Archive for April, 2011
Apr
Apr
Guest reading: Greed is good
Have you ever heard Gordon Gekko’s famous speech “Greed is good” in Latvian? I bet you haven’t so take a few minutes and listen to my Latvian version of this speech!
In case you’re wondering who I am, my name is Robby and I’m a Latvian chap living in Ireland. I also happen to be…
Apr
Apr
The Turkish past tense
Category: Turkish · Tags: agglutination,social networks,verb aspects,verb tenses,vowel harmony,Yonja
Last week, I talked about several things we can learn in Turkish just by looking at the login page from Yonja, the Turkish social network. I mostly talked about vocabulary, and showed how we can learn to understand a word’s meaning and its use just from a login page.
I also mentioned the activity stream…
Apr
Apr
How can you learn when all you do is study?
I recently saw a comment on a friend’s Facebook. He was at a coffee shop and saw an old man seated nearby with a Spanish workbook, a huge Spanish-English dictionary, and one of those giant books of 500 Spanish verbs. He guessed this old man was in his 80s, and he found inspiration in this…
Apr
Apr
Guest Reading: La Nacion
This week’s guest reading was recorded by Paulino Brener, a native Spanish-speaker from Argentina. Paulino lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where is is a school teacher, a performer, and a champion of Latin-American culture, among other things. He is also a good friend.
Paulino has chosen to read a bit of political news from La Nacion,…