life things
18 Jan 2013 07:35 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cimoreneMy current Finnish course will end in March, but my Finnish isn't good enough to take any sort of further professional training courses, like the practical part of my school assistant classes, in Finnish. (It would probably be good enough to work in a shop or something.) And in general, although I feel good about my progress, I'm not satisfied (I mean, confident) with my skills yet. I need way more vocabulary and practice. When I had the work practice interview at a local daycare, I got the gist and the keywords but I had to completely give up on big swathes of phrases where I couldn't pick out enough recognizable bits to start parsing the grammar and guess at the meaning: people who are talking about real life things and not just smalltalk or shoptalk don't use the same sorts of simple, bite-sized sentences.
So I'll probably be applying to the next level Finnish class, which will mean a significant reduction in support from social services down to, I think, 300-something €/month. Right now I'm getting full unemployment with all the extra options 700-something €/month, as one does when engaged full-time in professional development mandated by the employment bureau; for the second level course you only get the regular government allowance of student support, but it's still 35 school hours a week which makes working at the same time difficult.
Wax is still going to secretarial school. After learning the Microsoft Office suite at the basic level - like she hasn't learned macros, which I can't help feeling would have been quite useful - they moved on to torturing them with Business Swedish, and the school made her study it even though Swedish is her native language. It went something like this:
She was still made to take the exams, and in order to not have to take lengthy weekly vocabulary tests and sit through hours of painful instruction, she was ordered to write "an essay" on a topic of her choice, with no further guidelines. Obviously this should be easy, but it isn't because she's too angry about the whole thing.
So after finishing Business Swedish, they moved on to...
... Business English. Only, right, everyone in her class is competent to the basic Finnish high-school-graduate level.. except for one, so they actually started with conjugating "TO BE" and "TO DO".
Her unemployment/winter/this sucks depression has consequently spiraled to the level where she is almost entirely nocturnal and can't always force herself to suffer through her horribly painful homework assignments. Instead she is reading a lot of hockey fic and has even started reblogging things about hockey on Tumblr. I'm mostly worried about this because of fear that she might actually get further into sports. As long as it's just the players it's fine, but if she watches any actual sports on purpose, we will of course have to get a divorce.
But on the plus side, we have a lot of yarn around the house and Canonical has just announced they're releasing Ubuntu for phones next year, which is exciting because we were previously worried that Nokia's N9 might be the last Linux phone in existence, but neither of us could bear to use Apple, Windows, or Android. Sometime next month you should be able to install Ubuntu yourself on the Nexus Galaxy, though, which means by the time one of our phones breaks (they're currently 2 years old I think), the early adopter bugs should be ironed out. They say they hope to release the first manufacturer-partnered shipping-with-Ubuntu phones in 2014.
So I'll probably be applying to the next level Finnish class, which will mean a significant reduction in support from social services down to, I think, 300-something €/month. Right now I'm getting full unemployment with all the extra options 700-something €/month, as one does when engaged full-time in professional development mandated by the employment bureau; for the second level course you only get the regular government allowance of student support, but it's still 35 school hours a week which makes working at the same time difficult.
Wax is still going to secretarial school. After learning the Microsoft Office suite at the basic level - like she hasn't learned macros, which I can't help feeling would have been quite useful - they moved on to torturing them with Business Swedish, and the school made her study it even though Swedish is her native language. It went something like this:
WAX: But I already know Swedish because it's my native language.
TEACHER WHO IS NOT EVEN A NATIVE SWEDISH SPEAKER: Ah, but this isn't just ordinary Swedish, it's BUSINESS Swedish.
She was still made to take the exams, and in order to not have to take lengthy weekly vocabulary tests and sit through hours of painful instruction, she was ordered to write "an essay" on a topic of her choice, with no further guidelines. Obviously this should be easy, but it isn't because she's too angry about the whole thing.
So after finishing Business Swedish, they moved on to...
... Business English. Only, right, everyone in her class is competent to the basic Finnish high-school-graduate level.. except for one, so they actually started with conjugating "TO BE" and "TO DO".
Her unemployment/winter/this sucks depression has consequently spiraled to the level where she is almost entirely nocturnal and can't always force herself to suffer through her horribly painful homework assignments. Instead she is reading a lot of hockey fic and has even started reblogging things about hockey on Tumblr. I'm mostly worried about this because of fear that she might actually get further into sports. As long as it's just the players it's fine, but if she watches any actual sports on purpose, we will of course have to get a divorce.
But on the plus side, we have a lot of yarn around the house and Canonical has just announced they're releasing Ubuntu for phones next year, which is exciting because we were previously worried that Nokia's N9 might be the last Linux phone in existence, but neither of us could bear to use Apple, Windows, or Android. Sometime next month you should be able to install Ubuntu yourself on the Nexus Galaxy, though, which means by the time one of our phones breaks (they're currently 2 years old I think), the early adopter bugs should be ironed out. They say they hope to release the first manufacturer-partnered shipping-with-Ubuntu phones in 2014.
