way to drops!

I do believe I have bored you stupid (are you stupid yet?) with details on my attempts to at very least get my foot in the door with the Finnish language via apps, duolingo until a few months ago and now Drops. I am now on the very babyishly simple topic of Finnish words for other countries and for the people who live in those countries (something I covered very extensively in duolingo so it's even less of a stretch). Right now I am on a couple of gripes. One is the use of what I always (following the lead of Spike Milligan I think, putting me in a minority) call 'talks balloons' but most people call speech bubbles. 

So Drops is all about little pictograms which I suspect is the reason it can go in far greater depth with a super-minority language like Finnish - the pictograms are the same for every language course, but the answers are different depending on what language you're studying. Here, the answer is 'portugalilainen' i.e. a person from Portugal. In most instances, the pictogram for 'a person from...' is just a standard white (I guess) man wearing a t-shirt with that country's flag on it. But in this case, this is a cliche/icon of Portugal, with a talks balloon coming out of it with the flag in it. Why? 

Here are more examples. The pictograms for Italy; Spain (this time, a talks balloon coming out of Spain!); Brazil and Belgium.  

But the pictogram for Belgian person is a talking glass of beer, presumably saying 'I am Belgian'. 

Whereas the pictogram for Italian person is below - and most of the others are the same. Well, it's confusing! 

This is the first glitch of this nature I've encountered, by the way. The answer is 'italialainen'. I started to trace the word out and realised it was going to get me in a corner I couldn't get out of, but persisted because I thought well maybe - for the first time - it would let me reuse the 'i' on the second row. But it didn't, and I couldn't go forward (or back, but what would be the point). The lessons are typically 5 minutes long, and as you can see I was on 4:19 at this point. All I could do was wait it out. 

 Ridiculous! Hope this doesn't happen again or, you know, I'll never get to speak fluent Finnish :-P

bye duolingo

Weird goings on with Duolingo. I am sure I have mentioned that I was tired of using it, as it served me up the same stuff every day in a passive-aggressive way and clearly did not have any new vocab beyond what it took to jump through all the hoops. I decided to end my subscription. 

It kept me on, transferring me to the free version, then suddenly started giving me really difficult exercises, of either things I've forgotten because they were so long ago, or things I'd never actually seen before, can't remember obviously. I was then told I had run out of 'hearts' which might be a thing on the free version but was never a thing on the paid version. I wasn't going to pay, so I ended my streak. There you go!!!

Meanwhile, Drops, which you may recall was the app I chose instead of duolingo, is also putting me through my paces but I have paid a subscription to Drops for life, so as long as they don't suddenly put a ceiling on what they choose to present to me, I think I will continue to get a lot out of them. 

Of course, apps aren't the be all and end all. I am going to have to start being a bit more proactive about teaching myself Finnish if I'm going to be fluent by the time I'm 85. That doesn't leave much time. 

hilda scurr again

Well so I ordered the box of Bluey, the 1976 Crawfords show that ran for 39 episodes and gave Lucky Grills the career boost he never could have dreamed of. I have no idea what Lucky Grills was like as a comedian but I sort of imagine him as an Ugly Dave Gray type. He's a good ratbag in Bluey but in a way Bargearse was not a million miles removed from the reality, well, Bluey doesn't eat all the time but he is a slob who doesn't care who he offends. I guess. Well, the show is formulaic (in a way that Homicide, honestly, wasn't and even Special Squad is more varied and surprising) but it has good characters and the sets look good. In a horrendous way. 

Here's Hilda Scurr, once again doing a Crawfords turn, not looking terribly old or anything (I suppose she was only ten years older than when she first started turning up in Homicide) and in fact she'd only been in Homicide the year before.

Of course she dies. That's what old people do on TV, that's what they're for. 

I was moved to wonder about the Crawfords trope where people get badly injured then go to hospital but spend quite a bit of time coming round to dying, long enough to have conversations and decide to confess etc etc. I guess I've just answered the mystery of why this happens, but it's still odd that it happens so much. I suppose it might be - laziness?! Sorry Crawfords I'm mean. 

Meanwhile, I'm killing it on Drops, the new app I'm now learning Finnish on (I still do one or two duolingo lessons a day but I have moved on - Drops has so much more). 

One quibble: I don't think people can meet on their phone, and I do think they can sit on their phone. But apparently I'm wrong:

But really who cares. I'm doing so well! 

I am not sure what this means (the graphic) but I am not going to complain. I am unstoppable. 

made it

So this is my triumph but I'm not sure I'm going to take it much further with duolingo. To be tested - just as I was probably in the first week - on the Finnish word for Australia ('Australia') and koala ('koala') (at least Egypt is 'Egypti' and camel is 'kameli' - got tested on both of those too today) demeans us both. It seems pretty obvious I am not about to unleash a whole swathe of new words and I guess the duolingo model must be something like: string the lower tier language learners along (most of them drop off early anyway, obviously, none the wiser that there is no great epic trove unfolding down the track) and perhaps a few who hang around and finally catch on to the deficiency will opt for a more popular, expansive language course. I mean before they started offering Finnish I was dabbling in Norwegian and German and Duo still hopes I might one day take one or the other of those further sometime. 

Anyway, I've signed up to another app called Drops, which is sort of the same but seems - at this early juncture anyway - a little more sophisticated. Drops exchanges a lot more English for pictures than Duolingo which is probably good. It also, of course, doesn't hurt my language confidence that about 80% of the words I'm currently being 'taught' I also know from Duolingo. So I have a 96% score at the moment (largely because of my mental block about the difference between a finger pointing to a small ball - which means I think 'this' ('tämä') as opposed to a finger pointing to a small ball next to a big block, which means 'small' ('pieni'). Speaking of 'pieni', it willl be a big relief to put 'Mr Blue Sky, why is that small tree dancing?' behind me forever. I'd tell you what that was in Finnish but I can't be bothered correcting autocorrect every word.