First, a note from our sponsors. The BOGO is going on for today and tomorrow only, Sunday and Monday! Then this deal will vanish. More details here. But basically, buy the full Sorcery and Steam bundle, send me your email confirmation, and I’ll send you a link to my starter library!

Back to our regularly scheduled blog post…

I’ve been using Duolingo for thirty days now. I still love it. I’ve cut back the amount of time I spend on it, though, down to 15 minutes per day. I find that at the start of a new section, because of all the new vocabulary, I can really only do 15 minutes. Once I’m at the end of a section, and I’m just practicing and doing repetition, I can do 20 minutes. As long as I’m not doing it at the end of the day when I’m tired. So I still do 20 minutes a day frequently, just not every day.

Learning a new language does teach me focus, though, making sure that I’m paying attention to the little words like “a” versus “the”.

I’m right now going through three sections at the same time – basics 2, jobs and locations. I’ll do three – five lessons in one of these one day, then switch to the next the following day.

I was chatting with my friend about what I’m learning. Evidentially in Spanish, it’s all about the apple juice – do you want apple juice, no I do not want apple juice, yes I would like apple juice, etc.

In Hungarian, it was all about the water, wine, and beer. I would like water, not wine. I would like wine, not beer. Etc. (I just looked up apple juice in Hungarian. Found it interesting that as soon as I saw the construct, I remembered it and could apply it to other things.)

For jobs, I feel as though some of the job titles I’m learning won’t be used in everyday conversation, such as composer or director. Plus sentences like, “Good morning soldier!” As well as “Who is a soldier?”

But it also gave me a job title that I remembered – writer. The title for this post is one of my favorite sentences that I’m drilling on – I am a writer, not a politician.

For places, I ran across a very familiar construct. Basically, in Hungarian, to say something like, “The bus waits in front of the airport”, the words are in this order: The bus the airport in front of waits.

The placement “between” can be even more fun – The airport the city and a large river between is. (The airport is between the city and a large river.)

So again, marvelous fun speaking Hungarian every day. As soon as I finish these three sections I’m moving onto verbs as well as accusative. Good times. (^_^)

This morning, all I’m writing is this blog post. Then I get to go out and work in the garden. I’ve done over 17K for the week, which is good enough. I like being able to take a day off from the writing at least once a week. Again, that helps with the making it seem less like a job. Even if I’m in a section that I REALLY want to get back to, all about the unexpected consequences of chaotic magic…

So I think that’s about it for me. What do you use to take a break from the artist work? Too refill the well as it were?