Versaries

Yesterday, I received an email reminding me that it was my 6th Postcrossingversary. Wow. How time flies when one is having fun!


 Postcrossing:

• The goal of this project is to allow anyone to send and receive postcards from all over the world! The idea is simple: for each postcard you send, you will receive one back from a random postcrosser somewhere in the world. 

• Simply because --- there are lots of people who like to receive real mail.
  Receiving postcards from different places in the world (many of which you probably have never heard of!) can turn your mailbox into a box of surprises — and who wouldn't like that?
  

On top of that, I'm also celebrating my 3rd Duolingoversary this week.

Duolingo is a language learning platform with more than 300 million users and offering around 30 different languages. It is free to use and is designed to feel like a game. The course that they have developed the furthest is Spanish; and second comes French.

Spanish was also my own first choice on Duolingo, and is still my priority there. (At least one lesson per day - often more.) However, I have also made use of Duolingo to freshen up my French and German (learned in school many years ago, long before computers and mobile phones); to improve my understanding of Danish and Norwegian (closely related to Swedish); and also to try and learn a little bit of Dutch, Turkish, Welsh and Russian. (I have also had a peek at one or two others, but decided not to proceed with those - for now, anyway!) 

With Dutch, I have come to understand it pretty well (in writing), but have decided to "stop" at that, as I don't want to mess up my German. And it's the same thing with the other new languages, really: Except for maybe Spanish, my ambitions don't really go beyond learning to understand a bit. I have a general interest in languages though, so I'm fascinated when I can just learn to recognize some words and phrases and basic structures. 

Postcrossing and learning foreign languages are of course two hobbies that go rather well together - even if the most commonly used language in postcrossing is English.

Learning more languages has also made me more interested in watching TV series or films in those languages (even if I'd still be lost without Swedish subtitles). For example I have enjoyed the Spanish series Velvet on Netflix (the setting is a Spanish fashion house in the 1950s/60s), and the Turkish series Paramparça (Broken pieces) on Swedish television. At the moment, I'm following a Jewish series on Netflix - Shtisel. (No, I don't know any Hebrew... But I'm fascinated to discover that I recognize and even understand a bit when they switch to Yiddish now and then!).