Sun, 2 August 2009  Naujas Kamuolys A New Ball Photograph: A monument to Lithuanian Basketball, Vilnius, Lithuania Listener Marina Farrell sent us an email telling us about a website called, “I Love Lithuania.” You can go there, build your own page, upload photos, movies and music. The intention of the site is for Lithuanian-Americans and Lithuanians to share. We’ll post her web page address on Lithuanian Out Loud. http://www.ilovelithuania.com/ Okay, on with the program, enjoy! singular singular plural plural neuter Today we’ll do a quick introduction to many new adjectives. In this episode we’ll pick an adjective and then we’ll combine the adjective with a masculine singular noun, a feminine singular noun, a plural masculine noun, a plural feminine noun and finally the neuter adjective, if there is one. furry kailinis fruity vaisinis deep gilus warm šiltas cotton medvilninis new naujas happy laimingas linen lininis lovely, fine puikus wooden medinis golden auksinis glass, of glass stiklinis žalia rūta! (a clean expression) noisy triukšmingas black juodas amber gintarinis red raudonas chilly šaltas calm ramus moist drėgnas windy vėjuotas blue mėlynas white baltas leather odinis Šaunuoliai! Excellent! You made it to the end of another episode! Puiku! Alright! That’s it for today! Thanks for the download! If you got anything out of this lesson please leave us a review on our iTunes page.
Comments[12] |
I left you guys a voicemail the other day but I see now that you
aren't using the service anymore, so I thought I'd write you. My name is Rob, I also left one of the more recent
itunes reviews. I just wanted to let you know that I was able to use
the Lithuanian that I've learned from your podcasts with some native
speakers. I returned from Sweden a couple of weeks ago and I was able
to see my friend Daiva and some of her friends from Lithuania who were
attending the dance camp being held there. I was only able to speak
some very simple sentences, but she was very impressed. She even
showed me off to a few of her friends, like, "hey, check out my friend
Rob, the American, he knows some Lithuanian!" Her friends started
quizzing me on if I could write or transcribe correctly what they
said. I wasn't too sure exactly what the words meant, but because
Lithuanian Out Loud has given me such a good feel for the phonetics of
the language, I nailed each "test". :)
Along with flying to Sweden and back, I've been jet setting around
some other places too, and I've found your podcasts to be amazing time
fillers while I'm flying. Especially the exam episodes. I've
wondered if people sitting next to me on the flight wonder why am I
whispering to myself (as I answer the questions)...let alone "what
language is he whispering in?"
I think one of my favorite memories from Sweden was when I asked a
girl to dance (in english) and asked where she was from. She said
Lithuania, so naturally the next thing I said was, "Oh! Labas!" She
smiled and said "labas!", thinking maybe it was cool that this
American knew that one word. I followed it up immediately with "labai
malonu", and her mouth nearly fell open. She said "Wow, you must have
some Lithuanian friends!"
I love your podcasts, I hope you keep them coming. I'm learning so
much from them. I'm still trying to catch up, I'm somewhere in
September 2008 as I work through them.
Take care,
Rob
languages among other things). I've been listening to the Lithuanian
Out Loud podcast recently and I love it, and just noticed the episode
with the wedding speech yesterday. On YouTube when doing a search for
Lithuanian language there are quite a few videos but they are mostly
just greetings, colours or whatnot, and I think the wedding speech is
probably the best I've heard so far as an example of what Lithuanian
sounds like to someone that wants to hear it for the first time at a
certain length (not just single words), and so I made it into a video.
I'm not sure if you have a YouTube account but if you do then you can
upload it, and if not then I can upload it to my account and then you
could just embed it into your next entry.
Let me know what you think.
Regards,
Dave
First, let me tell you how much I like your course, and how excited I
am to have found it today. More compliments to follow after I tell a
little history of how my interest in learning Lithuanian came about.
About 15 years ago my friend and I planned a repeat trip to Poland and
Hungary and added Lithuania as a new destination. In preparation, I
bought a book on learning Lithuanian and also took a few private
lessons from a native speaker in my neighborhood. There used to be a
radio station in NYC that broadcast in a different language ever hour
or so. I'd listen to the sunday morning Lithuanian Hour, opening with
the announcer saying , "Labas rytas! Welcome to the Lithuanian Hour,
Europe's oldest living language!" I'd record folk and pop music onto
cassette tapes and then started buying records and tapes of Lithuanian
music. I especially liked an album of dainas sung by old men and women.
Also, I live just a couple of blocks from a Lithuanian Roman Catholic
church in what was once the center of Lithuanian life in Brooklyn
(Almost all have moved away to other parts of the city but still come
back to attend this church) so I'd go there for services just to hear
the sound of the language and the beautiful hymns. There must have been
a kitchen in the basement because it always smelled like cepelinai were
cooking. I know them by the Polish name "pyza/pyzy", being that my
great-great-grandparents came from Galicja in the 1870's and were
speakers of Polish. We lived in a little town that was Texas' largest
Polish community which had retained much from the Old Country. I heard
Polish (really an admixture of Polish and English) spoken by my parents
and older people (they never spoke it TO me, but I suspect, a lot ABOUT
me) One of the nuns taught us a tiny bit in grammar school but mostly
just to be able to read in order to be able to sound the words without
knowing the meanings. She used Polish-language prayers to teach us to
read. We also learned to sing Polish Christmas carols. That's as far as
it went at that time.
When I reached adulthood my interest in Poland was rekindled and I
started reading about Polish history, taking Polish language classes,
and planning my first trip to Europe, Poland included. From my father I
heard of a relative in Chicago who still had some contact with the
relatives who had remained in the villages of what is today
southeastern Poland. I used that information to contact them and they
responded, telling me how to get to their house. It required taking a
train from Kraków to Jasło, then a bus to an unmarked crossroads, then
a hike on foot for a couple of miles. I hardly spoke or could
understand Polish (on top of that, they spoke a country style of
Polish) when I met them in their stucco house with a thatched roof.
They took me up and down the hills to meet all the relatives and I felt
like a 5-year-old child who could only nod, smile, or shrug my
responses to their questions. I'm exaggerating a little. I got by.
This was in 1982 when the government was cracking down on Solidarity
so when I was in Poland it was still under Marshall Law. There was a
bit of a glum atmosphere in cities, especially when the military
police walked down the street in gangs. Crowds of people waiting for
streetcars or buses would go silent and stare them down. It was kind of
exciting to see this sort of quiet resistance, especially compared to
where I live, New York City, where many seem to not react to anything.
By reading Polish history I came to learn how the origins and destinies
of Poland and Lithuania have been commingled from earliest times. It
seemed impossible to learn about one without learning about the other.
I realize that events occurred in the last century that strained these
two nations' relationship and I'm not aware of the current climate
between them. (I personally believe that using the features of a
nationality to emphasize our differences and as a tool of separateness
is a fruitless venture. We can all cherish our differences without
sacrificing the truth that we are truly all the same in what we REALLY
are.
So after all that, and knowing only a handful of words in Lithuanian,
I'm very excited to have found your excellent course on line. I love
how the beginning lessons are short, so I got a feeling of
accomplishment by moving through 9 lessons in just one sitting. I wish
there were versions of your course in Polish and Hungarian, the other
two languages in my trinity of language interests. Lithuanian is the
last of the three for me to take up. Now with your course I can resume
my study of "Europe's oldest living language".
Thank you very much and I wish you both all the best.
Reggie
Brooklyn, New York
