sköldpaddan dricker vatten.

I'm having fun with Swedish. Our next-door neighbors are a very nice Danish couple, so I decided to check out Danish on Duolingo as well. (I was about to write "as a lark," but that sort of represents everything I do with my spare time.) There's a certain level of mutual intelligibility among Swedish/Danish/Norwegian, so I thought I'd see for myself. It's interesting, of course: the words for "man" and "woman" are cognate (man/mand and kvinna/kvinde), but "boy" and "girl" are not (pojke/dreng and flicka/pigin).

(I had to stop both Danish and Norwegian: all the words are too close together for me to keep track, and I also don't trust Duolingo's pronunciation across the three.)

I bestirred myself to actually look up Swedish's indefinite articles (translated as English "a/an"), en and ett. One Swedish teacher writes that there used to be three, formerly labeled masculine/feminine/neuter, but then they simplified and now about 75% of things are en, and the remainder ett. These come in handy for forming the definite article form ("the"), so ett äpple becomes äpplet, and en björn becomes björnen.

The rules get more complicated with plurals and then definite plurals, depending on the final vowel (or occasionally consonant?) in the word. Duolingo doesn't help with this: it's fun, but it's best not to confuse it with learning a language, exactly, since it neither focuses on useful phrases, nor explains rules nor grammar. I mean, do I know more Swedish now than I ever expected to? Sure, and I love learning stuff. But, Duolingo clearly has algorithms driving much of its learning, and may have topped its previous best sentence:

Hon har en älg. / "She has a moose."

With a new contender:

Björnen tycker om vegetarianen. / "The bear likes the vegetarian."

Though once I get off the plane in Stockholm, I will definitely look for a chance to use either of those.

books books books

I came in just shy of finishing 100 books in 2018. It wasn't a goal, but I was surprised how much I did read, and some of it took a while, like The Tide, A Perfect Red, and perhaps the longest-running, "great for small increments at bedtime," Cuisine and Empire: Cooking In World History. So far, nothing compares to Moby-Dick for great literature to put me to sleep. (Robinson Crusoe might, but I couldn't get past the first couple paragraphs. Maybe 2019 sees me trying again.)

I started in on audiobooks a bit, for the times when I can't focus my eyes, or I'm doing something else (driving, dog-walking) and need something different than podcasts. The clear winners here were The Dunwich Horror by H.P. Lovecraft, and various Conan the Barbarian writings by Robert E. Howard. Lovecraft, for all his reputation of writing in the vein of "O, but it is so cosmically horrible I cannot describe it," actually goes ahead and describes it, quite well. The Conan works are also pleasantly surprising, and once you adjust for the era and medium--he was writing in the 30s for pulps like Weird Tales and Oriental Stories, not angling for a Pulitzer--it's easy to see where Howard's avowed feminism shows up. I'm also revisiting Christopher Moore's work as audiobooks, starting with Practical Demonkeeping.

Reading in 2018 was a path for growth, but also an escape from anxiety, and work, and work-provoked anxiety. I've got a lot of stuff to do this year, internally and externally. We'll see what happens.