HTLAL Challenges

On the http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/ forum, someone had the great idea to pose a one week wanderlust voucher to everyone on the forum.

I decided to try Latin for a week. I used Peter Jones's "Learn Latin" and started May 7th. Unfortunately, I still have to do one day, so it's been longer than what I anticipated and I've decided I like Latin enough and I'll finish the course. I'm on chapter 11 of 20.

I'm also doing the Super challenge for Spanish, which is reading 100 books and watching 100 movies by January 1, 2014 (+6 hours EST, or 6 p.m. my time December 31, 2013).

I've gotten off to a slow start, and just finished watching "Titanic" with Spanish subtitles last night, so that counts as 2 movies. The rules state every movie of 3 hours or longer counts as 2 movies, any book longer than 500 pages counts as 2 books, children's books count for 1/5 a book, bilingual books count as being fully in the target language and the minimum length for a book is 100 pages.

Khan Academy on YouTube

Today I watched my first video on khanacademy channel. He's Sal Khan, a high school valedictorian, MIT & Harvard Business School graduate. In other words, he's really smart. :p I subscribed to the channel a few weeks ago after I saw a post on it on one of my favorite blogs, Page F30. It is basically a channel that teaches different types of academic subjects (alas, no languages though). He was even featured on CNN and PBS for his service to humanity. The CNN spot even talked about a girl in the UAE (I think it was) who was getting help with her calculus college class through his videos. Very, very cool. The videos I watched were on the credit crisis, the four videos in his Housing Conundrum series. Very interesting, perhaps business school wasn't a waste of time for me, I just needed to find someone who could explain things in ways I could understand, and being able to watch over & over again doesn't hurt either. Most of his videos seem to focus on math and science, although he does talk about business and history as well. It's a very cool channel and I highly recommend it.

Annual Bake Sale

Today at church we held our annual men & boys' bake sale.

I made mini cheesecakes, little cheesecakes the size of a cupcake or muffin. They sold for $50.

Yes, people actually pay that an excessive amount of good money for bake goods worth nowhere near that amount.

My brother's brought in $51. Beaten by a dollar! Dagnabbit!

They were selling a 12-year-old boy's peanut butter pay and a man told the auctioneer "I'll pay you $100 if you'll let me throw it in your face."

Yes, this wasn't the first time. The auctioneer has been doing this for about 20 years, and this is the second time he took a pie to the face.

We'll see if the YouTube video is up by tomorrow.

Class Today, March 25th

Well, had my ONE class that I'm taking for the first time since March 4th. March 11th was a snow day (we ALWAYS get snow days, even when there isn't much snow, like on the 11th) and the 18th was spring break. Bad times to be in Gerontology class.

Anyway, today we covered a lot of stuff, two chapters, but we still got out early. One of the things we talked about was creativity in old age, and we took a test that they give to see how creative people are based on one type of divergent thinking. This test was four letters (in our case, SALT, but they could be any letters) and we had to write as many four word sentences using the letters in that order in two minutes.

Some oddball sentences I came up with:

See, Amish love tales (my personal favorite)
Stan almost loved Tina
Santa always loves toast

I came up with six sentences in all, and the average is 6-8

The next test, which measured a different type of divergent thinking, was to name as many holidays, religious or secular, in three minutes. I came up with 22, but I think I may have gotten some wrong, because I wrote Christmas Eve and New Year's Eve, and I don't really know if you'd call those holidays. I also wrote some foreign holidays (Canada & Australia Day, Bastille Day, Cinco de Mayo) but those count, of course.

The average for that is 14, so if I did it right, I'm somewhat above average.

Language Links

All right, I'll list some of my favorite language websites, such as blogs, learning websites, YouTube channels, etc. for other people to check out.

My favorite language forum:

http://www.how-to-learn-any-language.com

My favorite blog:

This blog is about both natural languages and international auxiliary languages. He also writes considerably about space exporation and technology. It is written by a Canadian working in Seoul as a translator.

http://www.pagef30.com

Another blog, by an Australian author & scientist trying to write literature for an international audience:

http://joyoflanguages.blogspot.com

Naomi Chambers's language blog:

http://thepolyglotexperience.blogspot.com

A blog by a young man sampling 37 languages and deciding on one, kind of like The Bachelor for languages:

http://37languages.wordpress.com

His second blog:

http://pardonmynorwegian.tumblr.com/

ikindalikelanguages blog:

http://ikindalikelanguages.com/blog

Language courses at this site:

http://ikindalikelanguages.com/lab/courses.php

Last blog:

http://languagegeek.net

Some learning materials:

Jim Becker's website, links for 14 languages, the one below is for Spanish:

http://www.uni.edu/becker/spanish3.html

Spanish conjugation trainer:

http://www.spaleon.com/index.php

Spanish basics, plus a site to connect with Spanish-speaking learners of English, by chat or as a pen pal. Completely free. No, I haven't tried it yet.

http://www.lingolex.com/spanish.htm

German:

Deutsch - Warum Nicht? Great site to teach the basics of German, produced by the Goethe Institut and Radio Deutsche Welle. It's a four part course with 26 lessons in each part. This is the site in German.

http://www.dw-world.de/dw/0,,2163,00.html

Paul Joyce's German website, a professor at the University of Portsmouth in the UK. I highly suggest reading his "Why learn German?" section:

http://userweb.port.ac.uk/~joyce1/abinitio/index.html

Some YouTube channels:

Alkantre, aka Dr. Peter Browne, a Spanish professor at, I think, the University of Texas, and top-notch polyglot. The cool thing about him is he comments on new users' channels and videos, sometimes in random languages, LOL.

http://www.youtube.com/user/alkantre

Brian Greco, a young teenager who makes great review videos. He's interested in IALs and more unusual languages, such as Navajo (he has Rosetta Stone Navajo) and languages from the South Pacific.

http://www.youtube.com/user/BrianonLanguage

Cody, from Minnesota, a college student who is interested in German, Chinese, Swahili, Arabic, and probably many more.

http://www.youtube.com/user/Codylanguagesblog

A great Latin channel:

http://www.youtube.com/user/Evan1965

Anthony Lauder's channel, great even if you aren't interested in Czech, since he talks about issues everyone learning languages could benefit from hearing:

http://www.youtube.com/user/FluentCzech

Glossika, a YouTube polyglot heavyweight:

http://www.youtube.com/user/Glossika

A female polyglot:

http://www.youtube.com/user/katrudy7

Probably one of the biggest language channels on YouTube:

http://www.youtube.com/user/laoshu505000

Professor Alexander Arguelles's channel, probably the biggest language channel on YouTube:

http://www.youtube.com/user/ProfASAr

And many others. I don't want to list anymore right now, since this post is long enough.

Pittsburgh Loses!

I'm from Cleveland, and while I could care less about the Browns or Packers, I hate the Steelers.

Anyway, it was a great game. Watched it with a bunch of other people and had lots of fun. I just hope there is no lock out so we can do it again next year.

Game Night

Tonight I drove to the Panera Bread in Cuyahoga Falls, about a 20-25 minute drive from home by highway, to play with a group I met on meetup.com to play board and card games. I played one board game, Blokus, which is kind of like Tetris that you play against 3 other players. I also played Quiddler, a card game similar to Scrabble, which you play hands of 3-10 cards, allowing one discard, and need to spell as many words (or long words) as possible and any cards left over you lose the points. Any words you form you gain points, with a 10 point bonus for longest words and multiple words.

I really enjoyed myself. I tied for second place in Blokus and came 4th out of 7th in Quiddler. That was my goal: I know I couldn't win, but I didn't want to come in last. I did it.