Freedom

The second week will start tomorrow, the second week of freedom after I decided to step down from the German lessons I was taking at the Goethe Zentrum. I can't even begin to tell you how happy and relieved I am! I have more time to concentrate on the book we are reading at the Lesenklub, and the language becomes again something enjoyable.

It may have taken me a long time, but I think I stopped in time, before the circumstances and external conditions ruined my relationship with the language. I get out of it in time.

So, here is my lesson to all of you: learn to give up, to let go, to recognize when something is no longer working, and brave up to part ways. It's not easy because a false sense of pride can get in the way, or maybe it's a bit of OCD. We might already be used to it. But be it what it may, remember that keeping up with something that no longer makes you happy is the surest way to get to hate it. So, is it worth to take things to the point when you hate everything when you could step away, walk away and keep sweet, beautiful memories, mazbe even with the chance to come back again to it later, in better terms?

Dating Amid Turbulence

Life as a single person... is quite a busy thing. Happy but very busy. I still have a pile of letters to reply and my reading of books for entertainment is going really slow - though that's in part due to the fact that I have read three of the Anne of Green Gables novels, and by the end of Anne of the Island I couldn't be bothered with reading another of her books. The first one was enjoyable, the second one was also quite nice, but the third one got to my nerves. Be it as it may, 2016 is proving to be a year full of activities and tasks for me, with my trusty filofax nearly bursting at the seams with things to do. Between the German classes at the Goethe Zentrum and the classes I've taken at the University to get ahead with Finance and Marketing, I'm finding myself again at that point where I really don't seem to have much time to do anything.

I must admit that I take it as a wonderful blessing that I can live this phase in my life being single. I know that for many people a life partner means support and companionship and someone with whom to share the burden of daily life, but that hasn't been my case. I'm too much of a lone wolf to find much solace in company when I need to power up to charge on life, I guess. Between studies and lots of plans for the future, I've also been experimenting with the world of online dating. Some of my friends have tried it out - more than I thought - and I find this world quite interesting. Haven't actually met with anyone yet, but no like I aiming towards that either. Hyne, I think I might be doing the whole thing wrong, actually. OK, not like I'm putting much effort in it, truth tobe told, but then I connect with these people, we exchange messages and start chatting, and I feel really good with them. I make friends and I act accordingly, and so, when suddenly someone says something more flirty to me, I'm startled thinking "why is he flirting with me?" until I remember that this is a dating site and I'm supposed to be out there looking to date people, not just friending them.

What am I supposed to do there? Honestly I'm a little at lost there, because though I know a lot of women complain about how many men approach them butnever want anything serious, in my experience, I'm always the one that just wants to have fun why the guys that apporach me all are aiming for the white picket fence and the 2.1 children. So, am I looking for dating? I don't want a relationship, but I do would love to meet people for some casual get together, have a drink, share a good conversation and then maybe - if things click right - have unattached sex. The operative word being "unattached". My life is speeding ahead and I have so many wonderful projects in my plate right now, that I really don't need something else to pay attention to. But then is adating site the right place for me to find those loose tied, entirely casual brushes with like minded people?

Some people are nice, some people are really loving and smart, and then some are players that like to lead on others, or see how much can they jerk other people's chains. People can be so strange sometimes. I don't know, I'm still thinking about this all, about what should I do about this part of my life, and then thinking about how I used to solve these questions before, only to realize that I have never worried about it, it has never been my thing to go look for people, but people happened, I flashed my smile and things somehow got going.

I'd give it more thought just for the fun of it... it I didn't have so much studying to do.

Language Learning

Are you one of those people who consider language learning a hobby? I am. It doesn't mean that by thins language learning is all fun and easy for me, but I certainly like it. The process can be hard and you may feel like you just want to shut it all in a drawer and don't ever see it again for a while, but still, learning a new language is an exciting process.

I haven't really learned a new language since many, many years, but have been basically puffing up to shape those I know some of, namely English and French. Now I'd like to embark in a new adventure with German, another language I know a tiny bit about as I've been unsuccessfully trying to learn it by myself, and so far failed as I have proven to myself that self-learning in the early stages of a language acquiring isn't my thing. I've a very thin, small base for it, but I decided that it's about time to get on serious with German and really learn it - and make some new friends in the process. Now, that's all good and nice, but it's easier said than done. The sad truth about language learning is that it is quite an expensive thing to do, if you resource to someone else to teach you - be it privately or in groups - and if you attempt at doing it by yourself, you can trip into the same disheartening thing I did: most "learn by yourself" materials are quite incomplete and fail to explain you things in the detail you'll need to understand it better.

All goes well, slow and everything, and then comes a part where there's a jump and you are lost trying to figure out how to understand how and why you do this or that. It's very unnerving. Classes in this sense are much better, because you can ask the teacher at the break or after the class - maybe the next time befre class - to explain you exactly how this or that works.

The way you choose to learn a new language must always be such that suits you, but also a way that you can afford. However, whatever you do, my main advise is never to go for something blindly. Don't buy into learning by yourself and buying all sorts of "learn in your sleep" or any weird things like that. Don't fall neither for any sort of self-learning book that's sealed. Yes, many come sealed, and by experience I can tell you that those are mainly booklets full of phrases to pretend you know a language, when most of the time you don't understand half of what you are saying.

I'd personally recommend podcasts - Free Podcasts, to it - where you simply download, hook up to and learn. :-) They come with limitations, but they don't cost you a dime!

If you are into studying with a teacher, check the schools and the programs very well. I tend to be wary about places that take up years for you to reach an "advanced" level of language managing, specially because also by experience I know that the actual language management at those stages is medium-to-advanced. So ponder carefully the 200 € lesson per quarter that takes you up to 16 quarters to acquire that "advanced" level. Don't trust either the "Super-Intensive" classes where you are supposed to take a level each week. No matter how good with languages you are, you don't learn a whole level in a week.

Learning a language is like going to the gym to get a better body shape: you can go very often, but the results don't appear from one day to the next, and usually you have to wait at least a month to start seeing some results. Any other result in the shorter span is temporary.

It's possible also that you may work better with a combination of both assited and self learning, after all, even if you go to a class with a teacher and other students, you are supposed to do homework. All systems have their ups and their downs. Alone, you don't get bored and annoyed waiting for everybody to say a phrase, and getting to the point where you want to ditch the class because it's becoming terribly insufferable, BUT you get to know people, make new friends, practice with others, share and ask someone who can explain you everything you can't find a question for. Studying by yourself, allows you to advance at your own pace, study at any time it's convenient for you, and it's cheaper, BUT you are less able to practice with others, miss the chance to make more friends, and you questions are harder to solve because there's no one at hand to ask.

I'll go for a class now, if I can find one that suits me, and given that certain conditions in my near future allow me the time to join the class. If not... well, there's always the Podcast and scouting for new material to keep the little knowledge alive. Oh, and right now I've series in German and... Vienna around the corner!

Wish me luck!

Welcome to the End of The World - Been There, Done That

Salaam alaikum and Blessed Be, my dear readers! This year started to me as many others before: celebrating the New Year abroad. Ok, ok, maybe Hungary shouldn't count for me as "abroad", BUT, as I've had had my New Year in Paris, my New Year in Sofia, this year the New Year came at the Caribbean shores of Santo Domingo, the capital city of Dominican Republic. This time around it was my boyfriend flying all the way from Hungary to Costa Rica for the end of the year, and not the other way around, for reasons well known for those who need to know them. 

We talked about going to Dominican Republic in spring, but ended up going to Panama City due to lack of proper organizing. This time around, however, with much more time to do the planning - which is the key to everything - we made it to this lovely island, where we enjoyed the Caribbean culture and history. Yes, there were strange and odd things, like the tourist harrasing people at any step of the way, I wrote about in the last post of 2011, however all in all - particularly after taking a walk down Calle Conde - it was wonderful. I wouldn't say it was "magical", because there was so much earthy, human quality in it, that all supernatural forces were erased. Even the shores and the waves seemed like part of the effort of a nation that does know how to work it, but also know how to take it easy, not rush it, but live it.

Part of a trip - at least for me - includes the mandatory cruising of the tax and duty free stores at the airport, where I usually stock up with magazines and candy. My selection this time around included the december number of Latina - a magazine I haven't seen before, as I noted in the last post -, Vogue, Vanity Fair and The Economist. Normally I would go searching for Marie Claire, which had been my favorite magazine for ages, but as things have come by, this magazine has changed going from a smart, women's issues focused magazine to yet another shopping catalogue, with all traces of brain neatly supressed. It does upset me how the roaring "buy more, think less" wave expands to more and more newspapers and magazines, making it harder each time to actually find an article that can absorb you mentally, show you something you didn't know about, educate you, fill your braincells with useful, interesting information, and challenge you. 

After Marie Claire's plunging in quality, bigger concern with adds and pictures of clothes and accessories you don't really need, and lesser with showing the world of women around the planet, how can we otherwise get to know about them? What other way do we have to get informed from a different point of view? Which other source do we have to get glimpses of the history and the present of women all over the world? Yes, snipets can be found, but magazines are far more concerned with rags that won't last three months than the stories behind human trafficking, or efforts towards breaking new and more areas in women's labor fields. Glossy paper has become all about the superfluous and stupid, taking away any trace of thought, any trace of awareness, if not sponsored by a company or a group of them on a trendy topic, such as "Breast Cancer", or any other thing that doesn't challenge society or economical order. Anything to make you spend.

From the batch I purchased, gladly Vanity Fair kept up to the standard I set, though more leaning on the political matter, rather than foccused on the women's issues, even though this last issue had no other than Lady Gaga on the cover. I keep blinking in disbelieve how such an ugly, outrageous person can be so celebrated. Other than that, holding in my head a piece written by Joseph Stiglitz is delightful. However, before I even got around to Vanity Fair, I checked out the overly popularized and commented Vogue magazine. The magazine is an icon in fashion - as many know so - has been subject of songs, movies, books, documentries, and their Editor in Chief, Anna Wintour, quite known and celebrated. The magazine and Ms. Wintour have been also the underlying subject of the book and movie "The Devil Wears Prada" (a great movie, a terrible book, written by a disgraceful, untalented Lauren Weisberger). The magazine is certainly a stack of paper about fashion, with not much thought about any other issues - as I would have expected it to - so in that sense it came way under my expectations. Sure, "Vogue" isn't "Runway", but from no socially striking articles to no-brain articles there's quite a gap, and one that this famed magazine does not manage well at all. As you page through it, you can't see any of the "elitist" style oozing from it that the critics talk about - unless you call Kardashian-like no-brains-only-money style - but the kind of audience it seems to carter for is one you really, really don't want to belong to, specially if you have a university degree and believe in real hard work (not the maniac straining yourself for intrascendental things the magazine calls "hard work"). How can you monthly spend time reading pages that suggest you to dress like a clown, fast yourself into a toothpick and spend regardless of whether you have money or not, because "the trend" says so?

It was still interesting to see Meryl Streep on the cover, so I had to read the article on her to see if there was any mention at all about the afore mentioned movie, where she played Miranda Priestly, the homologue of Anna Wintour. Well, it made me smirk how evidently the sting of the book and the movie hasn't been overcome, as the praising of the actress was all over the place, and the moving was mentioned only passingly, in the middle of a list of other movies. It seems that "the cool people" can't put themselves past the booklet a mediocre writer wannabe composes, and keep the grudge until the end of days. Then again, who are we calling a mediocre writer, when Ms. Wintour's editorial is flat and the rest of the "articles" are blah, abundant in a language that seeks to detail luxury and a sense of grandeur, but that never get's to the nerve of things. It's all on the brands, and the mixes of humble attitude with knowing what's trendy and luxurious, but with not a word thrusting deeper into the vein, going to what's aside from the brand and the fresh oysters and "working hard".

Work hard, work hard... a phrase used up and down to describe successful people who have lots of money and still don't hit the bed before 4 am, are up in 4 hours and do this "work" thing constantly. Yeah, yeah, yeah... so, now tell me what's that "work" about. Is about organizing foundraisers and trips to bring aid packages to depressed areas, or is it sticking your nose to your computer trying to find a way to get millions of American workers to get rid of their debts, or how to create the missing 4 million jobs and make sure they stay? Is it hard work proselitizing for a candidate or a party, maybe a bill about tax cuts, or is it about waking up at 3 am to work on the fields? Or maybe it's hard work to be up until late trying to decide which picture would look better as the cover of your shallow, no-brain magazine?

So yes, there were no articles, so I paged through the magazine looking at the latest trends, what's to come and realizing once again that fashion lately has nothing that could or would hold my interest. There was then a piece (I can't call it an article) about the tendencies and how - unlike with previous times of economical crisis - the tendency isn't towards minimalism (which I like), but towards overaccesorizing. Necklaces and bracelets measured in pounds, not in units, and chandelier earrings. The lines to introduce the tendency were rather insulting, from the social and economical proint of view, basically saying "you can face the times of crisis with frugality and saving, bracing for the hard time, or you can give it the finger and put on every luxury item you can get". Okay, so we are living hard times, millions of jobs have been suppressed in the States, people have been unemployed for years, and their proposal is "overaccesorize and give the crisis the finger". The excuse to do this? "Because youth is doing it and many of them are unemployed and have no money". Oh really, so here we are, adults, trying to get a job or hang into the one we have, with bills and responsabilities to face, realizing that living on a credit card isn't doable anymore, and we need to cut the unnecesary expenses, save some so the next time the economy fucks it up we don't get it up the ass, and here comes a fancy little magazine telling you to fuck the crisis, let's go bolder and still pretend we can max our credit cards and everything will be dandy. Where are we heading to? (In Vanity Fair, meanwhile, Kurt Andersen writes about how it seems that style has remained stagnating the last 20 years, with much of the same when comparing 1992 and 2012, so that makes you think where all this "we like" and "we think" you see in these magazines actually get anywhere in a society quite depleted of resources, with trend gurus that can't get over themselves, but continue to push their own, little, outdated agenda everywhere.)

The way I see it, we are heading towards the absolute stupidization of the population, but not as part as some conspiracy, but also because of ourselves. If the magazines and newspapers dish us day after day articles and pieces of the lowest quality - and that can be seen in the very grammar and composing of many of the articles, where you would expect at least some average manage of the language - in every sense of the word. Shallow articles that not only don't grasp the surface of the matter, working the topic more as if it where a trailer of a topic rather than an article about it, but also because many of the subjects picked are not really that important. What would be more relevant, Demi Lovato's disorders or the levels of poverty reached by many countries, and what that slide down the socio-economical ladder entail? If you ask the magazines and the newspapers, Demi Lovato's issues, no question about it!

Yes, they are consistently working on making us stupid, but what are we doing about it? We keep buying their issues, we keep reading their shit, we don't demand for anything that isn't directly supplied to us. We don't demand, we take. So, demand. Demand! Don't buy the crap, but be clinical, and if you are bored, find new sources, but don't give them your money, nor be an instrument for them to get money out of you and your data for things you don't really want. We complain a lot about quality, but what are we doing to make them improve it? What are we really doing? Me, I'm doing something: Marie Claire is striked from my list, and so is Vogue now. Now it's up to you.

A Freshly Baked New Week

Monday Morning. I started AGAIN the 15-Minute-German little program, with all the intention of taking it to the end (instead of drifting away hardly three weeks away from completition (three out of twelve)). Now that I know how the system works, and how much does it have, I know also what kind of stuff I have to investigate in alternative sources. I'm back at the "Guten Tag, Ich heiße Martina Li, freut mich"-thingie, but I don't mind it at all. Repetition is the key to success in language learning (though over repeating is the key to language forgeting, which is why I always suffer with my French conjugations - particularly with the verb faire - ). The morning was cold, clouded, stormy, and so I was happy. Perhaps "happy" is too soft a word to express my feelings. I was exhilarated. Stormy mornings are my favorite kind of morning. The chill, the cold, the promise of a diluvian rain sparkled with loud thunders made me dreamy, hopefull and inspired, and so, starting a learning regime, such as this German program (again) was puuuuurfect!

I also fed the masses - or the proletarian people, if you wish to see it that way - with bread and sour cream. Nah, not some metaphoric bread, such as the bread of hope, the bread of education, the bread of information, but actual, freshly baked flour bread, from the local grocery store.I asked around if anyone knew who was supposed to bring bread today, but nobody seemed to know, so since I had to go to the store to fill the tank, I decided to cooperate with the cause and bring them a baguette and some sour cream. Probably the one with the bread task sorted for today would bring one or two bars of bread and I really didn't want to leave too much leftovers. I mean, bread from various days accumulate in Cyn's old office getting old and ugly in several paper and plastic bags, wrinkling up, hardening and becoming sort of gummy, like the limbs of old people.

Well, no bread was left over today, for nobody actually brought any bread, and so my humble, only loaf of bread was the one that abolished hunger in the office. Go figure. Tomorrow the Ants plan a breakfast-sale, for which I offered a bottle of Salsa Lizano. I guess that, in solidarity, we shall not gather to partake in our communal everybody-brings-something breakfasts, but buy from them what we ourselves have offered. Wonder if it will work.

Among the things that fill me this new week is the novel "Emma", by Jane Austen. As I wrote (somewhere), yesterday I saw (again) this movie "The Jane Austen Book Club", where plays one of my currently favorite actresses, Emily Blunt, and I was taken away  - again - by the wish to read Jane Austen's books. Well, as far as I know, we don't have Jane Austen's books at home, though I could have asked my mother, since I believe she's the only one who actually might have an idea about what volumes to we keep in our so called library. (We had Kurt Vonnegut, to my surprise, and also the book about Genghis Khan... all of them in Hungarian, of course.) Anyway, I was browsing the Amazon, when I came across this comment of a man who gave a 1 star grade to a compiling book I was cheking out, and so I found out that the novels could be read FOR FREE online. Go figure that. So I sought and found and saved the link. Read the first chapter yesterday, from Emma, the first novel in the list (and the first read in the movie) and found it strange. Yeah, strange. Getting used to the type of English used in the book, such as calling a woman "handsome" (my devious slashy eye made me wonder if Emma Woodhouse wasn't actually some Emmerson Woodhouse), or the reversing of numbers, saying ages such as four and thirty instead of thirty four; but the strange way in which the whole thing is dumped on you, with a basically selfish Emma, who feels herself superior to everybody else, surrounded by repression, passive-agressive blows and who herself deals out a great deal of them, well, that's not at all expected. There's so much crammed into that first chapter and it is so strange to read, you feel like you need a readjusting at some point. Oh well, I've clicked on the next chapter so I'll continue my discovery of Emma, and hope this book will be NOTHING like Dorian Gray.

Workwise, my alotted work has been slashed in two for today. Ro will tackle one batch and I'll tackle the other. And here I expected both to be dumped on me today. Oh well, we shall see, we shall see. This is, after all, just the first day of the rest of the week.

Deutsch: Now or Never

So I've decided that it's today or to-never, and so it had to be today. Got the book out of the case, the CD in the CD-Rom, and in the first minutes of the day, after talking to my boyfriend, I completed my first 15-minute German lesson. So far so good. This is my n-th attempt at learning German by myself, which is mainly due to my stubborn idea that I really want to do it by myself, or otherwise I'll end up bored out of my head and piling up a debt in class fees I really don't need. aNow, do not misunderstand me, I'm sure the Goethe Institute is awesome, but truth is that so is the Alliance Française, and I poured into the AF truckloads of money in course payments and books only to hate each day I went because it was so damned boring I ended up totally unable to conjugate irregular verbs. (Then again, for some strange reason, I kind of actually can... now... is it due to the Alliance or my readings?) So I was thinking, why to go through all the ordeal with German? I know myself (I know I bore easily), and I know the way I can take off with a language: give me the basics, and then give me a book, give me a TV channel, a few movies, some Internet sites, and soon you'll have me babling around, first quite horridly, but if there's something I don't have is lack of confidence or shame. Mistakes do not make me back off.

The book I already have it: Seine Grosse Liebe, a book I chose once upon a time because it was the only one which title's I understood: "Her Great Love".

My plan currently is simple: complete the 15-Minute-a-Day plan, not jumping ahead, but maybe listening to the lessons twice a day to engrave it in my brain better. When I feel I've advanced enough in this, I'll start checking my old books, with the bit of knowledge I will already have, in order to intensify the flood of information, so I get more tools, because, really, 15 minutes daily for 12 weeks are no way to get a decent foundation for a language. I am not stupid, nor I expect the knowledge to painlessly and effortlessly download itself into my brain. I have no Neo complex. My objective is to be able to read short texts in German, and be able to speak a tad more fluently by the time we go to Vienna in January. No, I do not set for myself irrational goals, like being able to read and fully understand "Das Kapital". However, on a mid term I would expect myself to read Seine Grosse Liebe for december of next year.

Teaching oneself can be quite a hard task, specially because you might have the tendency of granting yourself too many permits, skipping days and lessons, but also can be quite cool, for you don't have to wait the whole class to catch up, or try to catch up with a class that runs at 10 thousand verbs per hour and you have not a clue yet about how the freaking conjugation is done. You have all the time in the world to stop and mull and research and get it right, and then all the freedom to fly as fast as you wish, as high as you can without the dead weight of dunderheads that can't get in their puny brains something too simple just because they are too lazy to even try.

It worked for me (in a way) with English, though the base for it I've got it from lots of useless lessons paid to lots of language academies (okay, just one) and the idiotic highschool teacher that spoke the Charlie Brown version of English. (Years later we learned that she actually didn't know English...) Hopefully it's working with my French, which has been pimped up and pumped up by readings, TV5 Monde and the always adorable Air France Flight Attendants, God bless their beautiful hearts and beautiful... rest; as well as my promenades through Paris, where live, crispy, beautiful French was poured upon me like the sweetest rainshower.

Now German is next, even though I haven't finished with French, nor can I say the same about English, but those two are set on the way.