After I decided to go to Lithuania for one semester, I wanted to know something about the language as well. Wikipedia provides some interesting facts, like Lithuanian being quite close to what scientists think, proto-indo-european was like. Interesting enough for somebody who studied general linguistics as a minor. But if you want to learn a few words, wikipedia is not sufficient. The first thing I found was Kristina's channel on youtube:

Another website, which my Lituanian teacher showed in class is www.oneness.vu.lt. The site looks very nice and you find some phrases to read and to listen. They also provide a section which introduces the sound inventory of the Language as such. This is very interesting, if you have linguistic background.

So here's some pictures from Lithuania's capital Vilnius. I don't understand the lyrics, but the music sounds nice.

Link:

In Lithuania people use to adapt and transcribe names of persons and characters in movies and books. A typical ending for male names is -as. I found an example I like very much in Vilnius

Today I held a nice book in my handy, a student from VDU bought in Germany. There are lots of recipes and background informations inside: (the title translates "German Specialities")


And lots of nice pictures:



But now I want you to click on this photo and try to find out, what really does not fit in that picture:



More about the publisher here (German site). She studied German language and ethnlolgy. I still couldn't figure out, why there is no pizza and no Hamburger recipe in that book...

just found this one on youtube. Only authentic with the guy in the white t-shirt

The nice guys from the Kaunas TECHNICAL University yet again are unable to provide internet access in their dormitories. It only took them mere two weeks after we moved in to provide internet at all. Since then it has been failing every now and then. The funny thing now is, that only http seems to be down, ping, ICQ and Skype seem to work. So the nearby shopping mall is crouded again with students enjoying more stable network connection than in their dormitories. It's even provided for free. So if anybody out there has some old router, firewall or even carrier pigeons, please send them here. Thank you very much!

A few days ago we had an international dinner, where students could present their country by bringing some typical food. After that, we saw some Lithuanian folklore. Click on the image to see the gallery.

A fellow student in a language course told me about a very nice piece of software: jMemorize. It is written in Java and published under the GPL.

jMemorize uses the Leitner flashcard system , which is the best system I've heard of so far. You have a box divided into several sections and cards with questions on one side and answers on the other side. The cards in the first section are to be dealt with today, if you know the answer, the card is put into the next section and will not be repeated until the next day. Every time you know the answer, the time until the card is repeated again increases. If you don't know the answer, the card gets back into the first section where it will be repeated every day.

There are two versions on the homepage: one that can be installed under Windows and a .jar-file. The latter one does not need to be installed and can be used on any operating system for which Java is available.

jMemorize-screenshot source: jmemorize.org

Some features of jMemorize:

• Each card has an internal "flag", when it shall be repeated next time. You don't need to keep track of that yourself.
• You can determine, how much time you want to spend for learning beforehand. If you don't want to learn for more than, say 20 minutes, you can tell the program before you start.
• Instead of that, you can also determine, how many cards you want to repeat in that session.
• You can search either the front- back- or both sides of the currently loaded file. This helps, if you're unsure whether you already entered a certain word or if you want to use the software as a dictionary.
• Importing CSV-files is possible. Sometimes it can be more convenient to make your vocabulary lists with OpenOffice Calc or MS-Excel, where you can use spellcheckers.
• The program supports UTF-8, which means that you can learn a lot of languages with alphabets other than the English one. Some more information on that is provided at the project homepage.
• The jMemorize wiki provides some links to downloadable lessons.
• You can change the language of the user interface without installing additional files.
• At the moment jMemorize is not available for PDAs.

This software is really worth looking at. With such software you can also learn maths and other stuff, as long as you are creative enough to encode the information needed in text form.

Once again the link to the homepage: http://jmemorize.org/

The food was tasty and the German translation quite funny

Link:

After Internet is now available in my dormitory, I'm finally able to post my first photos from my trip. Until 1:40 the pictures are taken in Kiel, everything after that is Klaipėda.