Archive for May, 2010
May
May
My video from Tashkent
Last week I was in Uzbekistan, and I wrote about that a few days ago. I recently finised editing the video I had taken while I was there, and I’ve compiled a short report about my visit.
May
May
The new "About Me" page
Things are off to a good start here, but I think there’s something that’s still missing. Learning all of these languages is neat for a web site, but it’s not the reason I do it. The real goal has always been to travel the world, and the point of the languages was to make new friends and enjoy new experiences in all of the places I want to go.
May
May
What do I want out of life?
In addition to sharing my tricks and methods for language learning, and my progress as I learn a new language every year, I have decided to also share with you my reasons for doing so. Today, I want to give more substance to that, but sharing my “Bucket List”.
May
May
How does Italian fit into my goals?
This weekend I decided to improve the direction of this web site just a bit. I’ve updated my About Me and added a Bucket List, both in hopes of explaining my reasons for learning languages and for creating this site. But if you were paying attention, learn Italian isn’t on my Bucket List. So why am I doing it?
May
May
The first book you read in a foreign language
If you’ve been doing the LiveMocha, it’s likely that you’ve finished by now. And if you haven’t been doing it — either because your language isn’t offered, or because you just don’t like LiveMocha — you’re even more likely to need some new materials. And if you’re not already done with LiveMocha at this point, it’s probably time to be done anyway. It’s an excellent free resource for getting you started in a language, but it’s not good enough to get you to the next level.
May
May
Don't wait, use what you learn right away!
When learning a new language, it’s easy to start deceiving yourself into waiting to use it. But why would you wait when there are so many good reasons for using it now, and so many interesting ways you can already use what you know to help you continue practicing and learning!
May
May
It’s all in the past: Il passato remoto
It’s been a while since we looked at a verb tense, and there are still a few left to cover. We’ve already covered the workings of il passato prossimo, for things in the recent past. Today, we’re going to cover il passato remoto, the Italian verb tense used to describe things that happened long ago.
May
May
A first look at the Turkish language
In my recent look into the Complete World Traveler language list, many people were surprised to see Turkish make the list. But the influences of the Ottoman Empire have left their marks from south-eastern Europe, through the Middle East, and across all of Central Asia, even going well into Mongolia and northern China, where Uyghur (a Turkic language) is common language.
May
May
The T-V distinction
Showing respect in English usually just means inserting the word “sir” or “ma’am” somewhere into the sentence. In most other languages, however, there is some additional grammatical work involved in displaying an appropriate level of resepect. Perhaps the most common way of doing this is by use of the T-V shift.
May
May
Ongoing action in the past with Italian’s imperfetto
We’ve covered two perfective past tense forms, il passato prossimo and il passato remoto, which means we can now describe a completed action with some finesse. But we still haven’t thought about how to describe an imperfective action — something that was ongoing in the past. Today, we’ll fix that by looking at the imperfetto.