Question of the day.

Let’s have a question today, shall we? 🙂

 

What do you have that others don’t and will never have? 

 

My answer: 

 

Beyond the obvious, like my fingerprints, facial features, voice, DNA, soul or mind, I have Misha! Well, you could say that my family has Misha too, but they don’t really have him as much as I do, because I bought him so he’s officially mine. I’m not sure about the “will never have” part because, as I often say, if I were to ever move from here, like if I were to live on my own or in some place where crazy  Bibielz go when they don’t know how to make their own food or interact with people, and Misha would still be alive by then, I wouldn’t take him with me, because I wouldn’t be able to care for him the way he needs in every single situation, like when he needs his eyedrops for example. And also it would be a huge stress for him.

 

I’d be surprised if someone else had the same faza peep as me. I mean a proper, actual faza. I’d be quite surprised. Especially regarding Gwilym or Jacob because they’re really niche outside of Wales. I of course know people who like Cornelis or Gwilym and their respective music, but fazas as such seem to be quite rare. And if you want to be very thorough and precise, even if there is someone who has a faza on one of these people, theirs surely feels different than mine. And even if theirs would be similar, I can totally bet that there’s no other person who’s had fazas on all three of these people during their life. 😀 

 

I bet no one has an identical room as mine, and even if someone will live here in the future, I’m sure they’ll make it look very different so it won’t really be the same room anymore. 

 

I often wonder if there is any people who know exactly the same combination of languages that I do: Polish, English, Swedish, Welsh and Norwegian. Without Welsh in the mix, I’m sure there are thousands of such people, but one little language can change so much. People don’t own languages they speak in a literal sense obviously, but in a more metaphorical/symbolical/poetic, I think they do. Oh yeah, and we do say that someone can have a good command of a language. That’s not necessarily what I would say about my Welsh, and I would hesitate a lot about Norwegian, but I do have some degree of command over them, right? 

 

Oh wait, can two gem stones look identical? ‘Cause if not, I have a lot of gem stones that no one else has. And even if there can be identical stones, I’m sure that still a good deal of mine must be quite unique. Like my pyrite, it looks really odd and if there’s someone else who has an identical one, I want to meet that peep ‘cause they must be cool if they have such a cool piece of pyrite (I should really take those pics of my gem stones that I’ve wanted to do for ages and share them here so then at least the chances of that peep & I  meeting can increase). 

 

Also, who else in this creepy world is both blind and has AVPD? I feel like there should be more of us, but I don’t know anyone else who has both these things at once so it feels kinda lonely. But then I sometimes think that some aspects of these two things make it a really malicious combination to live with so for that reason I do hope no one else’s stuck with it. But even if there are blind folks with AVPD, I wonder if anyone of them is totally blind like me and due to optic nerve hypoplasia/septo-optic dysplasia also like me. Septo-optic dysplasia is rare and such a combination would be super rare, because from what I see, most people with either optic nerve hypoplasie alone or septo-optic dysplasia have some vision left and they may qualify/identify as low-vision rather than blind.

 

Actually, speaking of SOD, I’d like to share something weird I discovered recently, but I want to give you a fuller picture, so beware, long-ish digression ahead. When I was born, my parents had to basically figure out over time that I was blind, and then that on top of that I had hormonal issues, but even when I ended up in the care of an endocrinologist when I was already in preschool, they were never told that these two things are related and that there is a rare genetic condition where a child is born with underdeveloped optic nerve and pituitary, and often other issues that can range in severity quite a lot between people, even though as we learned later I displayed classic and creepily specific signs from the beginning. They most likely didn’t know, because it’s so rare and even now when you Google “septo-optic dysplasia” in Polish, what you mostly see is just fundraisers of parents who want to get treatment for their children, rather than any resources where you could learn something substantial. There are people with SOD who are intellectually disabled with severe hormonal issues, visual impairments, seizures and cerebral palsy, , there are people kinda like me who are blind and on top of that have some mild to severe hormonal issues, or people who have low vision but good enough that they can even drive but are still struggling with the hormones, or anything in between. Some people claim it’s a spectrum which makes sense. I only found out that such a thing exists when I was about 17 or so and trying to wrap my brain around what actually the problem with my hormones is, because no one really told me that in a normal way and my parents were very confused too. I couldn’t have found that out earlier, because to be able to do this, I had to understand English more or less, and when I was 17 I started essentially self-teaching English and my fluency  suddenly leapt forward, though was still rather lame compared with what it’s like now so I didn’t really understand all that medical language. But when I found out about SOD, I told my Mum about it and she was a bit shocked so we went to a neurologist who said that yeah, it seems logical that this must be the case, but was so vague that my Mum suspected that he probably hadn’t heard about it before and just didn’t want to say it. I never pursued any official diagnosis because I didn’t think that would give me anything at this point, it feels sort of too late or something, though it could have potentially helped both me and my family when I was a kid. Sometimes I wonder if it did something else to my brain that I’m not aware of and might be partially or completely responsible for what I call my “weird-brainedness” but it’s not like it matters hugely I guess. Since I didn’t have an official diagnosis and since SOD is so rare, I rarely even tell people that I have it, most often if I talk about the cause of my blindness I just say ONH. Anyway, recently some life circumstances made me dive deeper into the topic of SOD, which, now that my English is a lot better than at 17, made me discover a lot of quite interesting stuff. But one thing that I found interesting specifically because it clearly applied to me was that I came across an abstract of a scholarly piece where they said that there have been cases of people with SOD who also have… anosmia, because of underdeveloped olfactory bulbs. :O This world is full of mysteries. For those unaware, I am anosmic, although when I was younger I often wondered whether perhaps I’m just such a freak that I don’t even know how to use my sense of smell and interpret what it tells me, because, like, why would I even not have it? It would be a sick coincidence to be blind and anosmic (even if anosmia isn’t really a problem or not in my experience anyway, it just kind of reeks of morbid humour when you look at it from the outside I guess). And people would repeatedly tell me that I must have it, maybe it’s just weak or something or maybe it’s because I have allergies and hay fever all the time. At school, when we did gardening and smelled spring or autumn flowers, or other fragrant things, I would just pretend like people in “Emperor’s New Clothes”: “Mmmm yeah, it smells lovely!” It’s so ingrained in me that even now I still tell Misha that he smells beautifully even though I’ve never felt his smell, but Sofi often says that and my Mum too so when I tell him it means more that he’s just beautiful all round. I’ve only started being more open about my anosmia when Covid hit and a lot of people were in the same situation as me. Except people would think that if my sense of smell is nonexistent, then my sense of taste must be, too, because that’s what they experienced with Covid. But I assure you people that my sense of taste works perfectly well, or even better than that, because I think I’ve always had some taste hypersensitivity actually, and I have gustatory synaesthesia after all. But some people would still tell me that if I wouldn’t have the sense of smell, I wouldn’t have the sense of taste either, so I can either have none, or both and it’s probably my autosuggestion and shit like that. It’s such a simple and small thing, and my anosmia doesn’t affect my life in any bad way beyond it being low-key frustrating that I don’t know what it means that Misha “smells like sleep”, but it made me feel oddly happy to learn that it’s actually a real thing and that there’s a proper reason for that. My Mum got a laughing fit when I told her about that, I wasn’t exactly sure why, but it turned out infectious so we both ended up in stitches over this anosmia thing. And then I even came across a YouTube channel of a woman who has SOD and she’s totally blind and has anosmia as well. But I’ve never come across any info about gustatory problems related to SOD, and I think I dug deep, or at least long. So I resolved that from now on, if someone will try to discredit the existence or clarity of my sense of smell, I will  just flipping eat them, and once we meet in eternity I’ll make sure to let them know what they tasted like. So yeah, it may sound miserable to you or like I should be a vegetable but now it’s confirmed that I have three senses lol (at least when you count only the five senses as senses, and not proprioception and all that other sophisticated stuff). 

 

So, going back to the question finally, it would be even more intriguing to learn if there’s anyone else who has AVPD, no vision and anosmia all at the same time. 😀 

 

Ugh, and I’m absolutely sure that no one else has the same “Ian” living in their brain. But then no one has the same other, Brainworld peeps that I have either, the ones that are fun, and generally the same Brainworld/paracosm structure as mine. 

 

And no one has the same passworded diary files as I do on their computer, haha, at least I hope so. 😀 

 

I’m thinking but can’t think of anything else interesting or worth mentioning, so that’s probably it for me. 

 

How about you? And how do you feel about being the only one who has the thing that you have? 🙂 

 

Question of the day (16th March).

   What is your most useless achievement? 

   My answer:

   The first thing that comes to my mind is graduating high school, and even with honours (or rather our Polish equivalent of that). 😀 It’s funny and was totally useless, because months later, as you may or may not be aware, it turned out that I failed my Maths final exam, and you have to pass all your finals in order to go anywhere further in your education. I failed it miserably enough that that I decided not to retake it, as I had very little idea about what I’d do afterwards anyway, so I guess it’s possible that in the end my finals and any further education would end up being a useless achievement too. As I wrote in a post about useless skills, I guess some of my languages, namely Swedish, Welsh and Norwegian, may be considered useless for me as well, so if we think of them as such, then my achievements related to them can definitely be called useless. Not that I care particularly much though. 

Question of the day.

   What are three things you couldn’t live without? 

   My answer: 

   The first such thing that comes to my mind is Holy Mass. And I mean Traditional Latin Mass in particular, because back when I used to go to the new Mass I never really felt this way. Despite being raised Catholic, I never really felt like I couldn’t live without Communion. I knew it theoretically, that it’s important in your spiritual life, that it’s the Bread of life and all that, but I didn’t really feel it as such. Kind of as if you knew that you need to eat to survive and know what minerals and vitamins are in which food and how many calories each food has and all the theoretical stuff like that but you had totally no appetite even though you ate regularly and you didn’t even feel it if you skipped a meal or a few. Spiritual anorexia or something? Lol will have to share this term with my Mum. 😀 But really, it’s kind of how it was with me. Before I became a TradCat sort of officially about a year ago, I went to Mass every Sunday and holiday and sometimes on regular week days as well (at least ever since my “re-conversion” about 7 years ago), but it was more out of habit/a feeling of obligation rather than because I actually felt a particular desire to do so. Now, even though in a way attending a Holy Mass is more challenging to me, because you could say that TLM isn’t perfectly accessible to blind people due to it being highly visual and you having to have the missal or other prayer book with you which I can’t really have  with me in church, I actually look forward to it every week and feel that it gives me something. I do realise that religion isn’t about how you feel, contrary to how many people think, rather, it is about giving praise to God and placing Him in the centre of everything instead of yourself, but TLM does that obviously, so if it also affects my feelings, I am really grateful for this additional grace. 

   Another thing would be music. It really really helps me with the sensory anxiety thing which kicks in during silence. Of course, the background noise that helps me counteract that anxiety doesn’t have to always be music, and it doesn’t have to be music that I like as long as it obviously isn’t sensorily creepy and doesn’t make me even more anxious, but good music works particularly well because it’s very brain-engaging and music that I like will usually be more effective for me than something totally neutral or something that doesn’t really speak to me on an emotional level at all. I think life would feel really dull if I had to live completely without music, and finding ways to counteract sensory anxiety, especially when alone, would be extremely challenging. Also my fazas would wither and what would I do? Probably wither too, for what is life without fazas? 😀 I keep saying that but for those who still don’t know, faza peak is the best antidepressant for me, so I’d be struggling extremely with no faza peaks and no hope for any. Unless my brain would be inventive and I’d start getting fazas on literary characters more instead of musicians, or perhaps on people I know, or, dunno, maybe I’d start watching movies instead of listening to music and get fazas on movie characters or actors or movie directors or whatever? 😀 That’s an interesting thing to ponder, but I wouldn’t really be overly enthused with such a change, because musical fazas are easier for me to feed than literary or potential film fazas, and I presume a lot easier to deal with than real life ones could be. 

   As for the third thing, I guess it’s not necessarily as bad as that I would completely not be able to live without it, but my life would feel extremely barren. This thing is my languages. I mean obviously I can’t eliminate Polish out of my life because everyone around me speaks it and it’s rooted in my brain deeper than the other languages and you got to think in some language lol, nor English because it’s present everywhere in bigger or smaller amounts, but if I had to, for whatever crazy reason, cut myself off all the others completely… ugh, what’s the point of living? I mean obviously there is a bigger point in living than languages from a Christian perspective, but you get what I mean I hope, I just wouldn’t really feel like there was much left to my life here. I had such a time in my life for seven years when, after two years of learning Swedish with my tutor, I had to stop it, because I was leaving the inclusive school closer to home and going back to the blind boarding school that I originally went to, and it was impossible for me to continue seeing my tutor and neither the school people nor my Mum could find someone in the school area who could teach me further, I had still rather little idea about technology and we weren’t really encouraged much (though not discouraged either) at that school to use tech devices for learning anyway. So my Swedish started to fade, and I felt quite embittered because I still felt that something, almost like a calling, that made me feel that I should learn Swedish, and whenever I accidentally heard a little bit of Swedish somewhere I felt extreme longing for it. So I tried as hard as I could to just forget about it, not knowing if I’d ever be able to pick it up again, and was I guess as successful as I could possibly be in such a thing, but then sometimes I’d hear it again in a movie or somewhere, or I’d hear someone speak about Swedish/Sweden, like once I came across a Swedish couple (of all the nations in the world) on a train, and then my brain was in pieces all over again. This means that I am now able to appreciate my languages and being able to learn them even more, but I definitely don’t feel like going through something similar all over again. I love my languages so much that I sometimes jokingly speak of them as if all of them were my partners/lovers or something like that, hence I refer to myself as a linguaphile. I can’t even decide which one I love most, it’s always the one I’m with at a given time. And being multilingual and learning new languages helps me keep my brain in shape and is my favourite way of doing it, so what would I do if I was left without it? I’d die of fear of getting Alzheimer’s some day, I guess. 

   How about you? 🙂 

TToT (about apples, sleep, Misha etc.)

   I feel like writing another gratitude list on here rather than just in my diary, and as part of it, I’m participating in the Ten Things of Thankful linky. In no particular order as always. 

1.    Misha. Currently, Misha is sleeping on my bed, curled up in a little ball and seemingly very content with his life right now. That makes me very happy because he seemed a bit off earlier this week. I’m not sure if he actually was or if I was being hypervigilant as I often am in regards to Misha, but he wasn’t much interested in his snacks and isolated himself a lot, while now he’s decidedly more cheerful, if mostly very anxious but that’s pretty much the norm unfortunately. I check on him every now and then, more for my own benefit than him really needing regular supervision during sleep lol, and I seriously wish I could make a close-up recording of all those cute sounds coming out of him – his sleepy purrs, his fluttery heartbeat, all the funny gurgling sounds in his tummy, his gentle breath and little “Hhrrru?”’s when he stretches in his sleep – and show y’all, but I don’t think any of my devices would be able to pick up such mini sounds. 
2. My room. Today I feel especially grateful for having a room which I don’t have to share with anyone (except for Misha obviously, I always tell him it’s his room too because he doesn’t have his own, but who would mind Misha?) because later this weekend I’ll have to lend it to my parents’ guests. Late last summer, my Mum invited her acquaintance – my aunt’s sister-in-law who really likes my Mum – to come over to us for a weekend. Back then she slept in my parents’ room, and they slept in the camper. She was really appreciative of how my Mum hosted her, so appreciative, it seems, that she wants to come again, this time with her husband, who normally works in France, but for a shorter time. Except this time round we don’t have the camper because it’s having some sort of maintenance stuff or such done, so they’ll have to sleep here and Bibielz will sleep with Sofi in her mini room). I can’t say I don’t mind, because I do (even though her husband is called Jacek), but this makes me even more appreciative of having a room just for myself the vast majority of the time. And aside from simply being my own room, it’s also a really cool room, so I’m sure they’ll like it here. Perhaps so much that they’ll come for another weekend sleepover in two months’ time. 😀 
3. Going back to horse riding. I don’t know when exactly I’ll go yet, but I know I want to do it again. It may be the worst sport for me given my abilities (or lack thereof actually) and both mental and physical health situation, but it’s the only one I actually like, and I miss it despite the anxiety that has always been associated with it for me. I miss the stable and my regular horse and my instructor, and I want to give it a go again. Perhaps less ambitiously than before and more hippo therapeutically after all, but I really do. But the ultimate thing that actually made me make this decision was something else, which I won’t write about now but probably will quite soon. 
4. My fazas and generally my faza life. The past year or so, my faza life has been very… well, weird, chaotic, tumultuous… I don’t really want to get into the details, plus it wouldn’t be fitting for this particular post because it would take up most of it, and I don’t really have enough distance to it to be able to write about it publicly like that at this point, but things have been really weird and a little confusing sometimes I’d say, and both good and bad. But this week has been pretty good faza-wise, if very intense, and I wonder if perhaps things won’t be becoming more stable from now on. I’d quite like that finally. 😀 ANyway, I got a massive peak on Gwil this week totally out of nowhere, and you regular people on here know that a peak is a great thing and works like the best natural antidepressant for me, so having a peak means I’m doing really well mood wise. No spectacular highs like peaks cause sometimes, just a serene, calm sort of happy feeling. 
5. My Apple Watch. My Apple Watch may not be the most useful of my devices like my iPhone or Mac or PlexTalk, it doesn’t really bring anything extremely new to my life or its quality or whatever, but I just like it. This week I attempted to sleep with it for several nights to see how accurate its sleep tracking is, in particular sleep stages. I didn’t expect much because I didn’t believe a device like that could be reliable at all in tracking something as elusive as sleep, and because my Mum was saying it didn’t work too well and seemed very random to her, and claimed that it can only track your sleep during the scheduled sleep time, so if your alarm goes off and you’ll just turn it off and go back to sleep it won’t notice it. Well, my experience with sleep tracking seems to be better than my Mum’s. As far as I can tell, it’s oddly accurate. It knows very well more or less when I fall asleep, even if I fall asleep before my scheduled sleep time starts, and it knows quite precisely when I wake up, and it’s not because I use the Apple Watch right when I wake up, because even when I do check the time when I wake up I usually do it on the PlexTalk out of sheer habit. I obviously can’t objectively verify the accuracy of the sleep stages thing, but again, as far as I can tell, it’s pretty good. Like last night I kept waking all the freaking time and felt like I was sleeping very lightly, it did show that my sleep was very fragmented and I got only half an hour of deep sleep. After I let Misha out at half past four and went back to bed, I remember having a lot of dreams and Apple Watch said I kept switching between REM and core sleep pretty much til I woke up at almost 11 AM, and I remember having a very vivid dream right before I woke up and woke up with a raging headache, and Apple Watch says I woke up from REM sleep. Apparently it’s a thing to get headaches when you suddenly wake up from REM sleep like that. Also because I fell asleep at half past two last night and then didn’t really get the best quality sleep, I still felt very sleepy by the time my alarm went off at 8. I tried to snooze it, but must have done something differently than I originally wanted because Apple Watch turned off the alarm completely, while still staying in sleep mode and it knew that I was sleeping. So my Mum was definitely not right that it will only log sleep during the schedule, although I guess Apple Watches are still unaware of such a thing as naps. So yeah, overall I’m quite positively surprised and, who knows, maybe I’ll end up sleeping with my Apple Watch every night, after all. Not that knowing the sleep stages gives me anything really, but it can be just good to know. I’m also very curious if it’ll notice anything weird during my sleep paralysis. I already had it once with the Apple Watch on, but it was past my set sleep time schedule and I didn’t know yet that you can prolong it like I did today, so it wasn’t tracking my sleep. It was very helpful though because as I was in sleep paralysis, at some point I got an email, so my Apple Watch vibrated and I woke up. Which, while we’re at it, makes me also very grateful to the email sender, although I don’t remember who that was anymore. 😀 
6.    Speaking of Apple – apple pie! 😀 – My Mum made one last weekend and we ate it during the week, but we couldn’t eat it all so in the end Mum had to freeze it. It was very yummy though. 
7. And speaking of sleep, that dream I had earlier this week. That was really ridiculously hilarious. And yes, I find myself really liking the name Helenor. The next gem stone I get is going to be named Helenor (for all the new people here, I give names that I like to my gem stones because I don’t plan on having children and even if I did, many of the names I like are unusable for children). 
8. My fluffy overalls that I got from Mum a couple years ago. She made them for me and they’re very warm and comfy and I love wearing them when it’s relatively cool weather like it’s been recently. 

Noticeable Welsh progress this week. I wonder if it isn’t the aforementioned faza peak doing this to me, because I haven’t really been doing anything any different than last week or the week before. The power of peaks. 😂 Anyway, I really appreciate it because while my Norwegian learning has been mostly a stroll in the park because of Swedish, Welsh, with all the related excitement and my feelings for it, has been quite an uphill struggle compared with my other languages, so even the smallest leaps of progress are very much valued by Bibielz. And Welsh-language music. Even now I’m listening to Blas Folk Radio Cymru and I’m really grateful that there are ways for people like me who live someplace completely different to also discover music in minority languages. 

1. Chips for lunch yesterday. Mum was trying some new experimental recipe for chips, which didn’t sound all that good to me from the beginning, and eventually we both agreed that they turned out quite crappy, but then my Mum made «normal» chips, and these, as always, were very good. Good chips always deserve appreciation. 

   So, that’s my gratitude list. How about your thankfuls? What nice things have happened to you this week? 🙂 

Question of the day (7th October).

   This question is overdue for yesterday, but feel free to answer it in regards to either today or yesterday or whenever you’re reading it. 

   How has your day been? 

   My answer: 

   I’d say today has been quite decent. I really overslept though, so it feels like it’s been a pretty short day. Right now I’m in a phase where I fall asleep around 1-3 AM, even though I actually do feel kind of sleepy/tired much earlier but at the same time my brain can’t shut down or something, and then I naturally sleep for around 12 hours. I always have an alarm set to 8, which I don’t have to get up or even wake up for if I really don’t feel like it, although generally that’s what I do usually try to aim for to have a bit of a structure regarding my messy sleep-wake cycle and I like being able to wake up around that time, but even when I don’t and I’m pretty sure I won’t do it the next day, I still have it just to have some sort of sense of time. But the last couple of days I’ve been oversleeping my alarms completely and when I wake up I can’t even recall ever hearing or switching them off. And it’s not as easy with my phone to switch an alarm off on autopilot without waking up at all even for a few seconds, because at night I have music or radio going from the iPhone via my Bluetooth speaker, and VoiceOver doesn’t like Bluetooth speakers because it always yells through the phone speaker at max volume whenever it has to say something at the same time as the speaker starts or stops playing, and it’s impossible working around that bug. So when my alarm goes off, the speaker stops playing for a while, and when I switch the alarm off, VoiceOver starts babbling on about notifications and whatever and the speaker starts playing again so VoiceOver yells at me. I always silence it as quickly as possible so that no one wakes up in case someone is still sleeping, but yeah, the point is that it’s impossible not to notice that unless you’re so sleepy that it’s more like some other altered state or manage to silence VoiceOver on autopilot just in the right second before it starts yelling. So, my little theory is that the problem isn’t me, but my Apple Watch might be messing something up. It’s not really founded in anything other than that I heard my alarm go off only once over the whole time that I’ve had it, and I usually charge it overnight, during which time you can’t use it, so perhaps it thinks that if I’m charging and not using it, I don’t need the alarm either, be it on the watch or the phone. I hope my sleep patterns change some time soon so I’ll be able to verify if that’s true. Anyway, because of that alarm thing I only woke up after 1 AM and was quite horrified with my lack of moderation. 😀 I mean it’s one thing to fall asleep late but sleeping 12 hours?! Not that it doesn’t happen a lot to me but I usually don’t like it very much unless I have fun dreams or am depressed so sleep is the best thing in the world but otherwise it feels like I’m being totally lazy. I can’t imagine having a normal job with such habits, lol. 

   After I woke up, I did all the usual things most people do after waking up, except I had lunch for breakfast, as Mum was already making it when I got up. 😀 Then I talked for a bit with my Mum, and then Misha called me ‘cause he was already in my room and wanted to go to sleep but he won’t go to sleep without his usual routine, and he can’t do his usual routine by himself. So I gave him snack and then he laid on Bibiel for a couple minutes and had a quick ear massage, and then moved onto his sheep skin and fell asleep till 7 PM and made lovely sleep noises. 

   I then did my usual weekend Norwegian learning session for an hour and then some Welsh reading that I didn’t manage to do during the week for about 20 minutes. After that I read today’s Mass from the Latin missal which I do every day like Mum and Sofi, and then prayed the Rosary for an hour. I normally only pray one part of Rosary daily or sometimes less frequently than that, which lasts only fifteen minutes, but since October is the month that is especially devoted to praying Rosary, and because I’m having a sort of intensive prayer time since last Thursday for two weeks as I’m praying for someone important to me, I figured I’ll at least try to challenge myself a bit more and pray the whole Rosary every day for at least those two weeks. 

   Misha was very quiet for all that time and lay sweetly on his sheep skin, so after that I couldn’t resist and laid down for a while with him and we had a bit of a cuddle time and I read a book meanwhile. I’m now reading a book about the visions of Anne Catherine Emmerich concerning the lives of Jesus and Mary as well as Jesus’ Passion, I guess it must be in English as well but I’m reading it in Polish and don’t know what it’s called in English. I don’t think this whole book can be treated as her authentic visions, because it was written by a German poet Clemens Brentano based on her words, but it’s been said that he could have likely added a lot of details into that to make the descriptions of everything feel richer and more in-depth, and even without knowing that it seems kind of weird that someone would have such detailed visions of what people’s houses looked like or what plants grew in Palestina etc. etc, I mean it’s interesting but not relevant spiritually. 😀 Still, it doesn’t contain anything that would be contradictory with teaching of the Church and I just treat it as a sort of very religious and soul-enriching historical novel inspired by Jesus’ life and Passion that can help one’s imagination a bit when, for example, reflecting on the mysteries of Rosary, rather than a super factual account of what Jesus’ and Mary’s lives were like and that everything that is said in this book necessarily had to happen exactly like it’s described and that Jesus seriously said all that he does in this book. I’m really enjoying it overall, though it’s super long, so even though I tend to be a very fast reader, I’m chewing through it very slowly, because I started it a week ago and am still barely 30-something percent into it. 

   After that it was already well after 4 PM, and I checked my emails and all the other stuff that needed checking, and then wrote in my diary, which also took me quite a while because I didn’t yesterday so had a lot of stuff to get out of my brain. In the meantime my Dad’s colleague visited. He hadn’t visited my Dad in ages but he got divorced very recently and now he seems to have finally remembered where all his colleagues live and visits everyone to share his woes. Sofi also came back from our grandparents’ and we chatted for a while and she played a bit with Misha but he was super sleepy so not much of a playmate and soon went back to sleep. But now Misha is up and crying downstairs ‘cause Mummy has disappeared somewhere outside and he’s upset. 

   How about you? 🙂 

Question of the day.

   What is a useless skill that you have? 

   My answer: 

   I can click with my big toes if I move them a certain way. I used to be more skilled at this when I was younger, but still can do it if I try hard enough. I can put my legs behind my head, which is apparently not something that most people can do although I think it’s weird because it’s not like I’m super sporty or anything, our Sofi is a lot more than myself and she cannot do this, and for some reason some people think it’s creepy and I sometimes do this and then rock in that position back and forth to make people freak out, ‘cause they think I’ll get stuck like that and won’t be able to get back to a normal position. 😀 

   When I was at the blind school, we would often get calendars in Braille at the beginning of a year. Usually here in Poland when you have a calendar it doesn’t just have dates in it but also names which celebrate their name days on a specific day, because like some other countries in Europe, we do name days. And that was the case with those Braille calendars too. I would often feel kind of intellectually understimulated at the boarding school, especially if I had nothing interesting to read because I would usually finish my library books quite quickly and often didn’t really feel like going to library several times a week. So to do something, and make it seem like I was doing something, I would often reread my current library book, or would read the name days in the calendar. The resulting side effect of that was such that I ended up memorising all those name days totally unintentionally, and a lot of people seemed quite impressed with that, especially my grandad, who values brains and I guess for him something like this must have been evidence that I must have them, even if it was totally passive and I didn’t really make any effort, nor did I had a particular desire, to memorise all that stuff. I’ve just generally always had a tendency to memorise a lot of useless stuff, which has often given people an impression that I know lots of things about lots of things, even if my knowledge about something is rather superficial. 😀 So he would often show off with me when we had some guests on family gatherings and stuff like that, asking me when those people’s name days are. I suppose this is quite a good example of an absolutely useless skill. Later on, I’ve learned to have a bit more respect for my brain and figured out I must be more mindful of what sort of things I let take up my brain storage, and so whenever someone would ask me when is so and so’s name day or whether I still remember that, I would say that I don’t, and eventually I indeed ended up forgetting most of it. 

   Hm, not sure what else, but some people would probably consider my Welsh a useless skill, because people are so often like “Why the flip would you even need Welsh?” And they’re totally right  that I don’t need it at all, I just want to learn it and speak it and understand it, but I most definitely do not need it, and it isn’t particularly useful here in Poland. But then thinking this way, perhaps we could say the same thing about my Swedish and Norwegian as well. English probably not so much, because I think it IS actually, objectively useful and would be for anyone, but I don’t really have to use Swedish or Norwegian, I don’t work with them, I don’t have to communicate in these languages. Well I do have pen pals with whom I communicate in these languages but it’s because of learning these languages that I wanted to find pen pals who speak them, not that I’m learning the languages to be able to communicate with my pen pals. 

   How about your useless skills? 🙂 

Question of the day.

   What’s a ridiculously fun word to say? 🙂 

   My answer: 

   Oh my flip! This is gonna be a long post, no matter how hard I try! 😀 There are so many fun words! And, which language are we talking about? Whenever I think about stuff like this, I always have extreme trouble thinking about just ONE word, even if one for each language that I have any  idea about. Because really, there are so many words that feel fun to say, and fun in all sorts of different ways. And English is particularly difficult because it has such insane amounts of words, which can not only sound fun but also be so weirdly specific in what they mean. Also, I suppose that when most people think of words that are either fun or beautiful, they think words that aren’t used that often, whereas for me, a fun word can be something that’s part of daily vocabulary, for example ever since I learned about the English word pillow, I really love it and I think it’s so cute. And I’ve already wrote of my love for the English word sleep. Both English and Swedish have such a weird quality to them that they have so many words that sound absolutely cute and that are in regular use and I really like it. In the past, I even used to do rankings of my favourite words for each language I knew – so then it was Polish, English and Swedish – because I wanted to keep them all in one place or something, so I’d do yearly rankings for that. But there are too many cool words, and also I finally realised that a ranking isn’t perhaps the best way for me to keep track of anything, because as my brain doesn’t really do numbers, it only made things more complicated when I had to think which word I like more and put them in such very specific order. 

   So, I think rather than sitting here for hours and thinking about my ABSOLUTE most favourite English word, I’ll just tell you about one that I learned about quite recently, and it’s jackanapes! Does anyone still even use it?! :O I mean spontaneously of course? I wonder if an average English native speaker even know what it means? I’m very curious, but if you don’t, I’ll tell you that from what I learned it’s a fancy word for someone who’s misbehaving, or being mischievous, or downright impertinent. I’m nnot sure though if it’s supposed to have more of an insult vibe or is used in a lighter, joking context. Being a Jackophile , I love how English has so many jac- words, and so many of them are slangy and quite funny or quirky. Like, apparently in Ireland people use “the jacks” to mean toilet! 😀 I love it! 

   I think I already wrote about it in some distant past on here that one of my very favourite Polish words is mózg (MOOZG, though actually when pronouncing it on its own like that the zg goes unvoiced so it’s practically MOOSK) which means brain. No other language I know has a word for brain that would be equally or more satisfying to say than this. I generally find the brain fascinating, I like the word mózg, so I end up using it a lot, just like I do in English, even when most people would rather use mind or soul or head or something like that. For example in Polish I usually wash my brain rather than hair, which some people find extremely funny. Back when I was in college/high school/whatchamacallit in your country, I once let my Math tutor in and she had something she wanted to tell my Mum straight away, but I told her that unfortunately, right now my Mum’s washing her brain (meaning hair of course) which at first really puzzled her, and then after a while she started laughing like she never heard a better joke. When I have a migraine or a normal headache I also say in Polish that my brain’s aching. The English brain sounds not very cool though, it has an odd texture and tastes like plastic. Swedish hjärna and Norwegian hjerne are cool and quite passable but nowhere near as cool as mózg, and the Welsh ymenydd is incredibly bland. 

   In Swedish, one of my many favourite words which I learned quite early on and fell in love with passionately is krimskrams, which means knick-knack. It’s so cute! I also really love the Polish equivalent which is bibelot. It almost sounds like Bibiel! 😀 I don’t care about the English word though, because while all these words clearly sound like what they mean – something that’s not very practically useful and just gathering dust, at least the Swedish and Polish words sound like these things hold some emotional value to the owner, while knick-knack doesn’t give such a vibe, at least not to me. – 

   In Welsh, I love pilipala, which is one of several Welsh words meaning butterfly, it’s extremely cute. And the Swedish equivalent, fjäril, is so stunning and has very distinct tangerine flavour to it! The English word is quite disgusting though. And I’m fairly neutral about the Polish equivalent – which is motyl – it sounds like motility or something like that. 😀 I don’t have any stronger feelings about the Norwegian sommerfugl when it comes to its sound, but it means summer bird so that’s quite nice. Also when it comes to Welsh, I love the word achafi for how expressive it is, it’s not a swearword or even close to that but it can be loaded with so much expression that it can almost feel like one at times. Honestly though, after so many years of Welsh learning, I’m not perfectly sure whether it’s actually a proper Welsh word, or more of a Wenglish invention, that is something that’s actually originated among Welsh people whose dominant language was English, because most often when I hear it it’s thrown into English. Anyways, it means yuck, and from what I’ve noticed it isn’t only used when something is yuck, but also when you disapprove or feel indignant of what someone’s doing or when something generally doesn’t go quite the way you’d like. 

   Also, now that we’re talking about fun-sounding words, after I’ve mentioned one of my first loves in the Swedish language, and after having read Ashley Leia’s post about the versatility of the word fuck not long ago, I am reminded of another of my early infatuations in the Swedish language, namely, the word knulla, or, more exactly, knullar, which is the present tense of this amazing-sounding verb, as that was the form in which I heard it for the first time, being about 10-11 years old and totally unaware of it. I had just started learning Swedish not long ago, and, just like I did before I started learning, I loved to watch Swedish movies just to hear the language. I am not and never was a movie person, and I hardly focused on the actual movie, it’s plot line and all that, I just listened to the language, relished it and tried to understand as much as I could. And one day my Dad told me there’d be a Swedish movie on the telly in the evening, and we watched it together. I have no idea what movie it was and don’t remember what was going on in it at all. I only remember that it was something quite old, historical I think, and there was a dude who was yelling at what I think was a young woman/girl, and he used this word, and it sparked my attention right away, ‘cause it sounded so lovely and the more I thought about it, the more I loved it. “Knullar…” I was so excited about this new word that for the rest of this movie, I couldn’t focus on anything else. Then I went upstairs to enjoy and savour this new found word in the privacy of my room. I wonder, if any Swede would have seen me then, sitting on my desk, happily swinging my legs and stimming/“sensorisming” away with my fingers while repeating the word “knullar” to myself, what would they have thought of me. 😀 Thousands of different ideas went through my brain as I thought what this lovely, cute-sounding word could mean. To the tactile synaesthetic bit of my brain, it looked like a very flimsy-looking, small flower with very gentle, small, kind of velvety leaves. But it sounded like kötbullar (meatballs) and tasted like grilled cheese to the gustatory synaesthetic bit of my brain, so I figured it could be some kind of dish. I knew it probably wasn’t that for real, but I really liked the idea. Bulle (plural bullar) is bun, kötbulle (plural kötbullar) is meatball, so knulle could be some kind of cheesy ball or something. You could have some food place called Knullar, Bullar & Kötbullar, I thought. LOL if only I knew…! 😂 And then I entertained myself with thinking about what exactly these knullar could be, what they’d be made of other than cheese and how they would taste.

   Every time I had my Swedish lesson, my tutor would give me time where I could ask him all sorts of Swedish questions, be it about language or culture or whatever, that was unrelated to the topic of the lesson itself. So during our first lesson after my knullar discovery, I happily asked him about this beautiful word, and was very surprised with his odd reaction. First he went totally quiet for what felt like ages, so I wondered if perhaps he doesn’t know what it is but doesn’t want to show his ignorance, but that didn’t make sense as it had happened before that he wouldn’t know something I asked him about and had no problem admitting that. So I wondered maybe I didn’t get that word right and the guy in the movie actually said something else. But it felt kind of awkward. Finally he asked me in what still felt a rather odd way, where I came across this word, so obviously I told him in a movie, and then he calmly explained to me what the word knullar, or rather knulla, as that’s the infinitive form of this word, means, namely that it means to fuck. Now that was quite a surprise! Now that I’ve known this for years it’s normal to me but then I remember being really shocked because it totally didn’t sound to me like what it meant. And while I still think it sounds quite endearing, after I learned that, it lost a lot of its initial appeal. As far as I’m aware and from what I’ve noticed, it’s only used in the sexual context, you wouldn’t use the word knulla to mean fuck as in “fuck you” or anything like that. At least I’ve only heard it used in this one context and I’m pretty sure it’s considered quite vulgar and heavy. But once I managed to get over the shock and accept the truth, I did have a good laugh at it. 

   And, speaking more interlinguistically, I think the word mishmash, which as far as I know exists in many different languages, is very fun to say. Speaking of mish- words I alsoo like the English mishap, and I seriously used to think it’s pronounced MEE-shap. But I like it still, even though it’s not. 

   What’s such word(s) for you? In any language(s)? 🙂 

Question of the day.

What’s difficult to explain, but easy to understand?

My answer:

A lot of language stuff, imo, is fairly easy to apply in practice but freakishly difficult to explain in theory. I know I am terrible at explaining language, or so it seems, and so it always irks me when people assume that just because you know a language, you can teach it to other people. I think knowing/being able to do something doesn’t automatically mean you’re able to teach it to others. It shows particularly well if you try to help someone learn your native language when you actually have no experience of how to teach it to non-natives. It seems easy because, well, you know the language, but it’s not. It’s freakishly difficult to explain things to someone for whom it’s just not intuitive yet how your language works. I suppose it might particularly be a problem for me because I tend to learn a bit differently than people do in conventional language schools and stuff. I learn my own way and I comprehend things my own way, which doesn’t have to be right for everyone and which is difficult to explain to other people who are outside of my mind. By my own way, I mostly mean that I don’t really focus on theory so much. Like, in normal schools and many language schools, there’s so much emphasis on grammar, and more often than not, it’s done in a very theoretical way, like rather than just learning grammar through practice and exposure and noticing different patterns in it and stuff, there’s all the notetaking about what present simple is and how it’s used and then memorising it along with example sentences, and then doing exercises in a textbook which consist of filling the blanks in sentences with correct grammar forms or place the words in the right order to make a logical-looking sentence. To me, that’s quite boring. Also, when I was going to school, I seriously struggled with all these theoretical definitions. And it made me a bit concerned that perhaps something is wrong with me and that I’m not doing something right. After learning some grammar structure at school, I usually didn’t have huge problems using it properly, though of course I’d make mistakes sometimes like any non-native and I still do, but remembering the whole theory thing… nah, it was always rather abstractive to me. Even now, if you asked me about what is, say, a subjunctive, or even how articles work in English, I may have a problem explaining it, but if it’s some structure that I’ve become sufficiently familiar with, I’ll be able to apply it in practice anyway. I used to think it’s weird and perhaps just another example of how quirky my brain is and how it so often doesn’t do things the normal way. It was only when I started to try and help non-natives learn Polish language when I realised that, in a way, perhaps my way of perceiving and learning/absorbing grammar is better, because it looks a bit more like how natives perceive their language and thus I guess is a bit more natural. Inn Polish, we have something called reflexive verbs, and one guy who was learning Polish and with whom I was penpalling asked me if I could help him figure out how that works. Well, except… I don’t know… I just use them, and I know that I use them right, because it feels right, and any other way would feel wrong. I tried my best to help him out but writing all that down in theory seemed so infinitely more complicated than it actually is. I don’t need to know the definition of a reflexive verb in the Polish language to be able to use one and know when to use one etc. I highly doubt that there are many people in Poland who aren’t linguists, teachers or real huge language geeks or something like that who’d know what reflexive verbs are at all, let alone be able to clearly explain to someone how they work, just like people in the Anglophone countries don’t memorise all the irregular verbs because they just know how to use them. Because, of course, we acquire our native languages through constant exposure to them, rather than studying textbooks and memorising definitions. By that, I’m not saying that studying textbooks when learning a foreign language is total bullshit, I do it too (assuming I have access to such things as textbooks in a specific language, I don’t have any Welsh ones for example and I don’t really feel the need to) just that, if you base solely on a textbook, it’ll never become natural. Also, unfortunately you can’t just acquire a new language as an adult, or not nearly as easily as a small child would, even with a lot of exposure and practice, but for me personally, observing how the language is used and thus getting concrete examples, is more intuitive, and far more interesting, than basing primarily on dry, often long-winded and full of exceptions to the rules textbook definitions, and it clearly gives me more than the dry learning, given how insanely fast my English started progressing as soon as I started self-teaching and distanced myself a bit from the way I was being taught at school. I also often try to help Sofi with her English homework, but I always end up exasperated at all the boring theory in there they have to digest and all the silly exercises. No wonder that the poor kid hates English. 😀

What is such thing in your opinion? 🙂

Question of the day.

I am working on…

My answer:

…nothing really, at this moment, I guess. Nothing major for sure. I am always working on polishing my languages though, so perhaps we can count that though that doesn’t really feel like “working” or not most of the time.

You? 🙂

Question of the day.

I have to…

My answer:

…Well, nothing surprising here as for me. The thing that I have to do in the most immediate future, soon after I write this post, is my Welsh learning, which I’m going to do for about half an hour because today it’s mostly just going to be repetition. You could say that it doesn’t necessarily count as something I “have to” do, and more like something I just want, but in this particular case I think it’s both because when I love a language I just hardly have a choice, so I guess we can use these words interchangeably. 😀

You? 🙂

Question of the day.

We haven’t had questions of the day in a LOOONG time, as I was sick with bronchitis, so I thought let’s do a little bit of a general question today, and maybe for the next few days, except this time they won’t be in the form of questions, but rather blanks to fill in. Here’s the one for today:

I am thinking about… well, mostly it’s hard to tell what I’m thinking about at the moment, because my brain’s simply buzzing away with all the Norwegian I’d just been exposing myself to. 😀 I know, it’s the middle of the week, and I said I am going to do Welsh on week days, and Norwegian on weekends, because I already know quite a fair bit of Swedish so Norwegian isn’t as demanding for me as Welsh is, but I already did my Welsh in the morning, and the Norwegian exposure I had today wasn’t part of my usual learning routine, I just came across some children’s stories in this language and ended up reading a few because they were written in a way that seemed a bit weird to me (guess just older language than what I’m used to or maybe some dialect that I hadn’t come across yet) but I was surprised and intrigued that despite the weirdness I was able to figure out enough to understand the plot quite well. Nevertheless, I’m not really used to reading in Norwegian for as long as I did, so now I’m more like processing rather than thinking about anything specific. 😀

One thing that I *am* sort of thinking about right now, though more in the background, is the bouts of illness we’ve been having in this house for a while now. For Mum, Olek and me, it’s nothing new at this time of year (autumn-winter season) because this is when all of us change into real mucus factories. My Mum gets her episodic asthma and coughs incessantly until spring, and Olek gets his sinus problems which don’t last quite so long but seem to be really annoying while they do. Then there’s me and right now my situation is the best in our little phlegmy club, probably because it used to be the worst and I had my fair share of mucus adventures when I was younger whereas for them it has only started out properly as adults, especially for Mum. The way it works for me is that, pretty much ever since I was born, or at least ever since I remember, I would very regularly get bronchitis. Like, I couldn’t get sick with a normal cold, flu or stuff, it always had to be bronchitis. A lot of doctors, whenever they diagnosed me with it, said it must have not been “treated properly” the last time I had it so it came back, so I was often wondering how come no one knows how to treat it properly. I would always get some kind of antibiotic, sometimes two or three, one after another, and then it would go away and come back next year, or sometimes even after a few months. At some point I just got used to the fact that I got that weird thing once or twice a year where I first got a really sore throat and impressive amounts of snot, then would go really hoarse for a few days and sounded as if I’d been smoking longer than I’d been alive, and then all the snot would gradually go down into my airways and make me phlegmy and wheezy. As a small kid I often got fever with that and felt very ill, but as I got older, aside from the sore throat, coughing for weeks or sometimes months and the discomfort related to being filled with gunk I felt absolutely fine and would just go to school and do everything as normal, and everyone figured I just am like this and that if I feel okay and don’t get fever or anything it’s probably more like allergy thann actual bronchitis though my usual allergy meds only worked so-so. It always took really long to develop, and it frustrated me and my Mum that despite that, there didn’t seem to be any way to nip t in the bud before it developed properly. I still haven’t found a way to do that even though things are much better these days. Sometimes some people who saw me not very regularly assumed that coughing up mucus and wheezing must be my normal, everyday state lol. I remember one volunteer in particular who worked in our boarding school group and it happened so that she only came during autumn for a few years in a row, and she was so worried about me and was like: “Gosh, are you always ill like this?” 😀 At some point in my teens I suppose my system had enough of that and I got really ill with high fever and feeling weak and like absolute crap so that I had to go home and stayed there for a few months. My Mum was really worried because I apparently also looked like I was really ill and she was afraid it must be something really serious but every doctor kept saying it’s just allergy or just bronchitis. Finally we ended up finding an allergist who took a real good look at my phlegmy history, and then later on also at my other family members’ more or less similar issues, and he figured that yes, it is bronchitis, but, from what I understood, it’s something based on asthma, which I had no idea I had, and this bronchitis thing is simply the only manifestation of asthma that occurs for me, which apparently classifies it as episodic, although my Mum was also diagnosed by him with episodic asthma but hers looks a lot different so I suppose there can be very many faces to episodic asthma. So he gave me some different antibiotic for that and totally different allergy meds that I was to take only during these episodes, and suddenly I was all fine within two weeks. Then for the next couple years I kept getting it real bad with fever and everything but used more or less the same medication regimen and it would last shorter and shorter and be milder and milder every year. Finally when I had it two years ago I didn’t even need the antibiotic anymore and last year I didn’t have the bronchitis at all. So I was actually a little bit surprised and bummed when it came back again a few weeks ago as I thought maybe finally it had been “treated properly” for good. I actually got a bit freaked out, because my allergist has now retired and doesn’t work anywhere anymore, so I was scared what I’ll do if it gets really bad again and that it will be a lot of hassle filling someone else in who doesn’t know my history that well and isn’t quite as flexible with things. I did feel real crappy and weak for quite some time and sleep was the only thing I felt like doing, and even had fever for the first few days, but my respiratory symptoms were really really mild compared with all the previous times, I didn’t even have almost any cough as such at all, so I just took all the meds I usually take for the bronchitis excluding the antibiotic and ate a lot of things that help to reduce mucus and tried not to get too close with Misha (officially I am allergic to cats, which is normally very mild for Misha probably thanks to my autosuggestion but when I’m sick with this thing I try to be cautious and don’t let him into my bedroom or anything, but it didn’t seem like he was too upset about that) and it’s almost all cleared out now, and I’m feeling great. Meanwhile my poor Mum keeps coughing, and now it’s her who gets weird comments and questions from people: “Wow, are you sick still, or again?” “Covid, eh?” “Have you tried…?”

Just as I started recovering, it was my Dad who got sick and he claimed he caught it from me. I’m not really sure it’s possible if my bronchitis is asthma-based or something for someone else who doesn’t have asthma to catch it, but, like, what do I know. Also my Dad doesn’t belong to the phlegmy club normally, it’s just the three of us. Unfortunately he had to work the first few days of his illness, but then thankfully managed to get along with his colleague with whom they work shifts that he’ll take over until Dad recovers properly which is really great. Then over the weekend things actually got worse with him, he now has real bad sounding, chesty cough and is just overall not feeling well. He was tested for Covid, because he said he had something wrong with his sense of taste, but it came negative. So yesterday Mum drove him to the doctor, and, surprise… it’s bronchitis. 😀 Mum and me still doubt that it’s mine that he caught, he probably just has your usual bronchitis that normal people get sometimes. He’s now on an antibiotic and keeps feeling really miserable as far as I can tell based on the very miserable cues he’s sending. Today Mum figured that she could do cupping for him, she usually does that when anyone in the family is sick with a cold or something similar. But then she forgot that there was an online parents’ meeting for Sofi’s class so she had to be there. My grandad had finally taught me how to do cupping last year, which was a very stressful process but now I feel relatively confident doing it, so when I did my Norwegian and saw what the situation was I offered that I could do it for Dad, and both Mum and he were happy with that so I did. So that’s why I’m now thinking about all that illness stuff. I really hope Dad recovers quickly, because so far for the last few days it doesn’t seem like he’s been doing any better.

So, how about you? 🙂

Question of the day.

What took you an embarrassing amount of time to figure out?

My answer:

Maybe not as much as embarrassing, but it took me quite long anyway and now I consider it funny, namely all the weird assumptions I had about some things in English. For example, even when I was already a reasonably good English speaker, I thought some words were pronounced different than they actually were, or that some words or phrases mean something different than they actually do. I can’t think of very many such things at this very moment but there have been quite a few and some pretty hilarious. I’m thinking maybe I’ll have to compile a list of such things whenever I’ll be reminded of them and then I’ll share it on here. 😀 Like, for ages I had no idea how the word queue is pronounced, and I pronounced it like CUE-wee. 😀 I think even some five years ago I still pronounced it like that. And I think I already wrote about it on here that, for the longest time, I thought niche was pronounced nee-SHAY, much like cliche is pronounced in Swedish and also apparently in English. 😀 As for cliche, I’m still not perfectly sure what syllable should be stressed in this word as I’ve heard both people who pronounce it as CLEE-shay, as well as such who say clee-SHAY, maybe it’s an accent thing, dunno. Oh, and now I’m remembering that it was only when I started having lessons with my English tutor before finals, he enlightened me that deaf is pronounced DEF rather than DEEF. 😀 At that point I was already immersing myself in spoken English a lot, nearly all the time, but must have not heard that word actually spoken before but now that I think of it it’s kind of weird that I wouldn’t have figured that out earlier since dead for example is also pronounced with a short eh rather than an ee. As far as phrases go, I used to think that if you’re cracked up means you’re depressed, kind of as in, you’re quite sad to begin with and then something else happens and it “cracks you up” and you’re properly devastated, something along these lines, when in fact it means to burst out with laughter. And like I said there have been many more things like this but I just can’t think of anything else at the moment.

You? 🙂

Question of the day.

What would you wish for if there was a genie who would grant your one wish?

My answer:

I would want to speak all “my” languages fluently, as fluently as possible, without having to learn them, especially the basic stuff when you hardly know anything at all in a language yet and you have to learn absolutely everything. A lot of people think that if I keep learning and learning and learning languages I must really like it, as in, the process of learning. But in fact I don’t. I think actually using a language is way more interesting, so if I could just acquire a language on the same or higher level of fluency that I’d be able to achieve via learning consciously, I’d take it, so I could use more time on actually using and sort of consuming the language rather than learning it. I mean, I’d probably still have to learn some things, even natives do, but this kind of learning doesn’t really feel like learning and is far more interesting when you already have a firm grasp of a language. Also learning of some of “my” languages, the less commonly spoken ones, is a pain with the whole practical side of learning, like how you’re supposed to do it, where you get the resources from, where do you practice and with whom, especially if you don’t live in the area where the language is spoken and even more especially if you’re blind so accessibility of things can be limited or there can be other obstacles on the way like lack of speech synths for a specific language or having to learn a Braille alphabet of every single language if you want to read Braille in them like I do. So that would be just extremely cool!

You? 🙂

If We Were Having Coffee… #WeekendCoffeeShare.

We haven’t had a

Weekend Coffee Share

in a while, so I thought we could have one today, ’cause I have a couple things to share with you all, and I want to hear how you’ve been doing, too. 🙂 So if you feel like having a cuppa, or something yummy to eat, come along and join me, and I’ll be super happy to have you here! 🙂

Grab a cup of your favourite coffee (we only have black, whole bean coffee in here right now, which I personally think is the best, but if you’d like something fancier you can bring it with yourself). I can also offer you some tea (we do have plenty of these), or cocoa, or some orange juice, or kefir if you like it or want to find out what it’s like, or plain tap water, or you can bring some other drink that you like. I don’t have much interesting stuff where food is involved, if you’re properly hungry and are a meat eater there’s a fair bit of meat left because we didn’t manage to eat everything for lunch, or I can make you a sandwich, but otherwise I suggest you bring something yourself if you’d like a snack with your coffee or something. Yeah I know, bad Bibiel, what sort of coffee share it is without providing your guests with snacks, and a proper variety of coffees. Will try to prepare myself better next time. 😀

 

So if you’re sitting comfortably and have something to munch and/or sip on, let’s get into it. 🙂

If we were having coffee, I’d ask each of you how you’re doing…?

If we were having coffee, I’d start with the mundane topic of weather and share what it’s been like here this week. Because it’s been quite warm, if not hot, for late summer, at least here. It’s a common thing that late August is all gloomy and rainy, and then the first few days of September it gets maliciously hot so that poor kids who are starting school are melting indoors and want to go out and play but can’t cus they have to do some goddam fractions or whatever else they have to do, but after these few days it usually gets a fair bit colder and stays this way. Well, not this year. This year, the first week of September was very very windy and rainy and quite chilly, whereas this week it was as high as 27 C on Tuesday. It felt a lot fresher outside though than the temps would suggest and was just nice and summery. Then yesterday we got pretty bad rain and storms, and today it’s cooler but still very sunny.

If we were having coffee, I’dfill you in on

the Sofi situation.

In the post above I wrote how Sofi is suspected by her new GP to possibly have Marfan syndrome and that she’s gonna have genetic testing in February. In the meantime, my Mum had been ruminating about it quite a lot, which is not her normal, but she’s now feeling a lot better about it as it seems. Like, whatever will be, will be. The good thing is that Sofi doesn’t have, to our knowledge, any major complications that can arise from this condition, so even if she ends up being diagnosed with it, I personally figure that we should feel lucky that despite this diagnosis, she’s been doing this well so far. Mum agrees with me, and Sofi herself doesn’t think much of it. What had been particularly bothering my Mum, and still does, to an extend, is Sofi’s height, as she’s already like 180 cm and shows no signs of wanting to stop growing any time soon. I mean, maybe she herself wants, but her hormones or whatever is in charge does not. Since the genetic testing is still to come and we still have to wait quite a while, there’s no other news strictly where it comes to Marfan’s, but, as you may remember, all the worry related to that also made my Mum worry that Sofi could have polycystic ovaries and that that may be the reason behind her still growing and still not menstruating. So she had her first gynaecologist’s appointment about a month ago or so, and, while she was extremely anxious before that, it all went well and there were no bad news, everything is perfectly fine with Sofiwhere gynaecology is concerned.

If we were having coffee, speaking of Sofi (wow, what a cool rhyme lol, and yes, in case you’re wondering, this Sofi is pronounced like coffee with an S, not like Sophie because that’s how most Polish people say Sophie), I’d also tell you that recently she got vaccinated. Not for Covid, but for diphtheria, tetanus and whooping cough (these sound really weird in English :O ). She got the vaccine on Thursday, then started having some arm pain in the evening. The next day her arm hurt even more but she still went to school as normal, but when she came back she was feeling horrid. She had a headache, sore throat, achy muscles, couldn’t breathe normally and was very tired and weak and had a bit of a cough. She was supposed to go have her nails done after school, which she did, but as soon as she came back she just went to bed, so it all felt kind of concerning given that she’s normally very strong and healthy. But I guess that could be the exact reason why she reacted to this vaccine so fiercely. She didn’t get up for the rest of the day and by the evening she seemed like she had some fever and it got quite creepy because not only did she have muscle aches but her skin seemed extremely sensitive to touch pretty much all over her and she couldn’t even change position easily ’cause she said it hurt so badly. My Mum claims though that as long as you’re hungry while sick, things are looking good, and by late evening Sofi got a wild craving for fast food so I got her some. When I was a kid I also got wild and very specific food cravings whenever I had fever, and especially at night, so it either must be a common thing that I didn’t realise or it’s genetic for us. 😀 On Saturday things were a little bit better and Sofi really wanted to go pick mushrooms with Mum, so she did, but she was quite drained by the time she came back and spent the rest of the day in bed. So has been the case today, and she’s also got a stuffed nose. Mum doesn’t really know what to do, since these appear to be vaccine side effects so it seems counterproductive to her to give Sofi some medicines because she thinks her body needs to deal with all this on her own. If things won’t get better until tomorrow, which it doesn’t seem like they will, Mum will take her to the doctor.

If we were having coffee, I’d share with you something about which I already wrote a couple times here, but not much and only in passing. This is not like a huge news or anything breakthrough, but I think it’s worth noting in its own place. This something is that I’ve kinda sorta started learning Norwegian, I guess it was some time in July. I think I’ve written at least one coffee share since but I still had too much turmoil in my brain surrounding it so didn’t feel able to write anything constructive. Perhaps you remember that, as long as my favourite languages list is, and despite it features languages like Swedish, Faroese or Sami, Norwegian had never been on it. And I’m still not sure whether it is now. But for some reason I’ve been feeling more drawn to it lately, and also want to have a closer look at how it works, so that I have some more idea about it other than simply through my Swedish. I don’t know why I’d need it because I could already understand a fair bit of (especially written) bokmål Norwegian (there are two written Norwegian languages – bokmål which is like more classic and nynorsk which is more modern and rural) via Swedish, but that’s what’s happening right now. I started to realise my feelings for Norwegian were deepening in late June, around the time when we were on our camper trip in Masuria, and Sofi and me rode in the back of the camper, on the bed, where if the roads were bumpy, it made us jump up high to the ceiling, so when people ask me “why oh WHY Norwegian? Have you got a faza or did something specific happen involving this language that made you love it out of the blue?” I say perhaps because I got a brain injury from all the close encounters between my skull and the ceiling on the trip, ’cause I really have no better ideas. I mean, I could tell you now, at the point where I am currently, that I like Norwegian for its extreme diversity, like, it’s one language, but it’s two languages, and in practice, as some say, there are more dialects than people there. 😀 This definitely contributes to me liking it now. But I only got to experience this phenomenon first-hand after I got into it. And my feelings started to deepen before I decided to go with the flow and get into it and try to learn it. And it wasn’t like these feelings came and I embraced them right away, far from it. At the beginning it was freakishly intense and I didn’t know what was going on and I was really reluctant to do it, actually. I mean, I’m learning Welsh right now, it’s my first Celtic language and it’s more difficult than any language I’ve learned before, have still like a dozen or so languages that I want to learn in the future, Sofi says I should be treated for that ’cause something’s wrong with me, so I seriously can’t afford another language, someone save me or it’s gonna kill me! In the end though, I just had no willpower left to resist my brain any longer and got pulled into it properly. It felt like I had no choice but make room for Norwegian in my life.

The situation isn’t as bad as I feared, since I already know English and Swedish so there’s a whole lot of similarities between Swedish and Norwegian, they’re generally mutually intelligible, and Norwegian and English also share some common ancestry being both Germanic languages. That means it doesn’t really feel like I am learning a completely new language. More like a complicated dialect or something. It’s not like I have to learn everything in a sort of linear, structured way, starting from the very basics, because a lot of vocabulary I’m either completely familiar with or can figure out without much trouble, and a lot of grammar also already makes sense. Also, compared to Welsh, learning Norwegian is also way easier due to the wider availability of all sorts of materials. I’d long forgotten what sort of luxury it is to be able to learn a language via your mother tongue, and there are plenty of Polish immigrants in Norway, so plenty of Norwegian online courses, workbooks, whatever you want. Only problem is that a lot of the Polish material I’ve looked into isn’t of particularly good quality, like they teach a terribly unnatural accent if not plain wrong pronunciation (like you in Norwegian is du, where the u sound is pronounced like in the English word you, while I’ve found a Polish resource where they teach you that it’s pronounced with an oo sound, more like the German du. Except when you pronounce it like that in Norwegian it’s spelled do and it means the loo 😀 ) or only give you an idea about some stiff, official bokmål which might be a thing in writing but no one speaks like that. So I still tend to stick to the English stuff for the most part, and am also able to learn Norwegian in Norwegian itself, especially from written materials. So with a bit of effort on my part, I managed to make it work so that I can squeeze in both Welsh, which is still in the centre stage, and Norwegian, which I learn usually on weekends plus a lot of exposure in the meantime. It feels kind of weird to call it learning though, because for me language-learning is when your brain lets out steam and your brain muscles get all sore and pulsating, whereas here it’s rarely this intense. It’s still enjoyable though. I still wouldn’t say that I love Norwegian as much as I do all “my” languages, but I think if it won’t disappear as randomly as it appeared I’m probably going to get there and I do like it a lot. I mean, I’ve never disliked it, but now I like it more than ever, yet still don’t love like I do Swedish, Welsh & co. Like I said, I love the whole diversity in it and I’m loving more and more how it sounds. It’s so cheerful and childish compared to Swedish, and at the same time kind of more rugged than Swedish and less fluid, to me Swedish sounds more serious and sort of posher.

I don’t even know yet what I want to achieve with this whole Norwegian “learning” and where I want to go, what for etc. but maybe things will clear up. I guess it might come in handy when I’ll start with Sami. Maybe I’ll finally pluck up the courage to read all those Norwegian books my Mum bought me, thinking they were Swedish, including a grammar book from I guess the 50’s. :DBut overall, while I usually try to aim for as much fluency and familiiarity with a language as possible, at least for now I’m taking it very easy with Norwegian and don’t have any wild ambitions or anything, we’ll just see how it develops, I’m not in charge here anyway, my brain has taken over while I was on those Masuria holidays. Who knows, perhaps it’s just a short episode and I’ll soon be over it?

Now that I’m no more reluctant and have accepted the state of things and flowing along with it, I’m thinking that perhaps there’s something like destiny or whatever involved here, because I’ve had several people in my life who have told me in one way or another that I should learn Norwegian. My Swedish teacher started learning it at some point during the years he was teaching me and could go on and on and on about it and would often try to tempt me into it too saying stuff like that, actually, Norwegian is just like a little dialect of Swedish. It made me think what Norwegians would think of someone putting things this way and I thought it sounded quite diminishing. Like, I myself am half Kashubian, and while I don’t have a strong bond with the Kashubian language (I can barely understand it when someone speaks fluently) or culture, and also am far from supporting the separatistic notion that some Kashubians have, one of the reasons being that I personally identify as Polish far more than Kashubian, nevertheless it really irks me when people call Kashubian a dialect of Polish ’cause it’s just not a dialect. One day he devoted the entire lesson to introducing all sorts of Norwegian phrases and idioms to me that he wanted me to translate to prove to me how Norwegian is very easy when you speak English and Swedish. Sure, but at that point I just didn’t feel it, and if I don’t feel a language there’s no point in trying to convince me. It’s as if you tried to make someone be friends with or date someone else just because YOU think they’d make good friends or couple, while the individuals in question feel totally indifferent about each other. Now that I’m learning both languages, I totally agree that, while Norwegian as it is now certainly is not a dialect of Swedish, in many aspects it really seems like it could be. 😀

Then there was a classmate I had at the blind school, who didn’t know about my Scandinavian interests (which I was trying to suppress at the time because I temporarily wasn’t able to learn Swedish and it was a huge source of frustration to dwell on it or expose myself to Swedish in those circumstances) and for some weird reason he told me several times how in his mind he associates me with Norway, which I found rather hilarious. He didn’t know why either. Later my paternal cousins have come up with some weird theory I’ve no clue how, that we have some Norwegian ancestry. It’s always seemed doubtful to my Dad and my gran and me too, but in the past they would often say how I should rather learn Norwegian than Swedish ’cause we allegedly have some distant family connection to Norway.

And lastly there was my late friend Jacek from Helsinki, who shortly after we first met said that, as much as he praises my learning Swedish and considers it aesthetically superior over other Scandinavian languages, he felt that perhaps Norwegian would have been a better option for me, because of all them weird dialects and because they have two languages instead of one so I’d probably have more fun. All of these people would probably be happy now that it has come true, after all, lol.

I also have THREE uncles who all work in Norway (one full-time and two get sent there from time to time for some longer-ish periods) and one has told my family that apparently he’s learned to communicate in the language decently. He never said that to me, although we have talked about Norwegian vs Swedish several times, and he never talked Norwegian in front of me, but now I have to admit I’m looking forward to some bigger family gathering where all of these uncles of mine will be present so I can break the news to them and we can find out who can snakke (speak) better than Bibiel *evil laugh*. Or maybe I’m in for a surprise and any/all of them actually snakker better than Bibiel, which would be just as cool, they’ve certainly had more exposure than me and more potential opportunities to practice with people! 🙂

If we were having coffee, I’d mention that we’re having a bit of a national Catholic holiday today. This is because it’s the day of beatification of cardinal Stefan Wyszyński, the Primate of Poland. Beatification means that he is now known as blessed (which is like a step below canonisation when a person is proclaimed saint) and a primate is the archbishop of a country. Even due to his function alone, he was a very important and valued figure in the Polish Catholic church during his life and still is very much valued and respected due to his huge positive influence on the church and aspects like the so-called folk devotion to Mary, to name just one thing. Along with him, another person who was beatified was mother Elżbieta Róża Czacka who was the foundress of the religious order who leads the blind school I went to, and also the foundress of the school and everything around it as well. She was blind herself ever since she was 22, I believe, and is said to be the first person in Poland who has taken the problem of education of the blind seriously. This school is relatively well-known and quite a few people who have nothing or very little to do with the blind have heard about it somewhere and back in my school days they would ask my Mum whether I go to THAT school. I am talking about this because now that she and the whole blind centre and the order she founded have been talked a lot in the media and churches in the period leading up to the beatification, I’ve got quite a few people from my family and even beyond, asking me things like whether I’m happy that she’s gonna be beatified, and I found the amount of that and this specific phrasing of the question quite interesting so I thought I’d write a little bit about that and how I feel about it. Am I happy? Yes, I’m very happy! I feel tempted to throw an “obviously” in there, but since I’ve got this question so often perhaps it’s not so obvious for some reason. But I can’t think of a reason why I wouldn’t be happy. We definitely can’t complain about lack of representation of disabilities among saints but the more the merrier, and also I’ve got a feeling that blindness in general has gotten a little bit of spotlight in the Catholic church due to this, because they are telling her story everywhere now and obviously it’s impossible to tell her story without talking about blindness and the blind. Also while I can think of several blind saints, most of them have lived quite a long time ago and when reading about their lives there’s not much you can learn about their experience with blindness specifically, perhaps except for my dear patron saint bl. Margaret de Citta di Castello but she has also lived quite some time ago. So I think mother Elżbieta (or should I be saying Elizabeth in English now?… I never know if you should translate saints’/blesseds’ names or not, it seems so inconsistent) is going to be particularly relatable and close to the hearts of many blind people, and I think that sort of connection is important. I know many who have loved her long before she has been beatified, even if they were too young to know her or didn’t get a chance to meet her personally. I’ve heard of some blind people from that school who actually regard her as a sort of mother figure or something. And beyond that, whether it’s her or someone else, I think a beatification of someone new is generally a very happy event in itself for the Church as a community. My Mum also asked me whether I feel any sort of bond with her, which I think is a more interesting question. We’ve both had the same disability, so on this level I think there is some connection that I feel to her. Also, while personally I have very mixed feelings about both the school and my experience there, i feel grateful to her for the mere fact that she founded it, because the whole thing was extremely courageous of her, and that she devoted herself to the blind so much and on so many levels. One thing I’m extremely grateful to her for is that she adapted Braille to the Polish language. But I don’t feel much of an emotional bond with her like a lot of blind folks do. Or a very strong spiritual one. When I was at school, they’d talk a lot about her and I remember one person once suggested to me that if I struggle with homesickness and stuff like that, I could think of mother Elżbieta as my second mum or a mother figure or something, that some people have this sort of bond with her. I initially really tried and really wanted to, but somehow didn’t feel it. Then not much later I got truly sick of all that talking about it being our second home and stuff like that and I internally rebelled against it all, so there was no way I could think of her as my mum. When I was older, I read her writings and letters and several biographies and a couple memoirs involving her. She was incredibly wise and virtuous and strong-willed and in many aspects very extraordinary and fascinating, and while I didn’t see that at school because I had vastly different outlook on things and vastly different things on my mind, now I do admire her deep devotion to the Cross. Yet when I read her writings she doesn’t come across as someone whom I could truly feel close to. With all her admirable traits and all the great things she did, I think we just are too different for such a close bond to be possible. Or maybe I just have a somehow skewed perception of her despite all the stuff I read about her. And the mixed feelings I have about the school surely get in the way too, even though it doesn’t have to do with her directly. Like I said, the saint I do feel more of a connection to, and who also happens to have been blind and multiply disabled is bl. Margaret of Castello.

If we were having coffee, last, but not least, I’d share about a major purchase I recently made. I got myself an iPad, YAY! Now this is really a huge thing because not long ago I thought I wouldn’t be able to be able to use a smartphone, due to the touchscreen, and now I’m getting a second Apple device. This is because, actually, recently I had been considering a possibility of transitioning to a Mac from my Windows computer. Yeah, I’ve transitioned to a new computer over a year ago, but I’m sure Sofi would be more than keen to inherit this one from me, and also some of its parametres are well above what I need. I’ve recently got to hear a lot about how it looks in practice to use a Mac with VoiceOver (the built-in screen reader) and I was like, huh, this doesn’t sound quite as difficult as I thought. It sounds way more intuitive and non-geek-friendly than Windows. And I really have grown to like the way Apple does things ever since I’ve got my iPhone, while at the same time Windows irks me in more and more ways. Yet I’ve also heard about several blind people who have tried using Mac and it didn’t really work out too well, and because it’s not like I am incredibly tech savvy or anything, it felt risky, especially that Mac OS computers are not the cheapest in the world as everyone knows. So I was playing around with that idea for a long time until I figured that perhaps a cool golden mean would be getting an iPad, because I’ve heard of some blind users who just use an iPad with a Bluetooth keyboard as their primary device rather than a laptop or a computer, which they only use when something is just physically impossible to do on an iPad. Perhaps if I tried that, I would be able to say more decidedly in a couple of years how worth it and how risky for me getting a Mac is. And I guess in a year or two I’ll be able to apply for funding which you can get for an assistive device, and a computer counts as one. Since I don’t need anything more than a MacBook Air, perhaps the funding would even cover that if I’m lucky and counting right.

So in the end I got an iPad 8 and Apple says it should be here tomorrow and I’m really really curious and a little bit apprehensive. One thing I’m kind of afraid of not working out as well as I’d like is typing. I do a lot of writing, but while I have a Bluetooth keyboard for my iPhone as well as my Braille-Sense which works like a Braille Display and Bluetooth keyboard at once, I find writing on iPhone a pretty arduous experience, especially on the Braille-Sense which I prefer for longer writing because it’s easier and faster to review what I write. Except in the end it’s not because the cursor often flies around so it’s hard not to make mistakes, or in some apps it will randomly throw me out of the edit field after every few characters, or it will be very slow and freezy or otherwise buggy. Since iPad is essentially the same system, I’m not sure whether I can hope for much difference there. But it’s not like I am supposed to ditch the Windows computer and rely on the iPad for everything from tomorrow on. If, after a year or a few, I’ll come to the conclusion that I like the Apple ecosystem increasingly and the only thing that stops me from using iPad full-time is the typing, I might still get the Mac as I don’t think it has the same typing issues as iOS devices do.

What would you tell me if we were having coffee? 🙂

 

Question of the day.

What are three things you like that other people don’t like?

My answer:

I like liking things that other people don’t. One reason is because it feels kind of quirky, and since I’m quirky anyway it comes to me without even trying particularly hard. Another one is that I like and have a strong tendency to personalise things or even abstract concepts, so my mentality is like if no one likes them, they must be really sad. 😀 And since I am an (overly, as it seems) empathetic person, I feel a genuine need to compensate for that.

One such thing that I like but very few other people seem to do as well is the beautiful Dutch language. The funny thing is that I also used to consider it quite an unattractive language when I was younger, but everything changed as I started to listenn to Cornelis Vreeswijk when I was 17 and got a faza on him (he mostly sang and wrote his music and poems and everything in Swedish and lived there most of his life since he was 12 but he was born in the Netherlands and also had some sort of a career in his native country however much less impressive from what I understand and it’s like he’s sort of known in his country for being famous in Sweden). Fazas can change one’s perspective quite a bit, and while it took me quite a while to take a liking for this language, at some point it was just like something randomly switched in my brain and suddenly I was like “Awwww it’s actually such a really really beautiful language!” and my brain was all melting with delight as it tends to in such situations. It feels weird these days that I could ever have not liked it. I’m not one for the Romance languages and the like. One reason is that they’re “over-liked”, everyone wants to learn them and considers them beautiful. Aside from that, I often say, and have said on here as well, that I believe a language is similar to pasta in that it needs to be al dente. Swedish is a perfect example of that. Perhaps Dutch is a bit undercooked to be considered al dente, but that’s still way better than overcooked, I totally don’t mind the former and as a kid even used to eat dry pasta or noodles, but I can’t stand the texture when it’s overcooked, ewww! Like a dish, a language also needs to be spiced just right, and not be bland or wishy-washy. I usually don’t like things that are aesthetically, as my Mum calls it, “farting sweet”, or cloying, unless it’s genuinely cute. Dutch is really hot and I guess not everyone has high tolerance for spicy food so perhaps it’s the same with this language. Anyway, most Dutch natives I’ve talked to seemed very surprised whenever I mentioned that their language is on my list of languages that I want to learn and that I love. They’d usually find it difficult for some reason to understand why I’d want to do it, and many would admit that they actually don’t like the language themselves, and that they prefer English. 😀 I love English too, but it’s everywhere so it’s a bit boring, why limit myself like that? And some would even tell me how their language is actually quite difficult. I mean, I don’t speak it just yet, but I don’t really see how it would be extremely difficult for me, when I already know two Germanic languages (three if you include my kinda sorta making friends with Norwegian since about a month). Perhaps I’m overly confident here or not aware of something but it seems pretty straightforward and I find it very encouraging that I can already understand small bits of vocabulary with the languages I know, so it feels like one of the easiest languages on my list, if not THE easiest one. Some things about the sentence structure, like sticking the verb at the end of a sentence, is fairly odd to me, but I suppose it’s just a matter of enough exposure and practice until it will no longer feel odd. Swedish sentence structure in some more elaborate cases, especially where time is involved, is also different from the Polish (which is quite loose really or at least not permanently fixed) or English one and felt slightly intimidating to me at the beginning and difficult to understand, but, while I still do make mistakes with it, overall it feels completely natural that that’s how Swedish works because it’s Swedish, if that makes any sense to anyone other than me. Or it’s amusing what I sometimes hear Dutch language learners say, that they visit or move to a Dutch-speaking country to be able to practice their target language, but it often turns out impossible because as soon as people figure out they’re non-natives, they speak to them in English. 😀 Some of my Sweden experience was very similar, and it was kind of confusing because it made me feel like my Swedish must be really shitty if they find it easier to communicate with me in another language rather than their native one, even though I theoretically know it’s because people want to be helpful. Anyway, I myself am quite a patriot and love my own language and country so every time I’ve heard Dutch people being so underappreciative of their language, I honestly felt really shocked and also kind of sad, and that gave me just another reason for wanting to learn that language, to give it some love it totally deserves. I also love and plan to learn Frisian, which also gets some really interesting reactions sometimes. 😀

Another thing I love truly and deeply but everyone uninitiated seems to hate, or at best just not get my love for it, is kefir. I drink loads of it, so does Sofi, it’s very healthy and yumilicious and very refreshing, and is good for your guts so a perfect thing to drink if you’re emetophobic and happen to need to take antibiotics or something. It’s also okay for people who have lactose intolerance like my Mum. Obviously there is kefir and kefir though so you have to find the right one which has some better quality if it’s really important for you that it has the health benefits it’s supposed to have. Aside from water, I think this is the best drink when you’re properly thirsty. I rarely drink it on its own, unless I’m very thirsty and happen to crave kefir, but I drink it with most meals. I also used to get bad culture shock in my early days of penpalling when I’d mention kefir to my British pen pals and they’d be like: “Uh, and what is kefir?” I have an impression though that it’s become more popular over the last few years in regions where it hadn’t been previously known.

And another such thing are olives. I guess it’s not like everyone dislikes them but there seem to be two camps, people who love olives and people who dislike/hate olives and hardly anything in-between. I much prefer the black ones, but the green ones are okay too, certainly better than none. Olives weren’t a thing my family would eat when I was a kid, as we’re not very fancy with food really, and I remember the first time I ate them was on the train station in Warsaw when my Mum and me were waiting for a train to go home from my school. We were ravenously hungry so we bought one big Greek salad for us both, and that was how I discovered olives and immediately fell in love. Even though I have always loved them, I think I get why people wouldn’t, they really do have a very particular taste, and even I wouldn’t be able to eat a lot of olives without something that would complement the taste, it starts to feel weird pretty quickly. Since my Mum loves olives too, when she found out that so do I they became a regular ting in our house, even though everyone else here hates them. I also love capers, which seem to be even less popular with normal people.

How about you? 🙂

Question of the day (17th August).

What should every person do at least once?

My answer:

I’d say learn a language, or at least try to and experience what it feels like. I think it’s a very enriching and interesting experience and it makes me feel sad that a lot of people miss out on it entirely, without even knowing whether they’d like it or not, either because they don’t have any real motivation for it or because they think they don’t have a “talent” for it, whatever that elusive talent thing may be. Also the brain benefits long-term are a huge advantage in my opinion. Not to mention that it can open various doors for you, like to an entirely different culture and mentality, help you meet some interesting people. Most of all though, the reason why I think everyone should try it is that every language you know gives you a different perspective on things, a slightly, or perhaps sometimes not so slightly, I guess depending how different from each other your languages are, way of thinking, since language plays a huge role in how we think about or perceive different things. I’d even go as far as to say that with each language you acquire, be it in early childhood or later on, a different layer or aspect is added to your personality in a way, that is absolutely congruent with the rest of your personality and doesn’t create any conflict or anything, because your languages exist peacefully beside each other and complement each other rather than compete in your brain or exist in some separate, distinct realms, but speaking and/or thinking in more than one language simply makes you more multi-dimensional or something like that, and it lets you think more flexibly and in more ways.

Only there’s a problem, because at the same time I firmly believe that you have to actually, truly like your target language to do it and be successful at it and experience all the benefits of language-learning. If you don’t like it, there’s no point whatsoever. You’re neither going to be good at it (unless you seriously have some brain superpowers or are extremely disciplined and strong-willed) nor are you going to experience anything good from such learning. So while in theory I think we would all benefit from it, I think in practice one would first have to find a language that one finds really appealing and has some true motivation for learning it, because otherwise it just won’t work. I feel so much for all the kids who have to learn a foreign language they don’t like at school, like Sofi says she really doesn’t like English, although with her I’m not sure whether she seriously doesn’t get along with English as a language, or started to dislike it due to school and being unsuccessful at it. I – and it’s not just me –
always say that there’s no such thing as a language talent, unless you’re talking stuff like learning a native accent, but I think for most people who are accused of not having a talent or say so about themselves, the real problem is that they don’t really have much love for the language they’re learning, so it’s hardly surprising they’re not making much progress at it, or if they do, it feels painful and/or slow. Since I like learning languages people usually consider me very talented, but when I was learning German at school, which is a language I merely like and not love the way I do all “my” languages, I was very mediocre at it. Or when my Mum once had a dream to learn Italian (which, like all Romance languages, doesn’t really appeal to me very much in terms of sound and also I guess too many people like it for it to be truly loveable for me), and asked me to help her somehow, I tried to learn the basics, thinking just like my Mum that I’m apparently so good at languages so it’ll be no problem for me to learn and teach her the very basic stuff, except the grammar didn’t really make much sense to me and it all felt extremely arduous so I gave up after like two weeks. 😀 I feel for people who have to learn a language for work-related purposes but don’t have more of a relationship with it so it only feels stressful and forced and no fun at all. I guess it must be like being forced into an arranged marriage as opposed to being with someone you actually love, or making friends with someone solely because you’re colleagues and it’s useful rather than because you have anything in common and you want it. But there are so many languages in the world that I think if we all just looked around, or rather listened intently, most of us could find at least one language that we’d really fall in love with.

What’s such a thing in your opinion? 🙂

Question of the day.

What was the last book you read? Did you enjoy it?

My answer:

Village School by Miss Read. I’d been wanting for the longest time to read something from this author, particularly Miss Clare Remembers and No Holly For Miss Quinn, which are two books in her Fairacre series which inspired Enya (one of my faza people) to compose two pieces of music with the same names. Just listening to those songs I always thought that if they have book equivalents, they must be great, and reading their synopses made me think they were right up my alley, but there was no Polish translation, or at least I couldn’t find any, and it’s fairly recently, some two years ago I guess, that I’ve seriously started reading English-language books of all sorts more regularly and casually, that is not solely for learning the language and new vocabulary. GoodReads must have also figured that it would be right up my alley, because recently I’ve found the first book from this series (the aforementioned Village School) in my recommendations on there, and since now I have access to different places where I can get English books and I read them regularly, I figured I really need to give this series a go now. It took me some time to get into it properly, but I really did enjoy this book and I felt really at home in it by the time I finished. It was really sweet and charming and I absolutely loved her way of describing characters, I love authors whose characters I can actually imagine and who seem life-like, her way of describing things in general is amazing, and I liked her sense of humour.

At more or less the same time I happened to learn that a guy I used to follow quite regularly some years ago, who teaches Swedish online and is a Swede himself and generally seems quite crazy about languages, has written a handbook for Swedish learners, called A Lagom Guide To Swedish. I figured I could really use some good Swedish offline resource that I wouldn’t need to scan or anything, so I bought the ebook right away. And while it’s a handbook, so generally not something you’d just read like from cover to cover, that was precisely what I ended up doing, in just a few sittings. 😀 I was quite curious how much of the things in this book I would have already known, so I started just skimming through it, but then got positively surprised that I actually know SO much of the stuff he covered in it, and even more surprised and happy whenever I came across something I didn’t know or realise, that I just didn’t want to put it aside. It really boosted my self-esteem in terms of Swedish, because ever since my English has leapt so much forward, I’ve been feeling less confident about my Swedish than I was before, even despite I managed with it quite well in Stockholm and I can get along with people just fine, I always have an impression that my Swedish, compared with my English, feels kind of clunky and it’s not as easy for me to express everything in it as it is in English, even though there was a time when my Swedish was waay better than my English. So I’m really glad I came across that book, even for this one reason. And it’ll definitely still be useful in different situations.

How about you? 🙂

Question of the day.

What did your school teach you that turned out to be a complete lie?

My answer:

That you absolutely HAVE to pronounce the -ing endings in English with the standard English ng sound, or the velar nasal consonant linguistically speaking, as opposed to the way most Polish people with little practice in English pronunciation/accents tend to do.

When I was in my later years of primary and then early secondary, we had an English teacher who was generally quite demanding and also nitpicky in some respects and seemed to genuinely like creating the sort of image of a very stern and not particularly connected to her students teacher. Understandably, a lot of people who didn’t do very well at English were very stressed of having lessons with her, and even many who did well at English were still stressed. I did well at English for my class’ standards and didn’t like neither her nor English as a subject at all and found it extremely boring most of the time, yet I didn’t find it very stressful for some reason, guess because I generally didn’t overly care about grades. She had a habit of choosing a few people at the beginning of the lesson whom she would question from the previous material, and people usually dreaded it very much. One of the things she was particularly nitpicky for some reason were the -ings. Which would be absolutely okay with me as an accent freak (although I definitely didn’t have a normal English accent back then yet) if not the fact that it was very hypocritical, because she herself said them wrong half the time and lots of people noticed it and were annoyed about it, and generally looking back from my current perspective she didn’t seem to have the best accent. Neither did most of her students, thanks to this method, including, like I mentioned, myself. It was frustrating because, as is always the case in schools, there were children who learned slower than others, and still lacked some vocabulary or didn’t understand some grammar and she would also overwhelm them with such tiny details. Or on the other hand there were quite a lot of people who were good at English, especially in writing, but were shy when speaking because of stuff like this.

Years later I was learning English by myself, having a lot of fun with it, and immersing myself in a lot of different accents, discovering a lot of dialects, especially British ones, and their weird vocab etc. and trying to imitate all these accents and dialects and stuff and learn to tell one from another. And I grew quite fond of northern England accents, though frankly I love all of the British accents, when people ask me which one I love most I always say the one I’m currently hearing, because I can never decide. Yet I do prefer the northern ones slightly because they’re less ever-present and I like the rusticality I guess. 😀 And I started to notice that people from like York or Sheffield, I guess also some people in Manchester and Liverpool areas, would say their -ings “wrong”. The first couple times I figured I must have misheard it or something, you don’t say -ing like that, after all, but then I found it stated somewhere explicitly that people in the north of England do pronounce ing with the g. It IS different than the way Polish people typically do, because it’s still softer and more nasal, but still, it reminded me of that teacher and it made me laugh. I’m too used to saying my -ings “right” at this point, but I sometimes say it the northern way when I feel like it.

I personally pay A LOT of attention to things like accent in a language, because it’s freakishly interesting for me as someone whose native language has developed to be very universal across the country, and because at this point I can’t not pay the attention. But generally I agree with most of language teachers and mentors and learners and what not that accent isn’t the primary thing to be paid attention to when teaching/learning a language. Pronunciation and language melody and being understandable to natives as much as possible – yes – but purely accent not necessarily. I guess it seriously can affect the self-esteem and create a lot of mental blocks for people, who not only have to focus on a load of grammar rules (usually dryly memorised by heart because some people just like tormenting others and/or themselves like that), but also on the mini details like the -ings, and then when they actually get to talk to someone in their target language they can’t because they’re scared that the other person will laugh at them or kill them because they said one word wrong. Not to mention when we’re talking children. And especially when the teacher herself can’t show how to say something properly, so that people maybe don’t even realise how it should sound actually. From what I know, a lot of people, not just me, are a bit puzzled why foreign language classes aren’t taught in the target language altogether. I think that would make it way easier for students to learn to pronounce these -ings. As it is, a single individual hardly gets to say more than a handful of example sentences they’ve learnt from the textbook, and the majority of the lesson, all the real teacher-students interaction, happens in Polish, in most schools anyway. When people don’t talk or listen, but instead fill in the gaps in the book and memorise useless crap, how can they learn the fun stuff like accents, or whatever really? And, most of all, I wonder why it’s not solely native speakers who teach their native languages. They do have a different perspective than someone who’s just learning this language, for sure, and may not understand some mistakes they make due to their first language’s structure, but overall I think the upsides outweigh the downsides here. And then there are also some people who just don’t hear mini differences like that in a foreign language, like our Sofi.

How about your school? 🙂

Question of the day (17th June).

What is your biggest non-academic, non work-related accomplishment?

My answer:

Well, I think that would be my language learning achievements, especially when it comes to English and Welsh, as with Swedish I had a tutor for a long time so you could say it was kinda academic, but with English and Welsh I’ve been doing it mostly by myself. I did of course have English throughout my formal education, but, as I said many times before, I don’t feel like I learned anything more than just the basics this way, and anything else I wanted to achieve, I had to take care of myself, and only reached fluency in my last years of schooling when I had plenty of time to work on my English as I first had a year of individual education and then did schoolwork part-time and mostly from home. With Welsh, even though I don’t feel fluent yet at all, it feels like even more of an accomplishment because, even though I’m not fluent, I sort of doubted I could achieve even the level I’m at now, given the limited resources and their frequently limited accessibility and/or availability where I live.

You? 🙂

Question of the day (11th June).

What is something you enjoy doing, but others don’t?

My answer:

I really like reading dictionaries, while it’s just flicking through them (with or without a specific purpose) or reading them as you would a novel. I find words extremely interesting and sensorily stimulating as I have several forms of lexical synaesthesia (lexical-tactile and lexical-gustatory). I don’t do it very often because accessibility of dictionaries isn’t very high as a general rule, I had a dictionary of foreign words/loanwords in Braille as a child but now no longer have it as it took up a lot of space that I could have used for other things, plus when I started to use technology more it became useless because if I’d really need to look up something in this dictionary it’s in public domain so I can very easily do it online. I also have some Swedish-Polish/Polish-Swedish dictionaries in normal print which I’ve also scanned so I can read them, but these scans are actually pretty bad and difficult to read so it’s often easier for me to go online and do research if I need to figure out some Swedish word and how it’s used. Then now that I have an iPhone I also have tons of English dictionaries on it, and a couple Welsh ones – one very detailed with all sorts of information you may need and quite confusing sometimes if you’re a learner, and the other a lot more concise. – But you can’t really go through a dictionary app on your phone as you can through an actual book, plus the Welsh ones are not overly friendly when you’re a screen reader user which is discouraging. Still, I do like reading/browsing through dictionaries when I can and I think I do it a lot more often than average, not just because I’m learning languages but out of plain curiosity.

You? 🙂