Homework

No gaming this week, or even painting. I've had plenty of time but not the motivation. I have been doing my homework though. In a previous book haul I bought the second edition of Duffy's The Army of Frederick the Great. After abandoning books on the Duke of Monmouth and Captain Morgan, at least temporarily, I started the Duffy book. It was a blessed relief after the other two. Some well-written history. Proper history. The second edition is markedly different from the first, so it is well worth having even if you have read the first. Duffy revises some of his earlier views on the performance of Prussian light troops for example. I think the second edition was influenced by further research he did using Austrian sourced, which showed things from the opposition's perspective.

I also picked up a couple of cheap books from Paul Meekins on-line bookshop. (Excellent service by the way).

I had a book with excerpts of Frederick's writings in the 90s, but I think that may have fallen victim to  someone else's domestic travails.

I got Cooke's book on Yorkshire in the Civil War a couple of years ago. That was excellent, so I'm really looking forward to this one. This is still in a cellophane wrapper.

I've also been doing homework in the language field. I have been grappling with the Finnish language on and off for over 17 years. Progress has been limited mainly by my own laziness. I've been doing fortnightly lessons locally for years now, and over the past year these have moved from the classroom to on-line. The problem is, being a bit of a lazy beaver, I don't do any work on it between lessons and two weeks is just long enough to forget 90% of anything new.

That is until now. A few weeks ago the other half for some reason was having a go at Swedish on a phone app. Swedish was her second language and she was functionally fluent growing up, about 40% of her home town's residents having Swedish as their first language. Over the years, non-use has meant her skill has drifted away but she still comprehends a lot, although Swedish accents can be a bit harder for her to follow. Anyway, she was working on the app at a very basic level and looking over her shoulder I could see the correct answer to one of those 'pick the right word from below' type questions before she could. You see there are a lot of basic words that are very similar to English. English often has multiple words meaning more or less the same thing, drawn from different languages. You sometimes find in such cases, the short, simple synonyms, and especially slightly 'archaic' or northern dialect words, are similar to words in Swedish.  Thus 'clothed' is 'klädd'. Chuffed with myself, I signed up and started doing it myself. And then I started doing Finnish, from scratch. Doing both has filled up all those moments when I don't really have time to do much else, or when I'd be scrolling through TV channels in search of anything remotely watchable.

What's been useful is cementing all the basic stuff in Finnish, as well as exercising the brain picking up a new language. If I'd been more pragmatic I'd have selected a language that would be more 'useful'. Something more widely spoken, but what the heck. Life is short. Despite still being at a basic level on the app, I've found the extra practice every day has sharpened that part of my brain that deals with language, so I've been noticeably more switched on during the on-line lessons.

There's been some humour in the app lessons. For example, grammatically correct nonsense. You'll note from the following though that the app has some rather irritating graphics, sounds and, erm, 'Californian positivity'. Awesome!

Something (printable) to say when you tread on a Lego brick.

A comment of the origin of the Ashes no doubt.

Absolutely no idea about this one, unless it's translated from Cockney rhyming slang.

Those Swedes love a disco. Hallelujah!