Georgian language course

Up to IIRC video lesson 11 yesterday. By no means solid on that material. We are now flirting with vaguely useful travel vocabulary like the words for water and coffee. The next few lessons, if I can only find time to cover them, seem to be getting more practical. (As probably mentioned before, the video course is aimed at Peace Corps volunteers going to Georgia presumably for something like 6+ months, so it is an introduction to the language for someone presumably intending to become fluent, not a "Georgian for tourists" course which concentrates on phrases rather than how to conjugate 'to be'.)

Listened to audio lesson 1 on phone just now (I am on train back to London). Very different. Monstrously intimidating. It starts off running through the entire Georgian alphabet with English words using those sounds (which is not very helpful even when I know maybe half or more already). Someone else then reads the alphabet out with no examples in a harsh series of sounds, and the way they say it has a pornographic sexual grunting quality. (I don't think this is inherent in the language, it is the way this person is doing it.)

It then dives straight into some examples of how pronouncing two similar-to-English-speakers sounds wrongly can completely change the meaning of words. The whole thing has this somewhat no-nonsense military-esque information dump quality which is intimidating and not massively helpful. Let's push on to lesson 2 and see if it helps.

0731 Lesson 2 teaches pronouns and complete conjugation of 'to be'. The style is still info-dumpish but this is at least useful and intelligible, though possibly only as I have learned it from the video course. I think the two courses are completely unrelated and have just been packaged together on the DVD I bought, although I don't know that for a fact.

0738 Lesson 3 relatively long, lots of dialogues on introducing yourself. Variety of phrases etc rather intimidating but some of it familiar. Possibly subsequent listenings will help drive it in. I do think I miss the written assistance of seeing the words (even in Georgian script) of the video course.

Having skimmed over the accompanying PDF there is a kind of transcript of each lesson which might be useful to read simultaneously. However I am going to have a rest from this now, I am yawning, I just wanted to give the audio course a quick try. Have a feeling this week might be a bit stressful even if work goes OK/is low key but fingers crossed I manage to get through more of the video course. I should maybe just grind through all the remaining lessons at least once and focus on the more immediately useful vocabulary.

0809 Felt crap this morning BTW, the idea of the trip seemed a monstrous folly. But that's just the getting-up-at-630-and-saying-goodbye-to-parents business. Nothing ever looks like a good idea at that time in the morning, except staying in bed. ;-)