My adventures in German continue

So, I've kept up with teaching myself a little German every day. It's hard. Way harder than learning Portuguese, which I made relatively quick progress with. Having Spanish as a native tongue probably helped with that more than I realized even though by now I'm more fluent in English than Spanish.

I got myself a notebook to write tidbits in German. At the moment, it looks like I've returned to first grade, though I hope my handwriting is better. Today, I worked out that "sie" means a lot more than I first realized thanks to this:

At first I was like . . . but Männer is "men" and "sie" is "she"

Then it hit me! The verb decides what "sie" means because . . . why not? That makes sense, I guess. I'm sure Duolingo tried to tell me something like that at some point, but I was like "okay, alright, I'm tired though, next exercise".

ETA on 12/21/15: Apparently there's a different verb for animals eating (fressen) than for humans eating (essen) and it's insulting to use fressen when referring to a human. This feels like something I would forget.

I've started "Veronika decide morrer"

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Since Duolingo's Portuguese exercises have gotten a little to simple to improve my skills, I've decided to spend some hours every week reading Paulo Cuelho's Veronika decide morrer. I have an English copy of the book to check my translations against.

Since every translation is different depending on the translator's skill and viewpoint, it'll be interesting to see how far I get and how much my amateur translations differ from Margaret Jull Costa's, the person who translated my English edition of the book.

I won't tell myself that I'll push through the entire book. That would be daunting even if I didn't have a million other things to do. At some point during the day, I have to squeeze in some German practice, Spanish review, exercise, keeping that Duolingo Portuguese tree gilded, studying, work, personal writing, and perhaps speaking to other human beings. I'd rather focus on what little I can get through every time I can squeeze some time for the project, or I wouldn't start doing any of it at all.

So without further ado, the first two paragraphs of Veronika decide morrer:

 I read:

On November 11th of 1997, Veronika decided that - finally! - the time to kill herself had arrived. Carefully, she cleaned her room near num convento de freiras, disabled her heating, brushed her teeth, and se deitou.

From the make-up table, she got the four sleeping pills. Instead of crushing them and mixing them with water, she resolved to take them one by one, since there exited a great distance between the intention and the act, and she wanted to be free to change her mind. In the meantime, with each pill that she swallowed, she felt more convinced after five minutes, the boxes were empty.

I don't know what num convento de freiras means. For some reason, I want to say "near the train station", but that's not right. This might be an instant when knowing Spanish is detrimental because convento fixates my mind on convents and nuns. But I know that, in this context and in this language, num means "a". Or perhaps "an".

Se deitou means something like "stopped". More specifically, "stopped herself". Here's the thing though, I remember reading this English way bay in sophomore year of undergrad, and the closing words of the opening paragraph are something like "and laid on her bed".

So, am I remembering wrong?

Languages and Duolingo

Learning languages is my version of Candy Crush, a tidbit about myself I learned thanks to moving to a Brazilian neighborhood and Duolingo. At first, I started teaching myself Portuguese so I could speak to patients at work, but over the last year I've realized that keeping track of my Duolingo tree helps me relax during my commute. I started refreshing my Spanish, which has grown atrocious over the last decade and change.

And Duolingo works! Today, I facilitated a full conversation between my attending and a Brazilian woman eager to go home. Much to my delight, I clearly understood every single sentence from the woman (a native speaker of Portuguese). One of the first phrases I taught myself is "Se você fala devagar, eu comprendo". I didn't have to use it once today, though I still understand much more than I can say.

To congratulate myself, I decided to start my next Duolingo tree early. I'd planned to wait until my Portuguese tree was gilded, but since it looks like I can hold a conversation already, I went right on ahead and started German.

And it was a bit of a disaster. I didn't realize just how much knowing Spanish helped me with Portuguese until I read this:

From Duolingo's German "Basics" lesson. I didn't even grasp the English.

To be fair to myself, I did complete the lesson with a single error, and that was at the end of a very long day at work and after spending a good hour on Portuguese and Spanish. I'll continue at it and hopefully by next year I'll be able to understand a little bit of German.

Duolingo: I've finally finished my Portuguese skill tree!

After taking a month off during inpatient family medicine, I've finally completed the entire tree.
Most individual skill sets are not gold anymore and the percentage thing on the right of the screen tells me I'm at 48% fluency, but still. Go me.

I've really noticed the change in my everyday fluency. When I get Portuguese-speaking patients, I can get a history so much easier. I'm still at the stage where I understand more than I can speak, but that's still incredibly helpful, both for me and the patients.

My current goal is to go back up the tree and gild it before starting another language. I'm eyeing German, Russian, and Italian next. Italian because I tried to learn it in high school, and German and Russian because they both sound cool in movies.

But patience is key. First, I have to improve my Portuguese skill tree. I'm hoping to read Veronika Decide Morrer in Portuguese sometime next year.

Hey, if I can teach myself Russian before I die, I'll be able to read Notes from Underground in the original language. Maybe even write a blog post about the differences.

Which reminds me, I need to read La Fiesta del Chivo in Spanish before I forget how to read and write in my native tongue.