Refraction

Sooooooooo on one of my random trips to the mall, I stumbled upon a sidewalk sale of books and proceeded to buy two poetry books. One is book of tranlated Quebecois poems about Paris; the other is a collaborative poetry effort between P.K. Page and David Stratford. It’s this last one which interests me the most: it reminds me of when I actually wrote “poetry” and didn’t wince over it.

I would like to set up a renga circle now, but I have a dreadful feeling this is going to be another one of my half-finished projects. Maybe I’ll just admire the poetry.

My offline friends know I’m a language fiend. I’m not particulary good at most of them, but I like to collect them. 😀 And books about them. 😀

So I’m keeping this post to remind myself of exactly what language-learning books I have and to show them off 😀

French

• Le bon usage, a giant French grammar of everything and anything you could possibly need to know (okay, I’m exagerrating, but this is one huge book. It’s bigger than my dictionary.)
• Grammaire pratique du français d’aujourd’hui, another grammar book, but written in French for non-Francophones.
• Grammaire complète, a grammar I bought in Québec. Now that I have it I’m not too sure I need it anymore. It uses odd capitalization (le Subjonctif; le Conditionnel) but it has really cute pictures XD
• French Prose Composition, it’s an exercise book for English to French translation. There are no answers though, just a very interesting preface. XD
• Ensuite, a random French textbook I bought at a library book sale. I don’t know where this went, actually.
• C’est la vie, ditto.
• Collins-Robert Pocket French Dictionary, still going strong after many years of service!
• La petite Larousse, 197x, I can’t remember when exactly it was published, but it’s old. It has pictures though, helpful for when you can’t figure out what kind of tree an ‘epinette’ is (it’s a pine, I think.)
• Le micro Robert, dictionnaire linguistique que j’ai acheté au Québec. It’s awesome.
• Mettre de l’ordre dans ses idées, a book all about connecteurs! 😀 Cost me an arm and a leg but given the emphasis my prof in Québec put on them, I think it’s well worth the cost.
• Larousse: Difficultés Grammaticales, a small little reference book for those little details of French grammar. Surprisingly cheap, too 😀
• Plus a whackload of literary works (Voltaire, Ionesco, etc.)

Japanese

• French-Japanese dictionary, it is t3h awesome. Case closed. I can’t really use it, but still…
• Japanese for Busy People, Vol I (kana edition), a cute find, but unfortunately I am already familiar with 90% of the lessons presented here (not that I recall them exactly: I never liked numbers in Japanese.)
• Japanese for Busy People, Vol II.
• 250 Kanji Essential for Everyday Use, Vol II (or some such title). Haven’t even looked at this.
• Conversational Japanese: the Cortina method, this book is so old it comes with an offer for a free record. XD

(I am getting tired of these comments, and in any case, they are only interesting for the French ones, anyway.)

German

• Pocket Oxford German Dictionary
• Berlitz German Grammar handbook
• Teach Yourself German
• Teach Yourself German Grammar
• Handbuch zur deutschen Grammatik

Chinese (Mandarin)

• Chinese: an essential grammar
• Chinese in 10 Minutes a Day, ‘gift’ when I was, oh, 5, and HOW IT SHOWS.

Chinese (Cantonese)

• Elementary Cantonese, Vol I, currently on loan to someone somewhere.

Spanish

• Collins Spanish Dictionary
• Teach Yourself Spanish

Vietnamese

• Essential Vietnamese Phrases

Russian

• The Penguin Russian Course

I love this “free time” concept.

I spent today reading Speaker for the Dead, the sequel to Ender’s Game, and I like this one a lot better. A lot. I hadn’t realized a sci-fi novel could get so emotional; I must have cried five or six times reading that book.

See, Game left me feeling like I didn’t really want to read the next one, but Speaker really invites me to go on. Fun stuff. :biggrin:

I have to point out, though, that I really, really, really don’t think Card is a scientist. His explanation for the piggies’ life cycle makes no sense, unless he’s purporting that their genetic material behaves differently from ours. That implication doesn’t seem to be present, though, as it’s referred to as DNA. And DNA, as I know it, can’t do the things that he suggests it does.

A last-minute-uni-student style note to Sarah, who has officially hit the two-decade mark today. 😀 Zhu ni sheng ri kuai le! :star: (And psst, lemme know if you want a redesign on your blog (I’m thinking Vienna Teng. Or is that too fangirly?) I have TIME now.)

I haven’t looked at my marks since yesterday, which only reported my French marks. I’m really scared to look at my chem marks. Really, really scared.

I finished reading Ender’s Game a little bit ago, and while it’s quite good, I was a bit disappointed–I suppose I’d expected something different. Maybe I’d like it more if I were actually into military strategy and stuff… I’m also reading random chunks from Ender’s Shadow, which I like better, because Bean is a more interesting character overall.

(Rest of post contains spoilers for Ender’s Game.)
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I hope you all had a good New Year’s. :biggrin:

Okay, a couple of new things about this mostly painless upgrade to WP 2.0:

• You can now edit your comments within thirty minutes of posting it. Give it a try; once your comment has been posted, you’ll see a little “e” link there, next to the date and time. Click that to enter editing mode.
• I now have two anti-spam plugins working for me. By my reckoning, I’ve had about 17000 spam comments attack my blog over the time that it’s been up. That’s kind of scary, since there are only about 500 real comments.
• Haha, I lied, there really is only the one new thing, the editing comments part.

The new interface is quite shiny, but alas! It takes a little longer to load on my memory-starved computer.

Classes so far this term, in emoticons:

Physical Chemistry: 😯
Organic Chemistry: :notsure:
French Grammar: :dorkygrin:
French Literature: :nosey:

And for those of you who prefer words….
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