Unemployment Shoots Back Up Over 8%

I can't believe TFG is still president.

Four more years. Think about that. America is serving a medium-term prison sentence.

This is part of the reason I'm encouraging people to look to other things for happiness. I know it's going to be very difficult for me to get through this. For the past four years I've had a mindset of "Just get to January 13, 2013, and then it's all smooth sailing."

I'm having a difficult time ratcheting myself up for "Just get yourself to January 2017, and then we're on easy street, baby."

Speaking of hobbies, I discovered a fun podcast from Radio Lingua. They do a bunch of different shows -- Coffee Break Spanish, Coffee Break French, Coffee Break Italian, Coffee Break German -- where the idea is that they'll give you a language lesson in 15-20 minutes. Hence, "Coffee Break."

I started doing the French one over the Thanksgiving holiday. I really like it. One neat thing is that if you slap it on to your phone, you can listen to it while you're walking (or jogging, or working out, or driving, or laundry, or whatever).

Once I've mastered that bitch I'll move on to the one I really want to learn, Italian.

One thing here: The lessons are free but it's all audio, and some languages -- French, especially -- really require printed material to learn, because the spelling is frequently not what you'd imagine. (Lots of silent consonants.) So, if you were interested in doing this, you probably have to plan on buying a couple of language books at some point, so you can look up the spelling of, say, "travaillent." But you can get by with the first ten lessons or so without anything.

They all have a Premium subscription with, they say, more audio and printed lessons on the computer and stuff, but I haven't done that, and the prices look really, really high to me. I just got an old French textbook. That, and Google Translate. And About.com has a lot of articles on foreign languages.

I'm digging it. I'm not sure why I'm doing this but there is an element in satisfaction to it, kind of like leveling up in a video game, except obviously it's a skill with application outside of gaming (though those applications are kind of limited, too).

posted by Ace at 03:54 PM

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