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Assimil Adventure: 6 languages at a time | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Kerrie Senior Member United States justpaste.it/Kerrie2 Joined 5393 days ago 1232 posts - 1740 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 65 of 94 26 September 2012 at 1:48pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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Of the courses I've done, German is the absolute funniest. Every other lesson has me chuckling. =) 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| vermillon Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4676 days ago 602 posts - 1042 votes Speaks: French*, EnglishC2, Mandarin Studies: Japanese, German | Message 66 of 94 02 October 2012 at 4:53pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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That stupid Firefox (or was it me) destroyed my post while I was at Swahili. This is likely to be a much shorter report than what I had planned in the first place.
This has been the first week of active wave. By now, I am 7.5 days late, and my goal over the next 2-3 weeks is to catch up with that delay. I reckon I can do an extra 2-3 lessons per day, which would mean catching up one day every 2-3 days. Of course, a higher priority goal is not to give up, and therefore not burning out will be more important than catching up. Nevertheless, if I could, I would like to finish before Christmas holidays, as I'd like to do other things during that time. This week I've been able to settle down a bit and find a better rhythm, more sleep and more time for study. Results are there, and overall I've been much more motivated and happy studying my languages. I've tried to change my state of mind to think positively: several of the languages don't make me very excited, but I choose to somehow ignore that and just keep up with them. It was either that or giving them up entirely, as I don't believe they'll get any more interesting any time soon. Before starting, I'd like to give some advice to the people contemplating taking part in the Assimil Experiment and who might follow this log:
Assimil Adventure - Week 8 -Egyptian Hieroglyphs : lessons 50 to 56 : 3h50 (delay: 7 days) Better week than the previous: not studying on the bus but actually at home has helped a lot. Overall I've been quite happy with my progress and the revision has been instructive. I'm still quite concerned with Egyptian's conjugation system however: it seems to me that most of the tense are exactly the same. Here's a fictive (but not too far from reality) example: "Here the verb is in the 'subjunctive sdm-f', which you can recognise from the absence of marking after the stem" and then "Here the verb is in the 'preterite sdm-f' which you can recognise from the absence of marking after the stem" (what???) and finally "Here the verb is in the 'aorist sdm(w)-f', which you can recognise from the (w) marking. That (w) is generally not written.". Well, fortunately, after studying Classical Chinese, I have no problem infering tenses from context, and to me it doesn't really matter if a verb is in the subjunctive or aorist... but still, that's a bit puzzling. Active wave: I didn't do it. The first week only introduces words, half of them never being repeated later and therefore have no chance to be remembered two months later. The book is also laid out in such a way that it's impossible to do the active wave: the Egyptian, pronunciation and French are written under each other and it's impossible not to see the Egyptian when reading the French (I've tried to hide it, but didn't work). I'll keep it for next week. -Latin : lessons 50 to 56 : 3h25 (delay: 8 days) Very good with for Latin, with a (heavily simplified?) text from St Augustine about how he learnt his mother tongue and how he perceived the teaching of Greek he received (hint: he hated it) when he was a child. A lesson couldn't be more appropriate than an original text written almost two millenia ago about language learning, could it? Then the week ended with a nice summary of the conjugation system, which makes me wonder what can possibly come during the next 6 weeks. As for Egyptian, the layout of the first week is Latin+French so close that it's difficult not to cheat, but I've done it anyway (not cheat, I mean). It's very pleasant to see the progress, even though I'm missing a word or idiom every other sentence. I don't know what to do about it, here's how I process: I don't review anything and directly try to translate. I know they recommend re-reading the notes, but then they contain all the answers to the translation, don't they? When I couldn't find the answer, I would check, and the second time I was able to produce the dialogue correctly, but perhaps that's just obvious. -Norwegian lessons 50 to 56 : 3h55 (delay: 8 days) I'll keep it brief here. A good week, as usual. I have the same comments for the active wave as I have for Latin, but I'm not worried, and actually quite pleased to have this opportunity to review everything I've learnt so far. I feel that from now on, it will mostly be vocabulary and idiom acquisition rather than new grammar. This is fine, Norwegian seems to be "pretty light on grammar" anyway (well, I may regret that comment some day). On the side, I've bought a manga about Crime and Punishment. Haven't started reading it yet, but couldn't resist buying. -Polish : lessons 50 to 56 : 2h25 (delay: 7 days) Very short here as well. Pleasant week, same comment about the active wave etc. I'm still concerned with the very low volume of the lessons, and I don't believe that book will get me far in Polish: not seen yet anything about the declensions apart from a few notes here and there, but nothing systematic. I'm tempted to start reading my Routledge's Polish Essential Grammar from cover to cover to quench my knowledge thirst. I give myself two more weeks to see how the active wave goes and how good I am at producing the correct case endings. -Swahili : lessons 50 to 56 : 4h25 (delay: 7 days) Now definitely my favourite. Creating that Anki deck was the best decision I could make I believe. I'm adding the vocabulary of every new lesson, and I try to catch up on the old lessons, being ahead of the active wave (surfing?), and I have now 500 cards. This has helped tremendously in two ways: first, I can produce the Swahili during the active wave, and there are only a few words I can't remember, while two weeks ago there were dozens/hundreds. Second, I don't feel frustrated when I study a new lesson: before I had to look up the new vocabulary as well as the one I had forgotten from previous lesson, now this is much less the case and my reading ability has improved a lot. As for Assimil itself, I still love the lessons, the new grammar every day really gives a feeling of progress, and I hope this will continue until the end of the book. Every time I thought there was probably no more grammar I could learn, the book would come up with some crazy verbal affix, for instance a "relative infix" (a particle you add in the middle of the verb to reproduce the "that/who" in sentences like "the guy who is sleeping"). To reward and motivate myself further, I've bought Mwana mdogo wa mfalme (The Little Prince) in Swahili and should receive it shortly. Perhaps that's a bit ambitious, but well, in a two months I'll have finished the book passively and I would like something to continue practicing my Swahili. :) -Indonesian : lessons 50 to 56 : 4h05 (delay: 8 days) I'll try to keep it short. I find this book really boring. But I've decided to ignore it and try to focus on learning Indonesian. Perhaps I'll suffer a bit, but I'll retain something from it. I don't want to give up yet, especially as resources for Indonesian are not at all common place. So from now on, I'll try to document how I feel generally about my progress in Indonesian rather than my sentiment regarding the content of the book. The active wave went quite well. The Anki deck helped here as well, but the sentence structure can be a bit difficult to grasp. I'm really wondering how I'll manage to deal with the active wave once I get to the affixes that I'll need to produce. A final note: That first week of the active wave was a bit of a warm-up. The second week should be much more challenging, and I can't wait! I think I'll do a 3rd wave (I may reconsider this statement): once I'll have finished the passive wave entirely (lesson 100), I'll start a second active wave, probably at the rhythm of two lessons a day, so that waves 2 (active) and 3 (second active) finish on the same day and don't make my project longer. I'm not there yet (6-7 weeks to go), but I believe this should be highly beneficial. 5 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| vermillon Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4676 days ago 602 posts - 1042 votes Speaks: French*, EnglishC2, Mandarin Studies: Japanese, German | Message 67 of 94 11 October 2012 at 5:58pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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Alright, a bit late again, and I won't try to track how much that "bit" is. I had started catching up but some long week-end away cancelled all the effort. I feel satisfied thinking that I'm still there in week 9 and that an extra week should get me out of Volte's bad omen.
Relatively bad news still, as I've decided to drop Indonesian for now. The main reason is that the content of the book is really ridiculous and I can't suffer going through half an hour of it day after day. This is temporary, as I'm waiting for the first feedbacks on the new Assimil Indonesian, and I'm considering buying that new version once I can be fairly confident that it's a decent book. This has had the nice consequence of reducing my studying load by 17%, and considering how much easier it makes things, it's difficult not to be tempted to drop one or two extra languages and focus more on the languages I really like and plan on pursuing after. I'll keep that option and, who knows, there might still be something left out of the 6 by the end of the year! Assimil Adventure - Week 9 -Egyptian Hieroglyphs : lessons 57 to 63 : 3h After last week's revision, I've felt a short boost in motivation: suddenly, tenses would become clearer and I would understand quite a lot of the text before reading the French or even the notes. However, quickly I fell back in this state of despair, facing the ever growing vocabulary, realising that I would see these words once or twice and then they would disappear for two months until they resurface during the active wave. Yes, let's talk about the active wave. I really have a problem with a vocabulary, as we've mentioned before with emk I believe. I don't quite know what the purpose of the active wave is in Egyptian: I'm not going to actually produce any Egyptian, and my memory is not good enough to remember the word (and the written form) for names of trees I didn't even know in French before picking up this book. Perhaps the purpose is to make me practice grammar, but then the lessons consist mostly of a lot of vocabulary + very simple grammar that's been hammered for several weeks and that "of course" I have mastered. That may be obvious from the description above, but I'm not really happy with Egyptian. Perhaps this is because I didn't really ask myself what I expected to get from this course? Or because I don't really plan to continue after the end of this course (well, I've contemplated quite a few times Gardiner's grammar at the bookshop, and it looks tempting)? Or is it the content of the lessons that failed to keep my interest? Considering there are still ~90 days to go and that it's about 45-50h, I'm not sure how long I'll continue Egyptian. -Latin : lessons 57 to 63 : 2h15 Second "I'm fed up" language. I've loved this book at the beginning: it was vivid and far from every single Latin textbook I've seen (I haven't see the Lingua Latina Per Se or other very popular ones I must admit), and every lesson was pure pleasure. But then, after St Augustine which was at least appropriate in terms of content (about language learning), the last few lessons have been really boring for me: apart from a description of the oath pharmacist would swear when starting on this career (why???), the dialogues have seemed to be there mostly to cram in as much vocabulary as possible. I will not contest that this vocabulary is very often of daily use (food, shopping etc), but there has been so much of it that I could not read the texts without much effort. And as this vocabulary is also never reused in later lessons, there is absolutely no hope that I will be able to produce it later on in the active wave. In these conditions, I'm really wondering if I should continue: I know I'm running straight into the wall in the active wave, because soon every single lesson will be so frustrating when I cannot produce anything. It won't be because of the grammar (though lately the introduction of conjugation was too intense and I don't think I can possibly have remembered it all), but simply because I won't be able to remember the words. When I come to think of it, I think that's the biggest problem of this book: the absence of repetition: the vocabulary is not repeated (or only a very few of the words), and as for grammar, one thing I would like to see is a better comparison between the different tenses. Finally, the absence of text with holes exercises (is that cloze deletion?) is actually quite a problem: not having to produce anything until you reach the active wave means you have no way to see if you actually understood well the content of the lesson, because the texts are quite easy to understand generally that ignoring conjugation doesn't prevent comprehension. I should make the same comment as for Egyptian. As I'm not really planning to continue with Latin afterwards, this is the other language I'd consider dropping in order to have more time for Norwegian/Polish/Swahili. -Norwegian lessons 57 to 63 : 3h25 Ok, finally a language I'm happy with! :) I have much less to say, as I tend to say more when I have something to complain about. Lessons are usually funny, the actors sound credible, and there's always a good dose of reusable expressions in every lesson that the revision lesson even sums up at the end of the week. At this stage, I can see that the learning curve is decreasing and the amount of new grammar seems to be diminishing in favour of more vocabulary. I think that may be the moment to start an Anki deck, and I'm still considering what format I should use. Perhaps a sentence deck? Cloze deletion (if ever Anki 2 is able to create that easily)? My plan is to have that third wave in which I'd re-do an active wave, but with enough preparation that it would be a real breeze, not missing any vocabulary or grammar, and getting right most of the idioms. This is already more or less what happens in my Swahili active wave, and no doubt this is because of Anki (overlearning?). This may be more work, but clearly I prefer to put in more work and have very positive feedback ("you've mastered it all") than less work and mild frustration. I also can't wait to switch on native material. I want to wait a bit more, but have started exploring what online newspapers I could read. Ideally I'd also make myself a few tools to assist the vocabulary acquisition. -Polish : lessons 57 to 63 : 2h20 About the same as for Norwegian, but probably not as good. The lessons are generally quite pleasant, but I don't have the feeling I'm progressing very fast and I could probably make use of that grammar book sitting on my shelf (ok, I've said it already, I'm merely trying to push myself here). Here also I'm considering having an Anki deck, and I think it would be much more necessary than for Norwegian, as the vocabulary is almost entirely alien (while Norwegian is quite close to German and is at least pronounceable). As I've ditched Indonesian for now and Swahili is under control, this may be my next task, and I'd like to undertake it quite soon as the active wave is probably going to kick my butt. Again, I'm wondering if Anki 2 has a convenient way to do cloze deletion (if this is the best way at all?), and I need to set up my keyboard to type Polish and Norwegian (probably a matter of minutes under Ubuntu..). Also I think I could use some simple reader to feel like I can actually do something with my current Polish. Probably I can't even read a book for 4-year-olds... -Swahili : lessons 57 to 63 : 4h15 Globally very satisfied, as usual. I've managed to catch up on Anki, now having added the vocabulary of the 63 first lessons, amounting to around 750 words. New vocabulary is now rarer, which I quite like. It suggests that my Anki deck should grow slower for now (but then I don't see how it would reach the 2000 words Assimil usually claims, so there may be a surprise soon), and that I now have time to tackle Polish and then Norwegian. I believe this lower vocabulary introduction rate is simply the consequence of still having an important load of grammar every week. This week has introduced relative clauses, and once again I feel that this language is crazy. If I'm correct, next week will complete the general structure of verbs in Swahili. Swahili is agglutinative, and its verb can have 8 different components, the "relative infix" being one of them. Its role is simply to introduce the "who" or "that" relative pronoun into the verb, as if it was not loaded enough with subject-tense-object-root-theme_vowel and some I haven't seen yet. Alright, I'm just really excited about the language. I've bought Le Petit Prince and finally received it, though haven't started reading it yet (seems like I'm missing quite a lot of vocabulary, so I may keep that for when I've reached lesson 100). I've also searched for music, and I've been quite surprised to find a bunch of hip hop ("genge") songs from Kenya which are pretty nice to listen to. I've looked at their lyrics quickly, and I can recognize tons of words in them, which is very stimulating and I think it's possible I attempt to learn a song or two very soon. These songs have the particularly of being sung in "Sheng" which is the name of the slang spoken by the youth, usually a mix of Swahili, English and possibly some other local language. This slang is very interesting I believe, because it includes English words (most of them I couldn't identify by ear, as the pronunciation was not obvious) and these words are processed like Swahili ones: they receive the Swahili mark of plural (ma-boys, ma-finger, m-junior) and the verbs receive all the affixes (tuki-hustle, tuna-do)! If you're reading this and looking for a language to give a shot, try Swahili! I didn't expect anything of it, but it turns out to be the most pleasant one to study :) -Indonesian : lesson 57 only : 20m Ok, I won't write anything here as I've explained in the introduction. I hope I can resume learning Indonesian very soon and that the new Assimil will make me think of Indonesian as highly as I think of Swahili. A final note: An ok week, some very good and some less good. I'm seriously thinking of reducing the number of languages studied. This is not necessarily that I find it to difficult to keep with, but it's difficult to give equal times to languages you don't enjoy equally. I'm also starting to rationalise my language study over the whole year, and I think I've explored quite a few. I may continue exploring a few more new languages in 2013, but I'd also like to settle on a few languages to push further. It may simply require better organization, and I'm still very much sucking at that. 5 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5530 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 68 of 94 11 October 2012 at 6:44pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Maybe the whole dead language thing just isn't clicking for you right now? I couldn't justifying finishing Egyptian all in one go. In small doses, it's absolutely fascinating. I love the sense of deep time, and even though the literature is rather rudimentary at times, it's some of the oldest in the world. I'm still solid on lessons 1–30, thanks to Anki. (I can open up the book to any of the older lessons, and read the hieroglyphs directly, with only a few forgotten words.) I plan to tackle lessons 31–100ish over the next few years, when the spirit moves me. But I have to spread it out like this, and take my time. In the right mood, the strange sentences and ancient royal propaganda are just what I'm looking for. I'd say to skip or heavily modify the active wave. I think that Assimil introduces too much, too fast, with insufficient repetition in this book. So the active wave is going to be rough, and it would require an easy-going, non-traditional approach to enjoy it. Still, I'm really happy with everything up through lesson 30, and I hope to finish the book sometime in the next 5 years or so. No rush. :-) 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 5164 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 69 of 94 11 October 2012 at 7:08pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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Je suis desolé que tu aies (as) quitté l'indonésien mais c'est entièrement justifiable, compte tenu de la déplorable qualité des dialogues. Ça me rend encore plus triste car c'est un livre que j'ai acheté, moi-même, et qui se trouve dans mon étagère en atendant un moment qui viendra quand-même, car je ne veux pas gaspiller cette ouvrage même si elle n'est pas la meilleure sur le marché. Comme toi, j'espère vraiment que la nouvelle édition de l'indonésien reprise la qualité Assimil!
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| vermillon Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4676 days ago 602 posts - 1042 votes Speaks: French*, EnglishC2, Mandarin Studies: Japanese, German | Message 70 of 94 17 October 2012 at 5:40pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
I don't think that's the problem, as I really love Classical Chinese. Perhaps the material I've been exposed to in Classical Chinese was just much more interesting (not perhaps, it was definitely) than that of Assimil Egyptian/Latin. I don't blame Assimil for Egyptian, there "may" not be very interesting things to show, or perhaps simply I'm not interested in those very interesting topics.
I believe this is a very sensible approach, and that's probably my problem (because over all, I enjoyed it quite a bit before I became very busy). I've tried to keep all my languages in sync, and it's quite possible that the answer to this problem is that I have to allow them to progress at different paces. As it's a kind of experiment for me whose aim is to learn to learn, I can take that as one of the teachings of this experiment: I tend to give myself numbered targets (do 1 lesson every day, learn 500 words over 2 weeks) as a way to push myself, but I don't listen enough to the signs announcing burn-outs.
I believe so as well, here again I may have mistaken "doing some every day" with "do one lesson every day". I don't want to give it up, and I will try to progress more slowly on the material. That may involve learning to type and continue the deck you've given to me. For now, I'm going to put Egyptian on hold for a bit of time, in order to let it cool down and when I feel like going back to it, I will. With more time on my hands, that should be doable. I will do the same for Latin.
Merci pour le post en français, j'apprécie toujours l'effort :) Ce n'est pas très grave pour l'indonésien, je vais y revenir dès que je pourrai, et ça me donne un peu plus de temps pour avancer sur mes autres langues. Apprendre doit rester un plaisir! 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| vermillon Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4676 days ago 602 posts - 1042 votes Speaks: French*, EnglishC2, Mandarin Studies: Japanese, German | Message 71 of 94 17 October 2012 at 7:28pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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Alright, so following last week's demotivation peak, and emk's comment (see previous post), I've decided to put on hold Egyptian and Latin. So... in two weeks, I've dropped half of the languages of my experiment, right? Is this a scam?
I've thought of it quite a bit before doing it. Now that I've been experimenting this "drop" for a week, I think this was the right choice. Here's a little before/after bullet list, to avoid typing a long and boring paragraph. Before:
Now:
So I will go back to the other languages, but: -I will probably first try to get to lesson 100 in the passive wave before that (2-4 weeks) for Egyptian. -to Indonesian, under the same conditions, once I know if the new Assimil is worth it. If it isn't, I've already spent a bit of time in SOAS's library trying to find other learning material and know more or less what I would buy. -for Latin, not sure. I've spent the year exploring languages, and perhaps it's time for me to try to rationalise and spend more time on the languages I really want to improve and perhaps reach fluency (aaah, he said the word) in a few of them by the end of 2013. Assimil Adventure - Week 10 -Egyptian Hieroglyphs : no lesson : 0m On hold for now. "5 year target?" ;) -Latin : no lesson : 0m On hold for now. -Norwegian lessons 64 to 70 : 4h That was my feeling and Assimil itself commented on it at the end of lesson 70: there is not much more to learn in terms of grammar, and the book is going to focus more on feeding the learner with vocabulary and idioms, trying both to complete the essential/concrete vocabulary of the learner but also to teach him more abstract expressions. This seems like a very good thing to me. I don't think I've mastered the grammar yet but tons of idioms, if correctly learned, can quickly help me to formulate more ideas in a more Norwegian way. I've also finally started an Anki deck, now that I've more time on my hands. I've decided to go for cloze cardsand I'm mostly adding about every sentence of the book into Anki, with as many cloze deletions as I see fit. Haven't really had the chance to see the effects of it, but I reckon it should improve my retention of idioms, as well as making it easier to produce sentence. I also do a very little bit of self-talk, but that's rather shy at the moment. As I'm getting closer to the end of the book, and once I'm catching up on building my Anki deck, I will try to include more of different sources (if possible TV and news). On a very short note, the active wave tends to be quite difficult. The dialogs are quite idiomatic, and because I didn't use to pay attention much to these idioms, I have forgotten quite a lot of them. This should change with Anki and the 3rd wave. -Polish : lessons 64 to 70 : 4h20 The main thing this week is that I've also started a new deck, with the same principle as for Norwegian. The trigger has been that I could practically recall nothing during the active wave, or at least not most of the vocabulary. I want to tackle that the quickest possible and I feel that a few days already start to bring benefits:
Apart from that big chunk, not much. Assimil is still counting on assimilation and I would enjoy having more systematic explanations (Assimil Swahili has nice charts for instance), but it's alright, I'll get there anyway. -Swahili : lessons 64 to 70 : 4h10 Though this is absolutely not the case, I feel that I've had less work to do this week. This is certainly because I've finished catching up on past lessons to add to Anki, and I'm now typically having 7-10 new words to add per lesson. As the total time for the week didn't change from last week, I can only conclude that I've spent more time on actual study. As in Norwegian, the book says it has now mostly finished teaching the structure of Swahili and is now going to slowly complete the verbal system (funny verbal suffixes to come), and building up on vocabulary. I feel much more relaxed and I do the active wave without any frustration, quite the opposite: I can complete each lesson almost without mistake, and when I actually make a mistake, I now take the time to learn from that mistake in order not to do it again. Globally very satisfied with my studies, I really feel like rushing to the end of the book, do a third wave and then start going elsewhere: music and news to expand my vocabulary, reading stories for pleasure (and vocabulary) and possibly lang-8 for practice. -Indonesian : no lesson : 0m On hold until I get news from the new edition and see if it's worth buying. A final note: A great week. I'm not disappointed in the least to have dropped half of the languages for now. I'm happy I've started with 6, but now I feel that it's just right to halve the load. With the extra free time, I can learn more on my languages, and I can also do more lessons per day if I feel like it! Edited by vermillon on 17 October 2012 at 8:29pm 5 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| embici Triglot Senior Member CanadaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4608 days ago 263 posts - 370 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, French Studies: Greek | Message 72 of 94 17 October 2012 at 7:41pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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You are truly an inspiration, vermillon. Keep up the great work!
Swahili is on my to-do list and reading your log, I feel I might just have to purchase Assimil and bump it up to the top of that list. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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