one I am cheating. I only have it as a text document, but fortunately, it's a dual language text, Hungarian and English. I'm not sure how much I have read so far, but quite a couple of pages and I really like it, plus I already know the story. I have started reading Ciróka and Anne az élet iskolájaban, but as I mentioned, the second one is very difficult. Én es a fiam is actually a Swedish book that I found in the online catalog of a secondhand bookshop in my hometown. I sent my mother there to buy it, and then she sent it to me. The author, Sara Lidman, is from the same place as my grandmother (in the depths of Lapland), and she writes rather weird books sometimes. Wrote. She's dead now.

Buying books in Hungary was rather funny, because everything was so cheap. When I came to pay, the cashier seemed quite embarrassed to tell me the total sum and was a bit anxious about my bank card and if it would work out and so on. Little did she know that what I paid for all of the books was more or less the equal of what I would have paid for the dictionaries alone in Norway!

Besides from these books, I also use a couple of other resources. I haven't used the FSI easy reader in a long time now, but it's a very good resource and the text are actually very good. I am also going to try to read more news articles now, in order to acquire some "useful" vocabulary. Lang-8 is, as usual, perhaps my most important resource, together with Anki.

So that's it. I have probably forgotten about something, I usually do, but I do like having an overview of the stuff I have, or else I end up never using it because the books just disappear among the several hundreds I have in my bookshelves. Now, I'm going to get back to lesson six of Lépésenként magyarul.

Ça a l'air très bien.

2010-06-08T21:29:00.002+02:00

Même si je lis déjà trois ou quatre livres, j'ai commencé un nouveau aujourd'hui. Il me fallait quelque chose des léger, littéralement quelque chose qui ne pesait pas très lourd parce que je voulais le lire dans la baignoire. Donc j'ai choisi un petit livre de poche que j'ai acheté en France il y a cinq ans, La Vie Devant Soi de Romain Gary (un russe qui est venu en France à l'âge de 14 ans en 1914). J'en suis déjà très enchantée ! C'est un livre marrant, et déjà sur les premières pages, j'ai trouvé tout cela :

(Le livre commence avec l'histoire d'un enfant de six ou sept ans, et la langue reflète cela. Il vit chez Madame Rosa avec six autres enfants, pour la plupart des enfants de prostituées.)

Je devais avoir trois ans quand j'ai vu Madame Rosa pour la première fois. Avant, on n'a pas de mémoire et on vit dans l'ignorance. J'ai cessé d'ignorer à l'âge de trois ou quatre ans et parfois ça me manque.

...

Monsieur Hamil a de beaux yeux qui font du bien autour de lui. Il était déjà très vieux quand je l'ai connu et depuis il n'a fait que vieillir.

...

Pendant longtemps, je n'ai pas su que j'étais arabe parce que personne ne m'insultait. On me l'а seulement appris à l'école.

...

— Tu sais ce que c'est, une putain ?
— C'est des personnes qui se défendent avec leur cul.
— Je me demande où tu as appris des horreurs pareilles, mais il y a beaucoup de vérité dans ce que tu dis.
— Vous aussi, vous vous êtes défendue avec votre cul. Madame Rosa, quand vous étiez jeune et belle ?
Elle a souri, ça lui faisait plaisir d'entendre qu'elle avait été jeune et belle.

...

Il y avait sur le trottoir d'en face un môme qui avait un ballon et qui m'avait dit que sa mère venait toujours quand il avait mal au ventre. J'ai eu n al au ventre mais ça n'a rien donné et ensuite j'ai eu des convulsions, pour rien aussi. J'ai même chié partout dans l'appartement pour plus de remarque. Rien. Ma mère n'est pas venue et Madame Rosa m'a traité de cul d'Arabe pour la première fois, car elle n'était pas française. Je lui hurlais que je voulais voir ma mère et pendant des semaines j'ai continué à chier partout pour me venger. Madame Rosa a fini par me dire que si je continuais c'était l'Assistance publique et là j'ai eu peur, parce que l'Assistance publique c'est la première chose qu'on apprend aux enfants. J'ai continué à chier pour le principe mais ce n'était pas une vie. On était alors sept enfants de putes en pension chez Madame Rosa et ils se sont tous mis à chier à qui mieux mieux car il n'y a rien de plus conformiste que les mômes et il y avait tant de caca partout que je passais inaperçu là-dedans.

...

Sinon, je suis en train de lire un livre norvégien, un genre de de livre-culte qui a rencontré des problèmes quand il (en fait c'est une trilogie, mais bon...) est sorti dans les années 60. La trilogie s'appelle « L'Histoire De La Bestialité » (auteur: Jens Bjørneboe) et jusque-là, ça parle de la nature des « petits ours », c'est-à-dire des humains, et c'est pas beau ! Par contre, c'est plutôt génial ;)

Reprise.

2010-06-07T18:14:00.004+02:00

The other day I saw a movie that I liked very much on Swedish television. It was the Norwegian movie "Reprise", and unfortunately I missed the beginning. It's a movie about a group of young, intellectual men, and their attempts at writing literature and living in general. One of them (who could perhaps be called the main main character, out of two) writes a book that gets published and is declared a genius, but then meets a girl, and when falling in love with her, his mental breakdown is triggered. This is kind of the background setting for the development of the other main character as well, who strives to get published and still be supportive of his friend.

I was very impressed with this movie. It's delightfully made, the actors are great and the excellent narrative technique even adds a bit humor every once in a while, even though this is a rather sad movie. Still, it's not a depressing one, and it's actually hard to actually say what kind of movie it is. I found it to be uplifting and inspiring, but I suspect not everyone would share that opinion.

One of the characters I especially liked was the very serious and super intellectual Hitler Jugend looking Lars (who is later in the movie nicknamed "Porn-Lars", which is just incredibly perfect since it clashes completely with the nature of his character) who thinks that women are unable of intellectual achievements, that they are just creatures that can be filled up with knowledge by men, but can never think anything up on their own. His comment about how women in the eastern part of Oslo (the poorer part where all the immigrants live, and kind of where I live as well) at least acknowledge their inferiority and don't pretend to participate in the conversations of the "grown-ups" is excellent.

Here is an article about the movie (in Norwegian) and a scene from it.

Everyone with an interest in "intellectual" movies, that is slow ones without any extreme drama or action, should definitely watch this one. It kind of made me think of a book that I (along with everyone who has ever read it I guess) am a huge fan of: The Secret History by Donna Tartt. Are there any other books or movies that deal with groups of intellectual (and sometimes decadent) young people?

The Unfolding of Language.

2010-06-03T22:12:00.003+02:00

I finished reading this book yesterday, and I'm always happy to add another language related book to my list of finished books. Most of them end up in a pile, waiting patiently while I read what's on the curriculum for whatever class I'm taking :-) When people recommend books to me, I tend to read them somewhat quicker though.

I very much enjoyed this book, but I have a couple of complaints to make.

The book mainly deals with different structures in languages and tries to explain how they could have come about. For example, where does the Arabic verb stem system come from? Why are small, isolated languages so incredibly complex? Why do all languages seem to have been more perfect in the past? And so on. Very interesting questions, and the book is very nicely written, with amusing examples. However, at the end there are a couple of appendixes that just seems to be stuff that wouldn't fit in the normal chapters, and I think it makes the book feel a bit unstructured. I also didn't feel like it really had an end. It just ended, but it could probably have gone forever, since he could have continued explaining similar things for hundreds of pages.

What is worse though, is that all of a sudden in the book there is a very long discussion between a linguist (I think) and a moron. The linguist tries to explain how words can shift from one category to another (like from noun to preposition) and the moron refuses to understand. I just couldn't wait until that discussion was over, only to discover it was taken up again in one of the appendixes. It really annoyed me, and it kind of made my impression of the book a bit more negative than necessary.

However, I do recommend it to anyone interested in languages! It's written for people without any extensive linguistic expertise, so it's also the kind of book you can bring to the beach. If you go to the beach. I personally prefer my balcony.

The end is in sight.

2010-05-31T12:32:00.002+02:00

Next Friday, all my exams will be over and I will finally be able to concentrate on something else than Russian grammar. I have now got a couple of German grammar books that I am going to look through, and I also ordered the Routledge Hungarian grammar which I hope will arrive after my exams. I know this book is good, because I already have it as a PDF, and I intend to do some intensive Hungarian study this summer. I have never been able to remember any Hungarian grammar, so I think I'm going to try to apply some of my Russian grammar assiduity to Hungarian. I will also squeeze in some German, of course.

For German I discovered something that I hope will be useful during the summer. I have already written about it on the forum. I was browsing http://www.lingvotutor.ru/, a very nicely structured Russian blog/site about languages, but which unfortunately for me deals very much with English. I guess someone studying Russian could also use it though, because there are many word lists from English works of literature, and of course there are Russian translations for the words (without stress though, unfortunately). The author of the blog has written a rather extensive post about the site WordSteps. It's a site, or a community, for learning words! There aren't that many languages, but for those that do exist there are already premade word lists, which is excellent for me because then I don't have to type, and of course you can make your own lists as well. You can go through different exercises for each word list, and since your statistics are always saved, you can see how many words you have learned, how many percentages you get right, and so on. The interface is nice and friendly, and I think I could spend quite a lot of time just clicking away at this site. I think it's a good alternative for those who don't want to sit with Anki or word lists, and would like to have something visual in order to learn words. Also, you can log in from anywhere, so that is also a plus :-)

If you sign up, add me, I'm tricours as always.

Syttende mai.

2010-05-19T14:43:00.017+02:00

The other day was the 17th of May, which in Norway is a serious business. It's the Norwegian National Day or Constitution Day and it's celebrated rather violently compared to many other countries. This is just going to be a photo post, showing the national costumes Norwegians wear on this day. In general, people are rather happy if it's not too hot on the 17th of May since a big part of them walk around in many layers of wool. These costumes cost thousands of euros and each region has its own costume.

For those who party on this day, the festivities start at like 10 in the morning. The 18th of May is an ordinary working day, so it's a good idea to already be hung over by the evening, with the hope of having recovered in the morning.

There are plenty of flags on the 17th of May.

(I was trying to take a photo the girl with the bonnet in the background...)

More beer.

2010-05-12T17:17:00.004+02:00

Speaking of beer, I just had to share some of Sweden's finest beer commercials. This is a series of humorous commercials for Norrlands Guld, "the gold of Norrland" (Norr = north, land = land, the northern parts of Sweden, which is where I'm from). The slogan is "when you want to be yourself for a while".

Many of these are pretty understandable even if you don't understand Swedish.

The first, and unforgettable one:

Making fun of Stockholm and people from Stockholm.

One that makes fun of the "scho", which in Norrländska means "yes". Ingressive speech, I once wrote a post about it.

Dating in Norrland :D

This Spendrups commercial is also excellent, but you do have to understand Swedish in order to fully enjoy it, and it features one of Sweden's best comedians, who is convinced his fulöl (uglybeer) is better than Spendrups.

Sörözni.

2010-05-12T16:57:00.005+02:00

I have a couple (or 10) of these in the fridge. Happiness.

There is this one verb that I always forget to use in Hungarian, even though it's absolutely brilliant and should be used all the time. I tend to write "blablabla sört inni" (literally "beer to drink") and then someone corrects that to "sörözni". And how cool is that? A verb that actually means "to drink beer" (even though I'm not 100% certain I understand the nuances of this word). I was thinking a bit about how this would turn out in other languages. In Swedish I guess we would arrive at "öla" (öl being beer), which at least to me sounds very funny. Conjugated in the first person that would be "jag ölar". It's so ugly I think I must start using it. We do have a specific verb that is used together with drinking alcohol, when you're kind of sitting around drinking something, and that's "pimpla", which is also the word for "ice fishing". I like it though - "Pimpla öl". Still, it's composed of two words.

In English it would be... to beer? I beer. Hmm, that doesn't really work out that well, does it? French, bièrer - je bière. Same problem there! Obviously, the productive patterns of those two languages aren't always that practical.

I think I'm going to öla tonight, because tomorrow is a day off. The summer, I hope I will be doing lots of ölning. I ölade a bit yesterday, so I know that the öl I have is very tasty.

Do you know of any other language that has a particular verb for beer drinking?

Russian reading group.

2010-05-10T21:52:00.001+02:00

Some time ago, I tried to start a Russian reading group on the languagelearners forum. The idea was that we would read some shorter text together and research some stuff around the text (author, historical context and so on), making every person write something about it. Usually when you have these reading groups, people don't really know what to say, so I thought that giving it some structure might be a good idea. Not very much happened, no one even replied. Our forum really lacks enthusiastic learners of Russian (and of French, there is way too little activity in the French room), and since I'm not really sure many such people actually read my blog, I don't think this post will really help much either. But one can always try, so this is a general call to anyone learning any language to go join the forum and contribute to the different language corners. The language journals and ABC logs are also very interesting and motivational to read.

However, is it only me or does it really seem like people learning for example Japanese or Chinese are much more active and creative? why do not learners of Russian have that energy?

Eerie chaos.

2010-04-25T12:23:00.002+02:00

Say what you want about Norway and Norwegians, but they do make some good music! One artist that has recently (although I'm guessing she's been around for a while!) been more or less discovered by the entire country is Susanne Sundfør. She got some excellent reviews in the newspapers, and I really have a hard time imagining anyone not noticing her. In Norway, that is. And since almost all the people I know are from outside of Norway (all the stereotypes you've heard about Norwegians being hard to get to know are 100% true), I thought I'd write a little bit about her.

Sundfør makes music that is quite simply magic. I have finally been able to listen to her entire album (the 2nd one, The Brothel) since I got access to the Norwegian Spotify, Wimp (but she is on Spotify as well), and it is in no way disappointing after having heard the title track, the Brothel. I really thought it would be hard for her to live up to such a song, but she actually does it.

In a couple of words, Sundfør's music is melodic, violent, calm, energetic, chaotic creepy and/or eerie. She uses her voice as a true instrument, not just as a tool for adding words to music, and this is one of the very few albums I have a hard time listening to as background music. I just have to listen to it.

My favorite songs are The Brothel, It's All Gone Tomorrow and Father Father (which is delightfully and unsettlingly similar to church music).

This is what music should be like.

()

Paris photo post.

2010-04-23T10:34:00.023+02:00

(All photos are Sasha's, because I left for Paris with a camera without a memory card. I would like to point out that the lack of memory card was in no way my fault.)

Now then, Paris. Paris is a beautiful city, as is well known to everyone who has visited it. I did visit Paris once when it was gray and rainy, and that time I was not very impressed, but this time our first day in Paris was filled with sunshine, and how can that not be the start of a great mini vacation? I enjoy both extravagant architecture and old streets, as well as bombastic nature scenes. In Oslo I get neither, so it felt very refreshing to visit a truly big city again, with cathedrals, castles that actually look like castles, and all that.

On our way, after a somewhat dramatic start.

There are so many things to do in Paris that I have actually managed to go there four times without visiting Le Louvre or Le musée d'Orsay. But now I've been to both! The second one is actually more interesting, but here is perhaps the ugliest painting (or motive, poor woman) I could find in the Louvre (We were a bit surprised at people taking photos in there, so I thought we should take a photo of this thing. Just because it's ugly).

Lots of people at that place.

Two Russian girls took photos of us outside the Louvre.

We naturally got lost quite a couple of times. Usually at night. Luckily, the first time we were not that very far away from the Tour d'Eiffel, and I don't think you can say that you're lost as long as you can actually see that thing. Right?

During previous visits to Paris, I thought I had been to the flea market at Porte de Clingancourt. But I hadn't. I was always surprised that it was so small, but this time we had some printed instructions that mentioned going past smaller flea market in order to get to the big one. The big one was kind of creepy, and everything was very expensive.

Before going to the Musée d'Orsay, we went to a café that actually served decent coffee. The garcon was clearly amused by us wanting to pay at the wrong moment and returning our empty cups to the counter when we left. Apparently we were doing his job ;) It was a very cozy place, and I really like this picture Sasha took in our little "booth".

A rather fancy cappuccino and the money the garçon didn't want until we left.

The first time I saw these little "bookshops" on the Seine was when I was in Paris for just one day three or so years ago. My friend, who was living in Paris, showed me around Le quartier latin, his fancy school/Palace, a very nice park and these lovely things. We actually found some Russian books this time, but they were very expensive so I didn't buy anything. I bought "Les Russes" here though, and it cost 2,5 euros.

The other side of the river and the middle, from a bridge.

We didn't really do a whole lot of eating in Paris, mostly because we were always walking somewhere. And when we did eat, we didn't always choose the classiest places! The baguettes were very good though, especially after like 10 hours without food.

Russia was rather present in Paris.

Sasha thought I was so colorful she just had to take a photo of me.

Paris Metro. I like it, it's very easy to navigate. But hard to find!

We spent a whole lot of time in shops, but I think that's okay since it's Paris. You can't go to Paris without doing some shopping, especially since it's so cheap for us.
That's all for this time, folks!

Such beauties.

2010-04-19T20:28:00.004+02:00

The balance in the universe was today re-established as I bought three books. It's been quite a while since I last bought books, and shamefully enough I only bought one in France. But then I have also been too absent-minded lately to read, so I feel a bit stupid about buying books. Anyway, they are probably very good ones.

The quarrelsome seal that was eyeing a disenchanted but rather attractive fish that was jumping in and out of the icy water has picked a fight with a phlegmatic walrus that was innocently passing by.

Yes, I have already started reading "The Unfolding of Language", since it was recommended to me, and it has made me chuckle quite a couple of times, so I'm well pleased. I was actually just going into the book store in order to pass some time and to have a look at this book that I was thinking about buying, and then I saw that there was a "three for the price of two" sticker on it, and I had a look around to see if there was any other books that seemed highly interesting. When my eyes fell on Orlando Figes' book I just started looking for a third one in order to justify buying them. I have been reading, and very much enjoying, Figes' "A Cultural History of Russia" (I haven't actually finished it yet but it's never boring) so I am looking forward to reading his book about private life in Stalin's Russia.

Finally, the third book had "for people interested in language, this is a must" written on the back of it, and I recognized the title. Not a very difficult decision.

The book that I did actually buy in Paris (and I'm going to make a photo post about the trip as soon as I get the photos) was this one, and I guess you can see that there is a certain trend in the books I buy...

So not language or literature related. But there's wine in there.

2010-04-04T23:05:00.008+02:00

I have turned into a horrible student. I am not reviewing for anything I should be reviewing for, and I'm not doing much else that's academic either. I'm starting to feel rather horrible actually. I know that holidays are considered to be resting periods for some people, but for me they have always been times of intensified study for some tests or whatnot. Not this time though! I've finished an essay, or rather rewritten it somewhat since it didn't turn out good, read some German and done some Hungarian, and read half of Три Сестры, but that's really a very small amount of work considering how many days off I've had.

I am however rather pleased to be able to say that I have additional interests that take up time. I have tried to very carefully take up crocheting again, but I can only do two or three 15 cm rows a day. Yeah, that scarf is going to take awhile. Another hobby of mine is chocolate making. For the longest time I thought I wouldn't try to get serious with it, because it's just so time consuming and difficult and I've never gone to any chocolate class or anything. I usually cheat by using a specific type of chocolate to make my shells, a type that doesn't need to be tempered. I have not been pleased with the fading shine though, so I want to try my luck at using real Belgian chocolate for the shells as well - and tempering it. Have any of you ever tried tempering chocolate? I tried to do it with white chocolate and a poor thermometer some days ago. It didn't go too well. Hence I am about to spend a certain amount of money ordering chocolate equipment from the UK. Chocolate dippers, a chocolate thermometer, candy wrappers, new moulds (I already have five, but there are so many pretty ones...). Working with chocolate is an art, and I have finally decided to actually try to learn it. I'm not really sure what I'm supposed to do with all the stuff I produce, it's not like I have any plans on starting a candy shop :-)

All of these are filled with various chocolate/nut/almond paste/coffee/nougat fillings.

Notice the Russian chocolate box :-)

Other than that, I've also been creating some jewelry with Sasha, who makes fabulous Fimo earrings and pearl jewelry. I spent Wednesday evening at her place eating delicious sushi, drinking wine and (in a somewhat tipsy state) making these:

I'm horrible at photographing shiny things.This looks very plain, but it takes a certain amount of time to make all those loops that the pearls are attached to (it's all made from wire), and open endless amounts of small rings in order to attach everything. My hands were pretty tired at the end of the evening :/

I used to do some small earrings and such things three years ago, but like many other things in my life, I stopped it when I moved to Norway. Also, back then I wasn't really as obsessive about jewelry as I am now. My 60 or so pairs of earrings do show that I have a certain interest in these things. I'm very much looking forward to making more, but naturally both this and the chocolate business is going to take some considerable time away from my poor languages.

Stepping it up a bit.

2010-03-18T21:05:00.000+01:00

All of a sudden I'm posting more often than once a month. How come? I'm not really sure, but I used to enjoy writing very much. When I stopped being able to actually write and was forced to dictate instead, I guess the pleasure of writing more or less disappeared, because dictating isn't writing. It's completely different. What was supposed to be unspoken, written words is all of a sudden turned into false spoken language, and spoken language is very much different from its written counterpart. So you see, it's a question of two worlds interfering with one another - and I would very much have preferred to keep them separated.

Plus, I don't like things I don't feel good at. Who does really? I have the impression from school that you are supposed to enjoy difficult things ("these exercises will probably be boring for you, they will be too easy" always seemed stupid to me), things that you are no good at, but I always hated physics, and I was crap at it, whereas I loved writing, because I was good at it. Then I grew older but my writing did not evolve with me and now it doesn't feel special in any way anymore. I guess everyone has those things, "I had so much potential when I was a kid, then it all went away".

But that was only part of what I wanted to talk about. I skimmed through some language blogs today, and I realized how much I miss reading them and how much I miss wasting too much time on language forums while thinking I should be studying languages instead. It also made me realize I should be more ambitious with my other studies and about my general culture, and no, all of that isn't really possible to combine, so I don't really know what to do. However, I felt there were two things I wanted to share on this blog. Two very basic things, those kind of things you actually know without really realizing it, and that become very obvious when someone puts it in plain writing.

The first is about READING. Many people seem to be very hesitant about reading in foreign languages. When someone catches me reading a Russian book in class they are always impressed for some reason. Why is it people think reading is so difficult? It's just a text, it's there, it's not going anywhere, you can read it for as long as you like and using whatever tools you have. What is so difficult about that? I think the important thing to realize is that you don't have to read a text in any specific way. It's perfectly okay to switch between strategies, to go from reading something very meticulously to just skimming through it. No one says you have to read an entire book while understanding 100% of the words - that's not the only way to read a book. You can just as well read one page where you make sure you understand all the words, and then read five more making sure you understand what it's about, regardless of how many words you understand. Books are friendly, don't be afraid of them.

Secondly, USAGE. If you never use a language, you will never know when you make mistakes. Apparently Stephen Kaufman said something about this recently, and this kind of surprised me because generally I don't like much of what he says, most likely because I think he looks too smug. Ehem. Anyway, this is absolutely true. While you are reading or listening, you aren't creating anything on your own, you aren't using the language actively, so you don't really realize exactly what you know and what you don't know. And usually, no one corrects your listening or reading unless it's some sort of a test. You may read something and understand it perfectly, but then try to say it yourself and get it all wrong. It's like only reading Russian books without stress marks and then try to speak Russian and realize you can't pronounce anything correctly, because you have always taken for granted that this or that word has that particular stress, whereas as a matter of fact... it doesn't. Or perhaps you never really noticed the difference between ничего and нечего, because when you read it, you read it all like ничего... Those are just small and simple examples. A big and horrifying example would on the other hand be Russian verb aspects. You read and you have no idea you are missing 500 nuances, but you can't really care either. It only becomes a problem when you have to use the damned things yourself.

But what am I doing here? I am supposed to be analyzing 19th-century texts on nationalism.

Paris!

2010-03-17T19:21:00.002+01:00

There is very little language learning activity going on here right now, mainly because I have constantly got some essay to work on for university, or a heap of Russian exercises to do and Russian grammar rules to memorize. However, I am going to France! Not for very long, it's just a prolonged weekend in April, but it will be excellent anyway. I kind of feel like it's my responsibility to visit the countries of my languages every now and then, and France is very very cheap to go to, so it would be stupid to not go. Russia is a whole other deal, and I would feel much more lost in Hungary than in France. This time I'm going to Paris, where I've already been a couple of times, but it's such a big city that I can still go there many times. I'm going there together with Sasha, so it will be a perfect combination of Russian and French!

On the photo above you can see something completely unrelated, notably my latest attempt at Russian cooking, including a mushroom salad with horse radish sour cream, a салат Столичный or Оливье, and chicken soup with buckwheat (not very visible) together with a very fine bottle of Saint-Emilion Grand Gru Château Fombrauge 1997 (not very Russian!) that went straight to our heads.

It's important to not only get lost in the language, right?

Next time, I'm making пельмени. I would just like a good recipe first, one that someone can vouch for, since the last time I made them I wanted to kill the person behind the dough recipe...

Nya perspektiv.

2010-03-13T12:06:00.001+01:00

Snarare Pelle Svanslös då?
från Tjuvlyssnat.se

Dop, Söderhamn
Två barn ~3 står och pratar.

Pojken: Är du en pojke eller en flicka?
Flickan: Jag är en flicka. Men vad är du?
Pojken (funderar): …Jag vet inte riktigt.
Flickan: Men vad heter du då?
Pojken: Jag heter Måns.
Flickan: Men då är du ju en katt!

Oh, Oslo University...

2010-03-11T20:17:00.002+01:00

I desperately want to go to Russia!

Which is why I'm a bit disappointed with my university, where I only get the possibility to go to Russia for three months. I will also have to study with Norwegians only in Russia (at a Norwegian center), with teachers that speak Norwegian but that apparently teach in Russian. How is it fair that the students studying English get to go to English-speaking countries for a year, whereas those who study Russian, which is so much more difficult, only get three months? And why don't we get any practice actually using the language?

Studying Russian in the incredibly grammatical and sterile manner they do here is not a problem for me, since I writes essays on my own accord, have a big vocabulary and can read books, and meet with a Russian speaking person once a week. But if I had had no previous knowledge of Russian, and I only started studying this way, I very much doubt if I would've found it very rewarding. We never write anything of our own, we have never handed in anything written whatsoever, and we only get to speak once a week - that is those who actually show up for those hours. Since they are not obligatory, a lot of people just drop them. Not that the lecturers are obligatory, people still go to them without actually being forced, but for some reason the speaking class seems to be of very little interest to a lot of students. They are the only hours that include some literature!

This really makes me wonder how much Russian stuff the other students do on their own. I really can't imagine that someone who only follows these classes and who doesn't try to improve on his or her own would be able to follow classes in Russian after only one year. Since people still seem to do it, does that mean that the classes that we get in Russia aren't difficult at all? :(

Today as I was browsing through the classes that are offered at Oslo University I got very much tempted by some French classes. However, everything at Oslo University must be difficult and complicated, and I can't choose any free subjects. And if I could, I don't think I would be able to choose those French classes, because they seem to be reserved for people enrolled in French bachelor programs or masters programs. And, certain classes seem to be held once every 4th year... FLEXIBILITY, Norway. It's a virtue.

I'll get to it eventually though. As soon as I am eligible for student funding in this country I'm going to use it to the max, even though staying at this particular university for a decade doesn't feel that very tempting. Meanwhile I want to find some sort of distance class that forces me to go to Stockholm every now and then, just for a change of scenery, but I can't do that either since I'm going to Russia this fall. Bah!

For this summer, I signed up for a distance class on female history and another one in English grammar and translation. (At Swedish universities - distance teaching isn't really a concept in Norway it seems.) I may go crazy and go through with both.

Whose day?

2010-03-08T19:33:00.003+01:00

It seems like everyone is posting about the international Women's Day, so I can't help myself, I have to post as well! But if you want to read something much more interesting, I recommend you go read this 8th of March post.

My favorite Hanne Nabintu Herland is once again in the newspapers, thanks to this occasion. Heading of the article: Today we should turn the TV off and give him a sexual surprise. This time she thinks that Women's Day should be turned into Man Day, and she says that if the journalist called her because she's a woman, then she feels like just hanging up. She wants to be interviewed because she has something interesting to say.

I think we can all agree that the reason the newspaper called her is because she always says things that make a lot of people angry - and a lot of men happy.
(Did you see what I just did there? I separated "men" from "people", something that is usually done when speaking of women! And I even did it unconsciously! Perhaps this is the problem Herland speaks of?)

I never really understand what that woman wants to say when she appears somewhere, so I'll just leave it at that.

International women's Day is kind of like Valentine's Day in this part of the world. It's kind of shameful to celebrate it. It's best for all if you aren't even aware of what day it is. Surely, going "oh? Valentine's Day is today?" is a sign of you being a sensible person and not tricked by the evil forces of capitalism and consumption. Surely, these kinds of days are just about making people spend money (but hello, Christmas?), and on (primarily) women on top of that. Women in Scandinavia get no flowers or anything like that on the eighth of March, and I think many would consider it just a little bit politically incorrect to give them any. Equality and all that; women don't need any flowers because they already have it all. Only in countries where women are not yet as emancipated as in Scandinavia is it okay to give them gifts and to celebrate them.

The only people I've met today who have mentioned this day were... Russian. And I can't help thinking that it's a nice thing. I wouldn't mind at all if International Women's Day was celebrated at least... a bit around here, and if it was not just a reason for the newspapers to write articles about equality or the illusion of equality, which are then attacked by men crying about how feminism has gone too far and about how women should go back to being women.

And speaking about women being women... what does that mean? Does it mean being servile, shy and knowing your place?

Or does it mean trying to look nice, to be feminine? (Because that is kind of looked down on, even by men, as non-intellectual and vain. So are we supposed to do that or not?)

I feel like celebrating today by painting my fingernails pink and doing a facial mask, and by reading a couple more pages of Charlotte Roche's scandalous autobiographical novel about revolting things women definitely shouldn't be writing about, but sadly I don't really have the time for that. I have to be utterly unfeminine and write an essay on the nationstate from an historical perspective, and read some poorly written essays other students have written. Come to think of it though, all of those students are women, so perhaps it isn't unfeminine at all? Did academia turn feminine?

Feeding the Russophilia

2010-03-06T14:47:00.004+01:00

Great news! Søstrene Grene opened a store in Oslo, on Karl Johan. Great store, great stuff, great prices! I just couldn't help buying these two.

On another note, has anyone read Наталия Толстая? I've been reading her collection of short stories entitled Одна forever, and even though I have been enjoying it rather much, I must admit that I'm getting a bit tired of it. Each and every one of the short stories has an air of gloom about it, and the (as I perceive it) somewhat condescending tone of the narrator is ever present. All of her main characters seem to have lost all interest in life and the narrator makes an art out of describing how pointless their existence is (and how lonely). Funnily enough, the author seems to have a certain connection to Sweden, because several of the stories are about Swedish or Sweden; how naïve them Swedes are with their idyllic image of Russia, that mysterious Russia that of course no one can understand (and this seems to be something that only goes for Russia) - certainly no foreigners. And of course, about what health freaks the Swedes are and how unfeminine the women are. There's also a general resentment against men, even though the narrator seems to pity them more than anything else.

Still, it's very good reading, and much more difficult than Dostoyevsky or any of the classics. I just kind of look forward to finishing it...

Very much yes.

2010-02-23T18:25:00.003+01:00

Today I finally got the books I ordered some time ago. Isn't this beautiful? I'm especially impressed by the fact that the Russian book only cost like eight euros. Just for the fun of it, I'm not going to wait until I reach some sort of level in German until I start reading :-)

Il faut voir les choses autrement.

2010-02-20T18:19:00.004+01:00

Comme d'habitude, je suis très occupée par mes études, mais ce n'est rien de nouveau ça, c'est toujours pareil. J'aime bien être occupée et ce n'est donc pas un problème, mais le manque de temps pour mes langues « mineures » m'angoisse. Je déteste la question « depuis combien de temps étudies-tu le hongrois (ou le russe, l'allemand) ? » Comment est-on censé répondre à ça quand on ne peut s'occuper de la langue en question que des temps en temps ? Les gens s'attendent quand même à des résultats quand tu dis "ben... genre depuis deux ans...".

Autour de Noël, je pensais que c'était une très bonne idée de commencer à étudier l'allemand aussi, ce qui n'aide pas avec le hongrois. C'est forcément le hongrois qui va en souffrir. Je prends le temps qui aurait autrement été dédié au hongrois, et je l'utilise pour le nouveau venu. Je ne vais pas piquer le temps du russe, parce que le russe c'est très sérieux maintenant, et si je ne fais pas gaffe, j'aurai une mauvaise note à l'université. Mais j'aime bien l'allemand, je veux bien l'apprendre jusqu'au bout. Niveau compréhension c'est très facile, et je pense que c'est une langue qui pourrait me servir pour mes études. Maintenant que j'étudie une langue à l'université, je n'ai vraiment pas envie d'étudier mes autres langues de la même manière. Je n'ai jamais été très fan de la méthode « apprends le livre de grammaire par coeur ! », et maintenant que je n'ai plus le choix parce que c'est comme ça que l'on est censé apprendre le russe à l'université, je veux vraiment apprendre l'allemand d'une autre manière. En lisant, en écrivant, bref de la manière que j'ai appris le russe par moi-même, et ce qui m'a toujours beaucoup plu . Dans quelques jours, ou peut-être même demain, j'aurai trois nouveaux livres allemands et j'ai l'intention de commencer à les lire le plus vite possible. D'habitude, les autres études (les études facultatives) semblent toujours plus intéressantes quand on est occupé à faire quelque chose d'autre (non-facultatif). Alors, je dois bien profiter de mon manque de temps maintenant!

What's with the trumpets?

2010-02-11T21:39:00.004+01:00

For some reason, I have thing for trumpets. I wasn't really aware of it, until I started noticing that a lot of the songs that I can't stop listening to include trumpets.

Here are my three favorites :-) (Swedish, Russian and Russian)

Do you know of any other good songs with trumpets?

Hungary seems to have a lot to offer.

2010-01-11T12:03:00.003+01:00

Some time ago, my boyfriend received a rather interesting and beneficial offer to join a book club. Upon joining, you could choose a number of books, and one of the books I chose was "The Door" by Magda Szabó. First of all, it cost almost nothing (so I could choose more books), and secondly, it was written by a Hungarian author. Now I am very happy I chose that book, and that I actually got around to reading it since I usually just put the books I buy in my little library, and then they sit there for years and years. Magda Szabó is probably one of my new favorite authors, and I really look forward to reading more of her books, and to finally perhaps read one of them in Hungarian.

This book is really not particularly long, but it's written in a very dense manner, and it took me much more time to read than I had expected. I read the book in Norwegian, but I still had trouble following sometimes. Szabó's sentences are not like most authors' sentences, something that made reading this book a different reading experience. In the beginning, I was a bit annoyed sometimes, but then I think I just got used to it and started to appreciate her intricate manner of writing instead.

The story is rather special. I never read the text on the cover before reading a book, so I had no idea what this one was about. In short, it's the story of a female author who hires a housekeeper to keep track of her house so that she can focus on writing. The housekeeper, Emerenc, is also the care keeper of the neighborhood, and thanks to her, everything is in order. She's an old woman who never sleeps, but only works and works and works and who never lets anyone into her apartment. She does not accept praise or gifts, she chooses her own pay and doesn't work for just anyone. She decides her own working hours, and may come in the middle of the night to do her tidying. Soon the housekeeper is the one who is in charge of the house and the relationship between her and the narrator turns into something rather complicated. It's a very fascinating story. I can't help but appreciate the simple stories that are somehow made awesome by the author. This is not a flamboyant love drama or a detective story that can draw anyone in, there are no heroes or anything of that kind, just pure good writing. You never even find out the name or the appearance of the main character, the author and narrator, not even her age, and you really don't need to...

Tavasszal minden felébred téli álmából.

2009-12-14T15:31:00.003+01:00

(In spring, everything wakes up from its winter sleep (hibernation).)

The other day I was trying my luck with Anne az élet iskolájában, but it was a bit tiresome. I am really not able to read a real text in Hungarian yet, but I will keep trying. As a warm-up, I worked with the third text from the FSI Easy Reader today, and it made me fall in love with Hungarian all over again. The overly enthusiastic voice of the woman on the recording almost took away part of the beauty of it, but after I had listened to her a couple of times, I got used to it. When I'm looking up things in the dictionary in Hungarian, I am often struck by how beautiful words are, or how different, harmonic, symmetric they are. This never happens with Russian. Russian words are just Russian. Hungarian words are small wonders all on their own.

How about ibolya (Violet)? For some reason, I always enjoy learning the names of flowers or trees in foreign languages, and I probably know more names for trees in Russian than in French or perhaps even English. Another word that struck me was zümmög, in méhek zümmögnek (the bees are humming). Kizöldülni (come into leaf, become green), megsárgulni (turn yellow). Perfectly logical and lovely words, even though they may not be extremely useful.

Az erdei utak szélén feltűnik a hóvirág, majd a szerény ibolya. Méhek zümmögnek, pillangók röpködnek. Lassan csupa virág, csupa illat lesz minden. A tavasz a legszebb évszak.

(My attempt at a translation: Along the edges of the forest roads snow flowers appear, then the modest violet. The bees are humming, the butterflies are flying around. Slowly everything becomes a pure flower, a pure fragrance. Spring is the most beautiful season.)

To continue my Hungarian afternoon, I thought I would start making my Hungarian verb book.

Я свободна!

2009-12-10T12:48:00.003+01:00

I have no more exams, I am free for quite a long time, and naturally I should make as good use as possible of that time. I have many plans, probably way too many. As usual.

Yesterday I started reading another Norwegian book, or rather a book in Norwegian, Døren by Magda Szabó. The original is Hungarian, and I thought I should get some more exposure to Hungarian literature without necessarily waiting to read it in Hungarian. I very recently finished Jeg skal vise dere frykten by Nikolaj Frobenius, which I liked, but I was not absolutely thrilled about it. I fell in love with this new book from the first couple of pages though, so all is looking good.

But there are more books, there always are.

I am also going to start reading Russland og russere, Russia and Russians, a book about... well it's rather obvious. I am very much looking forward to it, since I usually like these kinds of books very much. Shortly I will make a post on books on culture that I have found very useful. It's also in Norwegian, which is great since this gives me increased literary Norwegian influence.

Furthermore, I am taking a class on the history of nationalism this spring at a Swedish University, and I plan to at least skim through the two books I have ordered for it. There are three books on the curriculum, but the third one was sold out, which is a bit troublesome. Swedish books! Or at least one of them was Swedish...

Russian then? Of course, there's always a Russian book! I started reading Dostoyevsky's Бедные Люди (Poor Folks) the day before yesterday. It's very short; I have already read 13% of it on my Kindle, and I am looking forward to reading the rest! I really wanted to read the Brothers Karamazov or the Idiot, but I didn't feel like starting on a huge book just yet.

Finally, I also have ambitious plans about reading a little bit of Anne az élet iskolájában (L.M. Montgomery). I really don't have any idea about how much comprehension I am aiming at and what degree of dictionary use I am going to allow myself. I am really going to try to read it in a highly relaxed way and tried to get through as many pages as possible instead of as many understood words as possible.

And I am very well aware that French is missing. I will see if that can't be fixed.

I would say those are my reading plans for Christmas. Add to that ambitious grammar study and big amounts of wine and chocolate. And ridiculous amounts of Christmas cookies when I go home to Sweden, cause you know... mothers and so on...

Swedish culture and mentality.

2009-11-28T14:38:00.001+01:00

I read something today that annoyed me quite a lot. This is nothing spectacular, I'm very easily annoyed, but I thought I'd mention it anyway. In Sweden we have this highly unpopular person or phenomenon called "Blondinbella". She is a 19-year-old girl from Stockholm who has been writing a blog of her own for a couple of years, and who turned it into a company, making quite some money off of it, and who has consequently been seen all over the newspapers and on television. All good, you say? Well it does sound quite ideal! But no...

The problem is that she writes a blog about her life (how dare she?) and about feminine stuff (HOW dare she??). You know, makeup, clothes, fashion... and she gets merchandise from companies who want her to write about them on her blog. Her blog gets an incredible amount of visits, mainly from teenage girls and from jealous Jante-lag infected women and men. This infuriates people something awful. As a result, she gets murder and rape (and mutilation...) threats, stuff thrown on her in public (like a bottle, a skinned mink...?), unpleasant phone calls, and has to live at a fake address, change her phone number all the time, and so on.

But now, how can we blame people? I mean, she's 19, rich and famous. And female! And how dare she become famous for writing about nothing? Of course "girly stuff" qualifies as nothing, since it is of no interest to anyone, the norm of "anyone" of course being male. If this had been a 19-year-old guy writing about sports, there would of course have been no problem at all. If he had received fancy shoes from Nike I'm quite sure no one would have had anything against it. But unfortunately for Blondinbella, she's female. And ugly (really, how can people stand to look at her?), and stupid (I'm not really sure why, but people say so, so I guess they must be right and they must know what they're talking about) and surely not successful, since she's famous for nothing. She therefore deserves to be stalked, ridiculed, threatened, and so on.

Wait, what was that we said about gender equality in Sweden?

Un morceau de Pouchkine.

2009-11-20T19:56:00.001+01:00

Tout d'un coup, j'ai très envie d'écrire. La semaine dernière, j'ai eu mal aux mains et je fais donc un peu gaffe maintenant pour ne pas trop écrire. Cela veut donc dire que je ne peux pas utiliser lang-8 pour le moment et que je suis donc limitée à m'exprimer en anglais ou en français, et vu que je n'utilise presque jamais le français de ces jours...

Pendant que je fais plaisir à mes oreilles avec une cavalcade d'Einaudi, je vais essayer d'écrire quelque chose qui ait au moins un peu de sens ou d'intérêt. Ce n'est pas tout à fait facile. Est-ce que quelqu'un a l'impression d'avoir moins à dire dans une langue que dans une autre ? Oublions maintenant la question de différents niveaux de langue ; comparez deux ou trois (ou quatre ou cinq...) de vos meilleures langues, celles que vous connaissez très bien. Réfléchissez un tout petit peu sur la facilité, ou le manque de facilité, avec laquelle (lequel) vous vous exprimez dans cette langue. Ou disons la facilité relative avec laquelle vous trouvez les mots ou qui enchaîne en vous une suite de pensées. Cela m'arrive très facilement en anglais, peut-être tout simplement parce que je l'utilise tout le temps. Le suédois, je ne l'utilise presque pas du tout ; au moins pas dans sa forme pure, et je n'écris presque jamais en suédois pour des raisons évidentes. Mais cela m'inquiète un peu que le français soit si peu accommodant. Manque d'attention peut-être ?

En parlant d'autre chose, aujourd'hui notre professeur de russe nous a apporté trois caisses pleines de livres, de journaux et de disques (russes et parlant de la Russie ). Je me suis trouvé quelques choses, par exemple des cartes de l'URSS et de Moscou, des livrets sur l'Estonie et la Géorgie, des cartes postales de l'Arménie et quelques livres en russe. Celui dont je suis le plus fière, c'est une édition de « Le Cavalier De Bronze » de Pouchkine, avec des commentaires et un glossaire, d'une série appelée "Russian Readers with Explanatory Notes" de 1980. J'en suis très contente - il y a en plus des lithographies et des poèmes à la fin. J'ai aussi trouvé quelques classiques, de courtes histoires, que j'ai malheureusement déjà lues.
Ehm… en parlant de la Russie, je devrais peut-être me mettre à lire quelque chose là-dessus ^^

Nothing of substance.

2009-11-19T19:41:00.003+01:00

I get more inclined to sin the closer I get to my exams. I probably should be reviewing something, but I know everything a little bit too well to actually get around to doing it. I think this may be bad.

While searching for something Hungarian to read today, I stumbled upon this blog, where I read this:

"Aki azt hiszi, a tündérkék picik, cukik, pillangószárnyaik vannak és virágot hoznak az ablakodba, az nagyon téved. A mi tündéreink két méter magasak, dagadó izmokkal és mély hanggal... és azok csak a nők..."

Since that was absolutely charming, I just have to decipher the rest. As soon as my conscience is okay with it, I am going to start reading Anne az élet iskolájaban. I have read a page or something like that, and even though I don't understand all that much, it feels rather okay. Understanding "a nyárfák levelei közt" gave me a small thrill and this time I am going to just read.

Otherwise when it comes to reading, I recently finished Отцы и Дети and thought it was time for a Norwegian book, so today I started reading Jeg skal vise dere frykten. It's about time my Norwegian stopped being so colloquial.

Regularity.

2009-11-17T00:16:00.004+01:00

(This post was really much more interesting and better formulated before I wrote it down, but unfortunately it has been traveling around in my head for over a week and bits and pieces got lost whereas other just became muddled.)

When I was still rather new to language learning, I used to have periods when I was extremely motivated and then periods when I wasn't the slightest bit interested in languages. Perhaps this was due to the rather low level I was at in both of my languages (Russian and Arabic), or just due to lack of experience. I really do believe that you learn how to learn, and that I partly did learn after lots of trial and error.

I would really be interested in hearing from you other folks how this works for you personally. Do you ever - or often - lose interest in your languages? I never lose interest anymore. I think the last time I lost interest was last summer; since then I have had no unproductive periods (and since I always used to get quite depressed during such times I guess it's uniquely a good thing, just so that SOMEONE doesn't start talking about how we all need to rest and so on - we don't).

I was engaged in some other things back in the up-and-down days as well; I used to be a very ferocious knitter, and anyone who has ever been into knitting knows that this is (or can be) an extremely time-consuming activity, especially when you are working on 12 simultaneous projects, something that all hard-core knitters naturally do. I also used to go to the gym quite a lot (yes I know, weight lifting and knitting... I have always liked weird combinations) and that is surely a very tiring activity. I do neither of those these days, both due to inability and lack of opportunity/time/money... the positive effect of this has been a concentration of my interest and energy on foreign languages. This concentration could however just as well have been applied to knitting instead. I can very well imagine a situation where it is completely unimaginable to not knit during any free moment of the day (yes, that's how serious you get) since that was practically what I was like when I was not in my language learning mode, just like it is now completely unimaginable for me to not constantly try to improve my languages. It doesn't really require an effort; not doing anything is more of a task than just naturally keeping myself busy. It is usually not worth pointing out such things to people who have no interest in anything and who don't spend ridiculous amounts of time doing something most people wouldn't even think twice about since you just get weird looks. It is much easier to just go along with their "oh, you are so talented with languages"-excuse or the "wow, your knitting is so even, that surely is the result of TALENT and not hard work!". Talent is a lame excuse, and an extremely annoying one when you don't have any.

Oh oh, I almost forgot. I think (know) that the language learning community (dear Skypers/IRCers, dear Forum folks!) has also helped me a lot. I just can't bear seeing other people hard at work, or speaking about being hard at work at least, while just sitting there myself.

---

The other day Jack sent me a link to a song that was just incredibly beautiful and ever since I have been listening to Ludovico Einaudi. I will provide you with the very same song that he gave me. I have the feeling it was made for my very own little world of classic literary.

Using Kindle

2009-10-31T23:35:00.001+01:00

Due to lack of time haven't been able to use my Kindle as much as I would have liked. I have, however, tried it out and I am very satisfied with how it works! Reading is painless, just like reading a normal book, and looking up words and taking notes is extremely easy. Yesterday I read a French book and decided to check out if there were any French dictionaries available for the Kindle. There was one, however it was quite small and got bad reviews, so I decided to not buy it. I'll just have to wait and see, perhaps they will make another one available. I also noticed that there were actually some French books available in the store. Shocking!

Another good thing that happened was that the Unicode hack for the international Kindle was "released". I can now read Russian on it! However, it doesn't display Swedish and French letters anymore. I am counting on this being fixed, or I'm screwed ^^

Spreading the word

2009-10-28T09:51:00.002+01:00

There is a new (highly friendly) language forum that anyone with an interest in languages and language studies should join and contribute to! Except for a general language discussion room and plenty of resources for different languages there is also an off-topic area as well as a language journal sub forum where you can write your own language journal and track your progress (I have moved my two logs there). Hop onboard!

Christmas came early this year.

2009-10-24T23:16:00.001+02:00

I received my Christmas present from my boyfriend very early this year. When the Kindle went international, he decided to buy me one! It is an incredibly elegant little thing and the electronic ink is truly impressive. The only thing I am now waiting for is the Unicode hack for the international Kindle! It is incredible that they would release an international version and still not include Unicode on it. Scandalous even, but I guess that's what Anglo-mania is all about. I mean seriously, who needs any other language than English?

Once I get this high tech toy to read Cyrillic, my literary exploits shall know no limits! I really want to read all the huge Russian classics, but finding the actual books is always an obstacle and everyone who knows me knows that I don't really like to read on the computer. Of course Amazon has no e-books in any other languages than English available, but since the Kindle can read simple text documents and since you can't convert files, nothing is easier than acquiring all the old Russian classics. Right now I have a large number of works by Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky in English on my Kindle (the very kind boyfriend was thoughtful enough to load it with those) and as soon as I get some free time I am going to read something :-)

One really neat feature is that with the inbuilt English dictionary you can look up any word in the text you are reading by somehow clicking on it (I'm not really sure exactly how it works, sometimes I have to click around a bit before I get the translation, but once I get it going it seems to be working just fine... perhaps I should stop playing "male" and actually read some instructions on how to use it :-)) and this just opens up extremely interesting possibilities for the future. You know, that future when this thing is actually international and not just pseudo-international. Reading Russian texts with an inbuilt Russian dictionary... a girl can always dream!

Virginie Despentes.

2009-09-26T15:21:00.004+02:00

One of my favorite authors is undoubtedly the French Virginie Despentes, even though I have only read two of her books. This may seem like a somewhat unexpected choice, but it does put me at a safe distance from the term "literature snob". Despentes writes a highly provocative books that are harder to read than any French classic you may ever throw at me, and I wouldn't have thought that I'd like her so much from only reading what her books are about. But that's the point, it doesn't really matter what her books are about.

What surprises me the most with the amazing Virginie Despentes is that she seems to appeal to men. The first book by her that I read was "Bye Bye Blondie" (a title that would never have made me pick up the book by myself) and it was given to me by a young Frenchman who came to visit Oslo and who stayed at our place. He just gave me the book, like that. It was his personal book I believe, not something he had picked up especially for me. I was a bit surprised since guys usually avoids female authors, and that also made me a bit intrigued. I have so many books that I haven't read yet that new additions to my collection usually have to wait a couple of years to be read, but I actually started reading this book straight away. And from a certain point on, I couldn't stop reading it. This happens extremely rarely for me, perhaps once every three years, and it is naturally a very good sign.

When I was last in France, I bought another one of her books: "Les chiennes savantes" (and now I feel really stupid about not buying more of them...). While still in France, one of the guys who lived in the apartment where we stayed picked up this book and started reading it, and he found it very interesting. Very captivating. Just like "Bye Bye Blondie", this book is about a woman with a highy screwed up life - something neither I nor these guys can really relate to. And yet we seemingly do. Yes, amazingly enough, Despentes seems to be able to make men read about women!

I did not like this second book as much as the first, and I actually only started liking it for real once the general plot was "pushed to the back". I don't really care for the story of the book, and I think Despentes did a better job with "Bye Bye Blondie" which has a simpler storyline. Complex stories, dealing with many people, is not Despente's forte. Her forte is on the other hand describing the psychology of messed up women. She has the ability to make what seems like a completely unsympathetic woman become incredibly captivating, and she makes you see things completely through her eyes, to the point where you are fooled together with the poor main character. Some of her descriptions of what goes on inside a woman's mind are uncannily spot on. It is also highly provocative and not very feministic, and it all makes for very engaging reading.

To get an idea of who Despentes is, I can add that she is the author of the book "Baise-moi". However bad the movie may have been, that's at least her field of expertise.

And speaking of the language of the book, why not have a small sample of it? With an appropriate passage ON that said language, of course:

- Pourquoi tu fais pas un effort quand tu parles ? Tu fais racaille, c'est insupportable. T'as vu où t'habites maintenant ? Et ça fait des années que t'es dans des endroits classes...
- Je la parle couramment leur langue de tapette, mais tu causes pas avec ça, c'est pas une langue vivante, c'est du cafouillage de cerveau broyé pour cerveaux de tafiole, tu vois de quoi je parle ? Fesses bien serrées, le ton qui monte pas, rien qui sort. Autant fermer sa gueule, tu vois... Moi, mieux je la parle, moins je la sens leur langue.

Back?

2009-09-18T11:43:00.006+02:00

The reasons for the neglect of this blog can be seen below:

Since I became an ordinary university student, I have had precious little amounts of free time to dedicate to my language studies. The speed-reading project is sadly on hold since I simply do not have that much time to spare each day. If I were a less serious student, I could pull it off, but right now I am in the process of writing some essays and even though these essays are in no way important, I want to use the opportunity to learn as much as I can about my field of study. That is to say, Russia.

Since I am mostly into Russian related things these days, I thought I'd share parts of a poem with you. I had some trouble understanding parts of it, but I got some help over at the HTLAL forums. The poem was written by Alexander Blok in 1918 and it fits in rather nicely with the Eurasianist movement of the 1920s in Russia. The Eurasianists considered Russia to be a part of Asia and embraced the Asian heritage that had for so long been neglected or denied. They had in common with the Bolsheviks that they believe that the West was on its way down and Russia would take the lead and show the world how it's done.

A general idea at the time, first voiced by among others Nikolai Danilevskii and Konstantin Leontev, was that Russia had saved Europe over and over whereas Europe never showed any gratitude. Europe wouldn't even recognize Russia as a European country. Russia must therefore stop protecting Europe and instead join the East in an alliance against the West.

Идите все, идите на Урал!
Мы очищаем место бою
Стальных машин, где дышит интеграл,
С монгольской дикою ордою!

Но сами мы - отныне вам не щит,
Отныне в бой не вступим сами,
Мы поглядим, как смертный бой кипит,
Своими узкими глазами.

Не сдвинемся, когда свирепый гунн
В карманах трупов будет шарить,
Жечь города, и в церковь гнать табун,
И мясо белых братьев жарить!...

В последний раз - опомнись, старый мир!
На братский пир труда и мира,
В последний раз на светлый братский пир
Сзывает варварская лира!


Here's the entire poem, read in the movie У озера.

More funny stuff.

2009-09-05T18:34:00.002+02:00

I got this comment today on a blog post, and I thought I'd share it with all the rest of you (even though I first considered deleting it due to the outrageous stupidity of it). In some ways, it is great. It kind of reminds me of that creepy inferioirty complex Swedes seem to suffer from. Enjoy!

"Вот не пойму: ну какой смысл в том, чтобы изучать местечковые языки, у которых нет ни практического применения, ни обширной базы носителей, как, например, у английского или китайского?

Чтобы читать книги на этих языках в подлиннике? Сомнительное удовольствие, если учесть, что 90% русских классиков — унылое говно.

Кстати, что касается русских классиков. Не понимаю, почему большинство садомазохистов, обрекших себя на изучение русского недоязыка, начинают именно с них — язык у них сухой, скучный и бесцветный, как в учебнике по физике, и зачастую полон архаизмов. Я молчу уж про антураж — мало кому будет интересно читать о событиях, которые якобы произошли в позапрошлом столетии с каким-нибудь вымышленным опричником или дворянином. Так что то, чем Вы занимаетесь, — полнейший мазохизм, а следовательно, вся Ваша затея с изучением быдлорусского копронедоязычка не только бессмысленна, но и обречена на неудачу.

До скорого."

Small speed-reading update.

2009-08-17T08:53:00.000+02:00

All of a sudden, I got very busy. University starts extremely early here, two weeks before the summer term ends in Sweden, so I'm doubly busy. I haven't stopped with my speed-reading though, I'm just not able to do as much of it as I used to. The exercises have become different now, they focus on visual reading at over 1600 words per minute and progress is not as easy to measure anymore. On average, when making an effort I think I read at somewhere between 800 to 900 words per minute. Every time I feel like I am reading extremely slowly, I end up at over 700 words per minute anyway. I'm guessing this is good. I can't really practice read a whole lot right now though since I am reading philosophy and other more difficult texts that need to be read more slowly. I am hoping to get some time over for my speed-reading soon -_-

Russian audio books.

2009-08-04T11:24:00.004+02:00

I wrote in one of my HTLAL logs that I didn't know what Russian audio book to listen to after I finish Anna Karenina, but now I realize that it is perhaps a better idea to write about it here since more Russians probably read this blog. I will just copy what I wrote in the log.

What I am mostly thinking about right now is what book I will listen to after this one. I would really like to listen to a book that I can become passionate about. Can anyone recommend any classic in particular? Classics are so much easier to understand so I would prefer that when it comes to audio books.

Things to keep in mind.

2009-08-03T20:53:00.002+02:00

From reading the speed reading books, I have picked up a couple of techniques that are so to say universal. These things are not about technically reading faster, for those things you have to look up these books yourselves, but rather things to facilitate your reading and recollection in general. One important thing to keep in mind - and something I often forget - is that you have to develop the two skills of reading fast and remembering what you read separately. I'm no expert yet, but I intend to apply these ideas in the future.

1. Always ask yourself why you are going to read something, what your purpose of reading is. Is it important to remember something? Are you looking for something in particular? (In that case, formulate a question that should keep in mind while reading.) Are you just reading to pass time?

2. Always browse through your material before starting to read it. Look at every page for four seconds, noting the different chapters and so on. This is not something I would do for fiction :-) And, it is way easier to do for separate chapters. I guess you could say you that you are preparing your mind for what you are going to read.

3. When you have read something, always take a couple of seconds to think back on the chapter, article or whatever it was, noting in your minds or on a piece of paper what it was about - without looking back! This is intended to improve your memory.

4. When taking notes, don't write blocks of text or lists; make mind maps. Try to avoid using full sentences and avoid using the words of the author. One good mind map pattern is a treelike structure. Draw a horizontal line on a piece of paper and write the topic of whatever you just read on this line. Draw branches coming out from this line for every main thought and smaller branches coming out from the main branches on which you add information. Always write from memory, don't copy from the book.

I think these were the main points but I have a feeling I've left something out...

Unfortunate encounters with Swedish literature.

2009-08-02T19:19:00.003+02:00

For my speed reading experiment I finally got the opportunity to read some Swedish fiction. I actually never read any Swedish books anymore, I simply don't have the time what with keeping up with French, Russian and English literature. I was therefore very happy to finally pick up a Swedish book! I really don't think native speakers have any right to neglect their own language; I am not good at Swedish simply because I am Swedish, I should also work on my Swedish skills.

However, the two Swedish books that I have read in the last year have both disappointed me greatly. I must therefore un-recommend them. The first one was a book my mother gave me, a very new book from 2008 (and I'm really no good at all at modern literature, I'm too preoccupied with classics): Myrrha by Ulrika Kärnborg. It should really be a good, intriguing read, the story being that of a simple woman and her relationship with a Victorian gentleman, of her absolute love for dirty work (the dirtiest possible) and his love for women doing dirty work. Yes. And this is based on true events. I was greatly disappointed because this book bored me more than anything else, except for a couple of pages somewhere in the beginning.

The other book that I read, the one I have been using for my speed-reading experiment, is Livläkarens besök by Per Olov Enquist. It is also a historic novel treating the subject of Christian the seventh, the mentally ill 18th-century Danish king, his English wife and his doctor, the latter two of course having an affair while the said doctor tries to reform Denmark. It's also based on true events, but I really know nothing of them, just like I know practically nothing about Danish history. However, this book was written in far too pretentious Swedish and with too little elegance. I didn't like it.

Now however, I have decided to finally read a book that I bought in the metropole Glommersträsk quite a couple of years ago for a euro or less. The first time I encountered this story was in junior high school when I saw a play based on it. It was amazing, just one guy on a scene with no props, telling the story of how he ended up on death row, and all the 15 year olds were mesmerized. The book is Cell 2455 Death Row by Caryl Chessman. When I saw the book in the depths of Northern Sweden I immediately bought it, but since it has been collecting dust in various bookshelves. I started reading it yesterday and read a hundred pages before going to bed (I read it in bed however, and according to the author of the speed- reading book you read slower in bed), and another 60 pages today while doing exercises. This is an excellent book for an easy read, and on top of that they Swedish is rather lively and interesting (modern day literary Swedish is mostly just weird) - it's a translation from 1954. For a learner of Swedish, the dialogue would be hell, spoken Swedish from the 50s :-) I am however very happy with the book so far and look forward to continue working with it. The story is rather excellent, I really recommend it.