Postcrossing card from Taiwan, February 2017
A type-written love letter… Not very romantic, I might have thought, a few decades back... Nowadays, perhaps a letter written on an old-fashioned typewriter would seem very romantic indeed?? – indicating the sender having gone through some trouble to find a functioning old-fashioned manual type-writer, and then having written the letter without access to any “delete” button for mistakes and regrets…
Postcrossing card from Russia, August 2017
I have recently taken up a new Duolingo challenge: Learning a little bit of Russian. Have to admit that to my ears, the spoken language still sounds like a tape played backwards (do younger generations even know any more what a “tape” is?) - and the strange [sorry – different!] alphabet doesn’t help… But I must be making some little progress, because at least I managed to “translate” the name of the artist who painted this picture into the “Latin” alphabet, and then also found more illustrations by her on the internet (even if no text info in English). Her name is Galina Egorenkova (Галина Егоренкова).
The postcard is just adorable!! I think the owls are guarding the mailbox...or maybe they are nesting in it! One can imagine so many scenarios! YES, I know what you mean about Russian sounding like a backwards tape! Now I will always hear it that way whenever someone speaks it.
ReplyDeleteThe Russian postcard is adorable. And I am always in awe of people who manage to learn another language that uses a different script.
ReplyDeleteBoth are lovely postcards!
ReplyDeleteConcerning alphabets, I love to decipher foreign alphabets, too! Not that I know the meaning of the deciphered words, but it is always handy to read names of artists, puzzling this way. And the good news is that the cyrillic (and for instance Greek and Persian) alphabet(s) have more or less a one-to-one letter 'translation', so having a sheet with both the foreign and the Latin alphabet, we can read already a lot :-) In contrary to for instance the Chinese characters...
Moroccan people would say "Arabic" alphabet, and not "Persian"... ;-D
DeleteI did not know that about the Arabic/Persian alphabet. I have no ambition at the moment to dive into that as well, though :) But as I get postcrossing cards from Russia now and then, I do see some use for being able to decipher names of people and places in Russian!
DeleteLet me know if you need a postcard with Arabic letters to be deciphered!
DeleteThanks Eva, I'll keep it in mind :)
DeleteI agree that a typewritten love letter would be very romantic nowadays. I feel old because I can type, what means that I use all my fingers on the keyboard. It seems that nobody do that any more...
ReplyDeleteI also can read/write/speak Arabic :)
I type using all my fingers, too. (Not in Russian, though!) Used to work as a secretary. Besides Swedish and English I am fairly fluent in German, also know a bit of French since my school days. Last year in spring I discovered Duolingo and have been amusing myself on my phone since then, adding some more languages to my list, "just for fun". Spanish at the top as the most useful :)
DeleteHello Monica, thanks for sharing both postcards. You make me envious with the second one as I love owls too. Good luck in learning Russian. I am having issues with Duolingo as it won't make me reset my "progress". I want to restart with my French lessons but I'm unable to do that.
ReplyDeleteMaria, I have never tried to reset my Duo progress. Can't you just go back and repeat? I've been doing that in all the courses that I've finished. One still gets more points added to one's score and one also keeps getting moved up in "levels" in that language. In some languages (Spanish, Dutch) new exercises have also been added but I'm not sure that happens in every language.
DeleteI have been doing Postcrossing for about four years and I just love it.
ReplyDelete