Mar. 9th, 2007

aprilstarchild: (horoscope)
Just saw the trailer for the movie 300. We already have plans tonight to see a friend play live music, so we can't go tonight when some Leo's Pride people are going. Maybe tomorrow.

On the other hand, I got the giggles at the trailer, because I instantly recognized the music as being from NIN's The Fragile.

There's a [livejournal.com profile] learn_icelandic. o_O The last time I went to Powell's, I saw a book that's something like, Teach Yourself Colloquial Icelandic, and I almost bought it just because it was there.

I still think it's mildly amusing that I was so miserable when I lived there, and yet I want to go back so bad it hurts. :^(

I think I'm going to take Katrina's suggestion, and buy that guidebook I saw for Reykjavik, and sit down and figure out a rough budget/itinerary for a trip of a week or two. I'm figuring that if we go for a week, we can stay mostly in Reykjavik, and do the Golden Circle stuff (Gullfoss, Geysir, Thingvellir, Blue Lagoon), and have a really awesome trip in a relatively short amount of time. Oy gevalt, though, the expense! There's also the swimming pool (so awesome) and mebbe a couple of museums right there in the city, and possibly we could do the pub-crawl thing one night. There are two vegetarian restaurants in the capital. Most of the hostels have kitchens, so we can buy food at the grocery store to keep costs down a little, food-wise. There's no way to get around the fact that it costs a thousand bucks for round-trip airfare, though. Damn Icelandair and their monopoly. If we go during May or September things might be cheaper than in the summer, and the roads won't be too snowy.

Hung out with Katrina yesterday. I helped sew Rick's huge cloak (I mean huge, it's a full circle of wool felt that'll go down to his knees). He's going to look like Andre The Giant in that thing. And there were enough scraps left over that I made a new hammock for the ratties (they peed so much in their old one, that even after I changed their bedding, the cage stank, I really need to have enough hammocks that I can have one in the wash and another in the cage), and I have enough for a bodice! Katrina gave me an old bodice pattern that was too small for her. It's not period-accurate at all, it's got darts in it, but she says it's way easy to sew. And it has instructions written for people who are complete morons at sewing (that'd be me) and explains the bit about making a prototype, and has illustrations on how and where to adjust the fit.

B Sharp Fabrics needs to do another class on bodice making--one of those ones where you get all duct-taped up over a tshirt and get cut out of the tape and then cut up the tape into flat pattern pieces.
aprilstarchild: (Default)
Woo, I registered for an online free Icelandic class. It's over here. I don't know what I'm going to do about the fact that they only have instructions for switching your keyboard to Icelandic settings, for Windows XP. Also, they prefer that you use Internet Explorer, and they have a handy dandy icon that means, "You have Firefox, and therefore, for this part, you're screwed." The introductory level is estimated to take 45 hours.

Whee!

Also: Rats aren't stupid. The gist of this article is, when a rat realizes something is too hard for them to do, they're like, "screw you, man."
aprilstarchild: (How Rad)
Eg heiti April.

>_< That's as far as I've gotten. Identifying myself. Good lord this tutorial has a steep learning curve. Not to mention that I don't know how to type accent marks (there should be one over that first "E") and I'm 90% positive that I'm saying it wrong, because the sound sample isn't slow enough. ARGH.

None of this is helped by the fact that they're throwing around grammatical terms that I don't know, even in English! Genitive? Dative? I looked them up...this is the definition of dative:

1. noting a case having as a distinctive function indication of the indirect object of a verb or the object of certain prepositions.

Oh My God. What does that even mean?

This definition is slightly better:

Of, relating to, or being the grammatical case that marks the recipient of action, that often indicates the indirect object of the verb, and that can be used with prepositions or other function words corresponding in meaning to English to and for.

But...that's sad. I'm trying to learn a foreign language, and the explanation of it requires an English dictionary. That's several levels of meaning/understanding, and I'm having a hard time wrapping my mind around it.

I seriously wish every language on earth was taught using a variation on the French I took at PCC. They used a program called French in Action, I think; and it used partial immersion. Every lesson had a 15-minute bit on a laserdisc, where they showed a scene of people speaking the language (the scenes told a story over the two textbooks), then they showed it to you and gave some of the words and phrases contexts (but didn't define them), and had you parrot back the entire phrases, over and over. Then you listened to the scene again on audiotape, which gave you another chance to parrot them back. Then you were asked questions about the scene itself. After all that, then you did grammar exercises. The idea was to learn it so that you didn't do mental translations. Most of the time you didn't even do mental grammar. It kicked ass. I learned more French in three months at PCC then I did in three years of high school.

Random Side Note: Something in the Final Fantasy game Jarrod's playing, sounds like the first couple notes of my cellphone's ringtone. I have the phone right next to me, and I still do a double take every time I hear it.

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