Today has been a particularly complicated day... I woke up with even more restricted movements, after a nearly sleepless night and I'm now fighting off this sensation of just feeling... blah... I think Swedes have a quite good and hardly translatable word for this - seg.
The fact that I have less than a week to sort out my situation in college, which virtually means that I'll have to finish a presentation and actually sort myself through another paper I'm supposed to hand in, doesn't really help much. Not to mention all the other things that have to be done before packing the bags and taking off to the "Old Free North"...
Yesterday evening, on the other hand, was a bit of a paradise in this mental and physical chaos of mine. My parents decided to adopt a new furry family member and, after some discussion on what she should be named, everybody liked "Lucy". For those of you whom I haven't tortured yet with photos and descriptions of this cuddly Miss, here goes a sneak-a-peak of the "girl" who has recently stolen everybody's heart around here... :-)
We had a lovely family dinner... nice warm sunny weather, grilled food and plenty of running around after a very tricky and messy puppy.
* - * - *
As for Swedish, I decided to re-translate to Swedish the first 2 dialogs of that all-so-mentioned Chapter 2 and I ended up realizing something - when I translate a dialog to English, I'll have to be more careful in introducing details, because when I translate it back to Swedish it often misses something. Still, my level of correctness this time around was higher, which is always inspiring, I guess...
I should also tell you a little something about the tools I use when dealing with vocabulary. Every time I come across a new word, that I'm supposed to add to a word card, I first pass it by http://en.wiktionary.org/. It not only allows me to grasp the meaning of a word and also insert in various contexts, but it also gives me a lot about the type of word I'm dealing with.
You should give it a shot! Really!... Take the word "svenska", for example. To start with, it tells you which language you're dealing with. Then, you have a sound file so you can have a clue on its pronunciation. Finally, it tells you that it can be both a noun and an adjective - and provides you with both a declination and inflection chart for the word.
Wiktionary has really proved itself to be a most valuable tool. It's a pity, though, every time we trip on a word that isn't there... So, here's my personal appeal to those of you who speak the language - do help improve Wiktionary! :-)
The day ended with a rather amusing vocabulary practice... - some word cards workouts - just so I could tune in my bable fish for the 3rd episode of "Kommissarie Winter". I start to feel like my fishie wishie is actually starting to process the odd accents and the strange vocabulary. Either that or the topic of this particular episode seemed more appealing somehow and my attention was captured more easily.
We didn't finish the episode though... after half an hour, we were both slumbering away. Maybe tonight we'll be able to finish it up - after I'm done with this presentation that just doesn't seem to want to cooperate with me. Hmm!... :-S
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