aND WHERE İS THE CHAT ROOM? I couldn’t find it??
You are here abraham. Everyone here is a learner, some are native speakers of English.
I think this improvised chat room is a great idea, and I am going to try to participate in a few languages. This morning I played hockey ( I play hockey Tuesday nights (50 and over) and Wednesday mornings (60 and over). T he other days I like to get up to Cypress Bowl for an hour or more of cross country skiing. I have just discovered the skating style of skiing which is a lot of fun. I am lucky that the hill is only 25 minutes from my home and I have a season’s pass.
I also just finished doing a video on Daniel Tammet. Thanks for the reference, Irene, or was it Vera. Very interesting. You can see my comments, and I think I will have it transcribed so that we can put it in the Library. I also recorded i as a sound file.
Now I am going to the office.
Hello everyone!
Here in Scotland we 've got not much clouds and occasionaly even blue sky but it’s absolutely freezing! I mean in the morning hours because the rest of the day, no matter what season we are, the wheather is always the same - cloudy and rainy…
I just had a very delicious winter drink: Red wine boiled with cloves and cinamon sticks and some brown sugar added at the end. If you haven’t try it, you should! :o)
I didn’t spent enough time with my Russian these days and I missed them!
I 've had a belly dancing performance at a Chinese New Year show, organized from the Chinese society of my university and I had to prepare a choreography and do lots of rehersals. The show went very well. All the rest of the program was around Chinese culture. There were some theatrical scetches, which I didn’t understood and a lot of singing. I really enjoyed the singers and the Chinese music. The whole show was very well organized and the audience was very lively. And I learned how to say belly dancing in Chinese! Tu pii! I don’t know how to write it properly He! he!
Hm, I forgot to say about my books. The latest book I read is “Putin’s Russia” by Anna Politkovskaya. Particularly the incidents from the army seem pretty scary to me. I don’t know if they are isolated incidents or revealing a more general situation… At them moment I have start reading “The Conscious Universe, Part and Whole in Modern Physical Theory” by Menas Kafatos and Robert Nadeau. It’s about understanding the universe and human realities through quantum theory. When I finish it i ll say more ;o)
And finally the one I want to read after that is “The X-rated Bible” by Ben Edward Akerley. Propably in the summer… when I will be in some nice beach in Greece…
Ana, last summer I spoke with one Brazilian. He learn Russian, so most time we spoke Russian. And he says “You know, there is winter in Brazilia now. So cold! Fourteen degrees”. I asked “Is it fourteen degrees of warmth?” In Russian we usually says “of warmth” instead “above zero”. He did not know this expression and answered: “Warm? No! It is really cold”. But the most interesting thing was that it was +13 here, in Magnitogorsk at that moment… So, sometimes Brazilian winter is warmer then Russian summer %)
I told my cowokers about this dialogue, and we began to name summer “Brazilian winter”. And when we have the first snowfall one coworker said: “Well, Brazilian winter have ended…” :))))
About books… (But not English books, sorry)
Recently I ended “Three ages of Okini-san” by Soviet author Valentin Pikul. It is rather sad book about Russian naval officer, Kokovtsev by name. Book describes a very difficult period of Russian naval history - 1875 - 1923: Russian-Japanese war, Japanese captivity, Russian revolution 1905, The First World war, February Revolution of 1917, October Revolution of 1917, the civil war, immigration… I cried much while reading this book… He had a son in Japan and three sons in Russia. In Tsushima naval battle there were he and his Russian oldest son on the side of Russia and his Japanese son on the side of Japan. (Of course, Kokovtsev did not know that his son Kokotsu Iichiro was there, until he was told at Japanese captivity). And the battleship, where Kokotsu Iichiro commanded an artillery, sank a ship, where his Russian brother was. But, this sinking Russian battleship, where Kokovtsev’s Russian son also commanded an artillery, finally sank that Japanese ship too… So, two oldest sons of Kokovtsev killed each other… The youngest was killed at the First World war, and the middle son became a revolutionist. For Kokovtsev it was even worse then a death, as he considered this as betrayal of Russia.
Rasana,
I have the audio book of “Three ages of Okini-san” and the CD includes the e-text so I can import it into LingQ. If you do a course on this book I will sign up and we can discuss it. I am not going to read what you wrote here in English so as not to spoil it.
Ooops. I just did not realised that some Russian learner going to read this book. 
Hi Steve,
it was me who brought information about Daniel Tammet. In the meantime I read and heard much more about him, including your podcast.
I have seen you bought the book in what I am interested. I the book good to read in English or would that be too difficult for me?
Is it written in an interesting kind, similar how the man is speaking?
I watched the video when Daniel was a guest in an English Talkshow too and there he was really funny.
today I will tell you from a grazy accident we had in Germany. In Cologne a great house, the “Stadtarchiv” collapsed within a few minutes and felt down in the deep.
In the deep? Yes, because it seems that in the underground has been builded a hollow space that brought instability.
The damage is immeasurable because there were kilometers of shelves with original manuscripts from famous people and much more. Three people are missed.
If you go to the Internet, you can see pictures. Write in google: Köln Unglücksstelle
Hi Steve,
It was a bit of a co-work from Irene and me. Irene wrote the article for the German library. And I added the links to the video, and the article in “Der Spiegel”.
Later today, I will take a look at your video.
Now I have to be the taxi of my daughter 
Today I uploaded some new content in the German library. Most of the content is transcribed by myself because very seldom there are scripts offered, and if scripts are offered, you often get not the allowance to use theme at LingQ.
After reviewing my LingQs in English and French, I studied an English article from “Listen to English”.
Driving my car I listened almost an hour to English podcasts today.
I submitted a writing and I got the correction. I’m very glad. 1 error on 25 words is a better than my goal to have less than 1 error on 20 words. So I can sleep well tonight
But now I’ll go to my french lesson, that I started yesterday.
Edward,
I have an even better saying about statistics, which I heard from a friend of mine, something like this: “statistics is the art of torturing numbers until they tell you what you want to hear”…
And there is another book I intend to read which is called “how to lie with statistics”…
Anyway, if I want to keep my salary coming to my account every month, I need to use some statistics. At least, I’m trying to learn how not to lie too much… hehehehe.
Callypa,
In fact, 13 degrees is somewhat cold for us. Still, there are places in the south part of Brazil where temperatures go under zero in the winter, but even in these places, this fact is remarkable, and end up commented by people for an entire week “did you see, it went under zero yesterday!!!” So for us, zero is a frightening extreme…
By the other way, I never saw snow. I guess it must be beautiful, but when I remember that in essence that beautiful white thing is pure ice, it completely “freezes” my enthusiasm to see snow personally… heheheh.
Sorry, I misspelled you nickname, Cakypa…
And, Doo, I’m not a mathematician at all. I’m trying to become a Computer Scientist, but we do use a lot of statistics to evaluate our experiments.And about the book, if you have the opportunity, give it a try, it does not have formulas, it’s simply history.
I think the result of a statistic depends of the money what the client is willingly to pay or how influence the company has.
Irene,
I googled Koln in Russian news… Terrible. It is good that almost everyone has enough time to run out to the street!
Ana,
my nickname is Sakura (spelled in russian letters), so you can name me Sakura or Rasana
And winters with snow… Yes, it is quite cold, especially for people who don’t have appropriate clothes. When “greens” shout about the ban of fur clothes, I always want send them somewhere about the polar circle…
I live on the border with Kazakhstan, the place is named the South Urals, but winters are very windy, so it is quite cold to go out your home without sheepskin coat (or a personal car).
Rasana,
I agree with you about furs. Fur is one of the most environmentally benign form of clothing there is. Furs are also vital to the economic well being of thousands of trappers in Northern Canada, most of whom are natives. Fur is not a product of the petroleum industry, nor of monoculture, as is the case with most other textile products. Anti-fur activism is just a fad among some people looking for a cause.
Rasana and Steve,
At the moment, in Germany is fur in clothes absolutly out.
I have been in Malta in January and there I visited a concert. It was a festival and in a church, the birthday of the president was the reason.
In my whole live I have not seen so much women with fur, made of mink fur. It wasn’t cold!!!
But I think the women like those occasions to wear her precious object. My friend and I were there with our more sportive clothes and felt light inappropirate but our neighbours said “don’t worry, that’s no problem”.
And so we enjoyed the concert in this wonderful church!
OK
Here in Spain , today is cold but sunshine, for me it is a lovely day, but everybody is worried about the economic crisis
Too much unemployment. I am also worried. Young people don’t have work.