I’m struggling to get used to Zoom thus far. I should perhaps try and find a tutorial or two on YouTube ?
I’m really enjoying my Welsh and Latin classes. Welsh is hard going, even though I have the enormous benefit of speaking another Celtic language - the similarities are very strong in many places, and the differences on the other hand are often huge and surprising. There’s also the problem of two major dialect groups, North and South Welsh. Our teacher has been asked to teach both, and about half of us are North devotees, myself included, so everything new is introduced twice. The two halves each have different tutorial textbooks, I have the North Welsh book and I have an app for iOS which accompanies the book with native speaker audio samples, vocabulary and exercises. The app has a North/South switch in it, so there’s only one version to download, which contains both. It’s fun though, even though it’s work.
My weekend Latin classes are a delight, 2.5 hours every Saturday afternoon. The teacher is great and so are all the other students. Refreshing my Latin from 1977 is like meeting an old friend. I haven’t forgotten much, which reminds me of how useless my vocabulary was - I didn’t know enough in the first place even back then. I am by no means the most remote student. One of my classmates is in Moscow where apparently it’s now the deepest snow since 1956, over the tops of cars, and people are trying to dig cars out. Some of the students are completely new to the language but a good few are like me, using our substantial knowledge acquired long ago.
I’m struggling here with Zoom and a downloaded textbook which lives in the Kindle app on my iPad and reading the book requires switching to Kindle while Zoom is still running, requiring a certain degree of coordination. I’ve decided that there are advantages to a physical book. Not many though. I have a physical textbook for my Welsh course and it’s very large and the nightmare of trying to keep it open at the right page while I’m also using my iPad for Zoom is causing damage to the spine of the book, and trying to support the damned thing in a position where I can read it is a pain too. What I need for the Latin Kindle book is a second iPad, so I can run two screens at a time, one for Zoom and one for the Kindle textbooks. And luckily I do have a second iPad. My old one hasn’t been used in a while but it still works fine, so setting that up could be my job for this week.
