Yesterday morning I met up with other conference participants and after a bit of a wander around the city, we had lunch then went to the opening ceremony a reception. In the after we had a little guided tour of Novi Sad seeing some interesting buildings, including the Catholic or Orthodox Cathedrals, and the fortress. There are some rather attractive buildings here, wide, pedestrianised café-lined streets, some nice parks and generally a relaxed kind of atmosphere.
In the evening we all went to a restaurant about 4 or 5km from the city centre for dinner. I walked there with a few others, and the rest went by bus or taxi. We had a nice dinner with lots of polyglot chat, then some people started dancing, and others carried on chatting.
Today there were lectures and talks on a variety of topics including sound symbolism, the magic of metaphors, language coaching, and acting and humour in a foreign language.
So far I’ve had conversations in about 10 languages and spoken bits and pieces of maybe 10 others. In some cases this was only a few words (all I know), in others it was a bit more. There are even two guys here who are learning Scottish Gaelic, one of whom also speaks a bit of Manx, and another who is learning Irish.
I began last week to study some languages, Swedish, Esperanto, German, (studying them again and improving); Romenian, Catalan, Croatian, Swahili (new languages to me but I am liking them) and the last one in the list is Irish, mentioned in the article. Irish for me is a passion case but very hard. I think the language difficult, written part is completely different from spoken form. But I won’t give up. Thanks Simon for the tips of the proper books.
Simon,
Any chance you have a pdf of the Novi Sad conference? I’ve checked the Polyglot site but there’s nothing there now. Wondering about the gathering in Berlin next year.
Cheers,
Mike
Mike, you can download the programme for the Novi Sad conference here.
Details of the gathering in Berlin are on Facebook – it’s from May 1-4 at A&O Berlin Hauptbahnhof.
Hvala vam puno, Simon! I’m going to try to go to Berlin in May.
Since you helped me, I’d like to pass on to you a new resource I found that you might like: Say Something in Cornish. http://www.saysomethingin.com/cornish/
Iskreno,
Mike