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[yuuago]

✿ This weekend was all right, but not what I would usually prefer. Rain kept me home on Saturday, and smoke kept me home on Sunday. The forest fire smoke wasn't as bad as it was around the beginning of the month, but we're still getting a lot blowing in from the north of the province and east. The fire problem is province-wide, but in Saskatchewan it's even worse, and over 4750km has burned so far. The Red Cross hasn't put out an official call for donations at this time, but 13,000 evacuees - that's a pretty damn big number for them to deal with.

✿ ... As for myself, my area is unaffected at this time, aside from the smoke that I mentioned before. It's not so bad if you stay inside, but that sure is a bummer. And while I'm healthy, not everyone is, and this stuff could affect some other people pretty badly.

✿ Wow, I totally did not intend to start this entry off on a downer note. I guess this stuff has just been on my mind a lot lately.

✿ Anyway! In completely unrelated news, I have an account on Duolingo, username is yuuago as always. If any of you want to add me there, go ahead. Right now I'm only working on Norwegian, though I might pick up another language eventually (though I'm not sure what). I've been going through the lessons very slowly; I don't want to run out of them. And taking in too much all at once tends to be a little overwhelming and I usually forget things easily when I do that. Anyway, so far it seems to be pretty useful for drills, though I don't know how useful it will be for anything else. The upside is that it gets me in the mood to work on Norwegian, and that's the important part.

Comments

[st_aurafina]

I'm doing Italian on Duolingo - I'm danpants on there, I've added you. Ugh, I've been so slack, maybe adding people will help me to remember to actually go and do the thing.

[yuuago]

:D! Sounds good. Hopefully you'll be able to find more motivation.

Italian is one of the languages I might pick up once I get farther with Norwegian, but I haven't decided yet. How do you like it?

[st_aurafina]

It's actually pretty easy? I'm a native listener, (so like, my grandparents speak and it's my dad's first language but we didn't speak it at home), so I'm not sure if I'm finding it easy because it is easy or because I have strange caches of language tucked away in my brain.

The Duolingo classes have some weird sentences though - a lot of eating strange foods like sugar.

[raskolnikov]

How does duolingo work?

[yuuago]

Basically, after you choose which language to learn, you do short lessons that involve the program throwing vocabulary at you, and eventually you build up to use them in simple phrases/sentences. These can then be reviewed in practice lessons/drills. It gamifies it by giving points for how much you complete from lessons/practice, letting you level up (not sure if that does anything or if it's just numbers). And there's a social aspect to it - you can add your friends and write messages to them, which can be a convenient way to practice if you're learning the same language, though not so useful if you're not.

I'm not sure how well it would work for learning a language from scratch, but it can be a good way to do review if you're already working on a language that they offer.

[raskolnikov]

Ah, great. That is exactly what I was interested in; improving my language skill for languages I haven't used in a while.

Thanks! I'll probably go sign up.

[dhampyresa]

Tat sucks about the fire, man.

Duolingo sounds interesting.

[icelilly]

Nice! I was wondering if you'd ever get an account after Norwegian was added. I've been using for it Swedish and Danish, and for brushing up on my French but it's been a while since I last did anything there. I need to get back into things. I was using it for German too since I was hoping to get refresher course but I've barely touched it. D:

I've gone and added you. But I'm pretty sure you knew it was me pfft.

[yuuago]

Added you back!
I've been thinking of doing French on it, but I don't know... my bitterness about French is pretty strong :|a