The end is in sight.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

(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!