21 November 2013

November life updates!

AH! So I haven't blogged about anything interesting or entertaining or stupid and boring in three weeks. I'm sorry! Life has been pretty hectic in between school, work, thesis, transcribing, blah blah blah. Plus side, I am just 35 minutes away from being DONE transcribing for good! Downside, I have NO FUN STORIES.

That's not entirely true. I have a couple fairly interesting tidbits in my life:

1) Amsterdam didn't happen because Al and I have been so busy. But I am less than a month out from going back to America for Christmas, yay!

2) I wrote an article for an anthropology blog, yay! Here, have my full name.

3) Al has started writing for the Huffington Post Germany, yay! Here, have his real name.

4) I started taking Mongolian! Because three weeks into the semester, we found out our uni offers it. I don't know why I was so surprised, it's almost like I forgot my uni also offers obscure languages like Nahuatl and Lakota and Tok Pisin. I figured better late than never, especially because we are actually relocating to Mongolia at the end of this.

5) HOLY MOTHER OF GOD MONGOLIAN IS SO HARD. I swore to myself I would never learn anything harder than German, and now where am I? I'll tell you. Staring down the barrel of 8 cases, 8 ways to negate a sentence, 4 O sounds I can't tell apart, something called vowel harmony, and the fucking Cyrillic alphabet. So there's that. Trying to read makes me feel like I've taken a brick to the cerebral cortex. It doesn't help that everyone in the class has already spent time in Mongolia/learned Classical Mongolian because they're linguistics majors and get off on noun declensions and paronyms. I asked the one girl today how many languages she had fluent speaking command of today, and she told me six. Six. Jesus. I mean, my goal is to eventually speak seven, but I figured 2 and a half at 25 wasn't terrible.

6) Kulturschock! is getting an overhaul sometime next spring/early summer. Al and I actually have plans for this whole blog thing come Move To Mongolia time, so there's that.

7) Why did it take me this long to get into Battlestar Galactica?

8) I only have seven things.

That's all for you today, folks! Gotsta jet, I am powering through these stupid transcriptions!

2 comments:

bevchen said...

I had no idea Mongolian was a language. Although it's logical now I think about it.

My grandad spoke 6 languages, and English was always his worst one. It was also the last one he learned, so not too surprising really.

Alex, Speaking Denglish said...

Can't wait to see what you do with the blog come Mongolia!