Jam këtu përsëri... shpresoj që do të jetë për më shumë këtë herë

I'm here again... I hope it will be for longer this time

Hi, and thanks for stopping by. I must admit that I am pretty bad at keeping timetables or working by lists, and my enthusiasm for things usually comes and goes.

The truth is that I have put my Albanian learning at the background for a while - I have started a new full time job and there are quite a lot of things to be taken care of, so somehow it just slipped through. I haven't forgotten it completely though, it's just a learning "as you go" without any particular dedication per day or something like that.

I plan to return to my reviews, hopefully I won't give up that easily this time *sigh* Fingers crossed.

I'd like to use this post to give you a few updates on my own progress during the last few months.
- I've somehow managed to finish the "Discovering Albanian" Memrise course (consisting of 1850 words, most of them with pronunciation). I loved it, the only problem is that some words in the reviews are not very well selected and have more than one correct answer (and I usually choose the "wrong" one, although it's not wrong technically!)
- I've returned to the Discovering Albanian textbook, and I'm up to lesson 15. Learning the vocabulary definitely helped a lot, although as I said already, making to-do lists is not one of my strengths and I am very spontaneous as a person. So I'll finish it off eventually, one day.
- As I drive to work every day, I usually play music from my phone - it made me an impression that I have actually increased my own amount of listening and understanding of the songs I like (no cheating reading/knowing by heart the lyrics).
- I started catching up some more common Gheg words/expressions, and I have also started to "guess" the meaning of some words (only if they're not far too different though). I consider that a huge achievement due to the fact that I'm teaching myself and I rely pretty much on music (and lyrics found online, some of them very badly written).
- I started translating/writing in Albanian more; I also started searching for people to speak with, but haven't found anyone for a long period of time yet, probably because I'm not very consistent.
- I love "overhearing" (or whatever the equivalent is of listening to others' conversations) random Albanians whenever I hear them on the street - my heart always skips a beat as I consider that a huge achievement. I used to have an Albanian housemate up until a year ago, and I didn't understand almost anything he was saying to whoever he was speaking with. Luckily for me, I live in an area where the Eastern European population is not scarce, so there is a good chance to listen and try to understand.
- I've discovered a few Facebook groups (review of them in some other post) - both for learners and for Albanians. I love reading what people say, and especially trying to understand what someone is asking entirely in Albanian without cheating.
- I've been working on my pronunciation and I hope to finally manage to get l, ll, r and rr right as they should be.

That's all I could think of. I plan to come back and continue with reviewing some of the most helpful resources in my opinion, so stay tuned!

Natën e mirë!