Well hello there, dear friends; happy Saint David’s day, or I should say, dydd Gŵyl Dewi hapus! I hope you’re all doing well. I’ve had a lot on this month, which has unfortunately left little time for studying or indeed anything like that, but as it’s been a short month, so it seems appropriate to follow it up with a short post. I just wanted to do a quick check-in and share the small amount of progress I have managed to make this month. As always, you can keep up with my day-to-day (or at least, more regular than monthly) goings on on Twitter, Instagram and Mastodon (click the names of each social media for the link to each of my profiles).
The most progress I’ve made this month has been with my reading challenge – I’ve been trying to read more than the one book a month that I read for the book club I set up at work a couple of years ago; I was a voracious reader as a kid, but doing a degree in literature seems to have killed that off. Even so, I refer you to the graph below, showing my reading activity for the year so far:
It might not seem like a lot to those of you who read more regularly, but I’ve already read double what I managed by this point last year – and I’ll be posting some reviews of a selection of the books I’ve read since my last book review post, last April. If you’d like to make your own graph like the one above, I’d like to take this opportunity to recommend The Storygraph one more time, too – I’ve personally found watching my dataset improve with every book I read and review to be incredibly motivating! If you’re a nerd for pie charts and graphs like I am, then you’ll really get a kick out of it.
As for language learning, I’m still (appropriately enough for St David’s Day!) working through the Routledge Basic Welsh by Gareth King. Although my progress has been fairly slow, that’s got more to do with my hectic work schedule than anything else, and I’m still working through the units at a pace I’d only dare to call steady-ish. I’m hoping to finish the Basic course and move on to Intermediate before the end of summer, but you’ll have to stay tuned to see if I manage that.
And that’s about it for this month! I’m sorry for the shorter-than-usual post, but things have been pretty wild (in a less-than-ideal way) for the past week or so, so doing this shorter update is something of a little present to myself – an act of self care that I really needed. I’ll see you when regular service resumes next month. But until then, take care of yourselves.
— J.
den språkliga skatan 