A productive day, and it's only mid-afternoon

[vostoklake]

What I did today:

- gave out 100 leaflets advertising the March 20 anti-war demonstrations at my union's stopwork meeting.

- voted for protest action, leading to strikes, if the university management don't start playing fair. I'm quite excited. It would be my first ever strike, although of course I'm hoping it won't go so far.

- began writing an article based on Part Three of my doctoral thesis, in the hope of getting it published somewhere and thus really starting my academic career.

- applied for a place in the May graduation ceremony, in the hope that they might actually examine my thesis before the end of March. Well, it might happen.

- recommitted myself to getting a reading knowledge of Italian. (deepbluemermaid, naturalmente avro' bisogno della tua assistenza*. Did I spell that right?)

*For the benefit of darthsappho the Esperanto snob, that translates as "kompreneble mi bezonos vian helpon".

Comments

[deepbluemermaid.livejournal.com]

almost perfect! should be 'bisogna', which is the noun as well as the 3rd person singular - bisogno is the first person singular, but you don't normally use that. it works exactly the same as 'j'ai besoin de' in french.

i forgot to reply to your email, but i was very amused by the italian woman calling you 'comrade'. that just rocks.

...evviva socialismo e liberta'!

[laputain.livejournal.com]

In her honour, I've taught myself to sing Bandiera Rossa. :)

Reading knowledge of Italian

[rex-anglorum.livejournal.com]

I think you will find you already *have* a reading knowledge of Italian. There are so many loan words to and from French and English that you have most of the vocabulary already. If you take something simple - ideally something published in the last 50 years, and even more ideally something with some technical content (which boosts the Common European Heritage [CEH] percentage even more) I would imagine that you will not need to look at a dictionary after the first page or so. Science Fiction is ideal reading-matter. I can scan some for you if there is only a limited supply in libraries local to you.

Even better is comics, you won't need a dictionary at all. Viva Asterix il Gallico! :-) [I still have Asterix e gli Elvezi, Asterix e il Duello dei Capi, and Asterix e lo Scudo degli Arverni....] NB as these would be colour scans rather than plain text, the files would be bigger.