Lee Nau

Since I was very young, I have been studying foreign languages. I will not name all of the languages I’ve studied, but there are nearly ten on my college transcript. Once in a while, I get bitten by the bug to jump into another language. So, it’s off to the bookstore with me to peruse the stacks.

There are a wide variety of language books in whatever you’re trying to learn. I’ve recognized that certain patterns emerge in the tone of these books. Let’s lump them into three categories (and a limited fourth one).

1. Business Travel – “I’m going to Abroadia next week for business and I’d like to be able to tell the taxi driver in passable Abroadian which hotel I’m staying at.”
2. Cultural Enrichment – “I’m ethnically Abroadian, but I grew up in America. Learning to speak some Abroadian might help me connect with my roots.” or “I’ve always been curious about traveling to Abroadia and learning more about her people.”
3. Language Student – “I want to become as fluent as possible in Abroadian, learn as much of its grammar as possible, and be able to read newspapers and websites in Abroadian, carry on conversations with people who live in Abroadia, and learn vocabulary that makes me an independent communicator.”
4. Public Service – This narrow category is generally geared toward law enforcement, health service, and legal professionals. “I’m a police officer, nurse, or lawyer and I need to be able to ascertain the needs of immigrant Abroadians living in my community.” In my local bookstore, this is primarily for Spanish and, to a limited extent, Chinese.

I place myself squarely in the third of those categories. When I’m shopping for language books, I’m always looking for the ones that have as much of the core of the grammar and vocabulary as possible. I’m actually interested in the grammar and how sentences are constructed. In shopping, there are several indicators that tell me whether or not this is going to be a book I’m likely to outgrow very quickly or whether it’s going to give me enough information to be able to read a book, even if I have to use a dictionary to translate some of the words.

Here’s a list of the things I like to find in the index of any book I, as a language student, would consider essential.

1. Broad Vocabulary – The vocabulary, reading examples, and conversations cannot be limited to tourism / travel topics.
2. Verb Conjugations – In Indo-European languages, verbs tend to have endings that vary with person, number, tense, and mood. In particular, I look up pluperfect, subjunctive, imperfect, irregular verbs, and Gerundive or gerund. Without these (regular and irregular), a language book instructing a language that has these is incomplete.
3. Noun Declensions – In most Indo-European languages, nouns, adjectives, and pronouns decline (or change endings) by person, gender, and number. Many languages have nominal cases like nominative, accusative, dative, genitive, and locative. There should be areas in the book that describe how these are used for various functions.
4. Reading Material – In addition to simple conversations, there should be some short multi-paragraph or even multi-page stories, potentially culture-related, to accustom the student to reading printed material in the target language. There’s only so long I can be entertained by limited dialogue practice.
5. Vocabulary in Chunks – I like chapters to have between 50 and 100 new words. There should be lots of exercises to allow me to use the new grammar and vocabulary. It should challenge me, but not hold my hand too protectively.
6. Cultural Material – I enjoy language instruction books that give examples and anecdotes here and there, talking about the people who speak the language. For very widespread languages, I prefer some diversity in the cultural material presented. For example, a French book should give some dialogues, stories, and culture notes about Paris — as well as the rest of France, Quebec, Monaco, Belgium and the other places where the language is used. I have an old Spanish book that assumes its readers are primarily talking to Spaniards (the word Mexico is only in the book twice). The cultural material should also be reasonably recent.
7. Interesting Content – Some instructors that write language manuals are really boring and present their material in an uninteresting, difficult-to-grasp way that loses us in a few short lessons. This is also true for language tutors or teachers. Don’t give up trying to learn German because this instructor, book, audio course, or podcast is boring.

There are a few titles I look for especially, but I’ll let the reader of this lengthy column research their needs.

One more point before I go, though. Don’t give up. As humans, we have varying degrees of interest in one topic or another. We make big strides during one period of time and are stymied in our studies during another. When we are stymied, it’s tempting for us to think we’re not intelligent or dedicated enough to master this language (or any language). Set it aside for a while and come back to it later. Any language that you care to study was around long before you were born and it will certainly outlive you. The noble people of Abroadia will wait for you.

I’ve spent a long time going along with whatever was in front of my face, either idling time when I had it to idle and putting out the fire closest to me when I didn’t have idle time. I haven’t really nailed down any long-term goals, except in a very small number of areas. Without setting goals, the only things you can do are idle or put out the closest brush fire.

So, let’s try a five-year plan.

Personal Goals.

1. Save $100,000.
2. Pay off my student loans completely.
3. Get into phenomenal physical shape.
4. Reduce my personal property by 80%.
5. Purchase better car and donate current one.
6. Acquire a place of my own.

Educational Goals.

1. Learn to play my acoustic guitar.
2. Formulate a plan for a college degree.
3. Become fluent in at least half of these languages.
4. Learn to sail.
5. Write more effectively.
6. Take an acting class.

Technical Goals.

1. Learn Ruby on Rails.
2. Gain fluency in object-oriented design.
3. Enhance 50 Words functionality.
4. Become more of an AJAX expert.
5. Study information architecture.
6. Build nifty new web projects.

Artistic Goals.

1. Write a novel.
2. Attend comedy school.
3. Take a course on art history.
4. Learn photography.
5. Be able to perform more than 50 jazz songs.
6. Study ballroom dancing.

Adventure Goals.

1. Sail the Aegean.
2. Backpack across Europe, from Lisbon to Berlin to Istanbul.
3. Kayak the San Juan / Gulf Islands.
4. Take a road trip across the US and Canada.
5. Hike to Macchu Pichu.
6. Climb Mt. Fuji.

Travel Goals.

1. Visit Paris.
2. Explore Southeastern Australia.
3. Join a samba parade in Rio de Janeiro.
4. Marvel at the ruins of Ancient Greece.
5. Visit the Valley of the Kings in Egypt.
6. Wander around Barcelona.

This is a decent start. What’s your 5 year plan?

Today, I got a spam on my gmail account from Beth Myers, campaign manager for Mitt Romney, that talked about how great this last weekend was — that the former governor got an endorsement from the Family Research Council. Whoopty doo.

It’s bad enough that my snail mail box is stuffed full of political arguments ads and other bullshit nearly every day—all from the campaigns and issues that I care the least about, from a controversy about a bridge to various people running for City Council.

But, in honor of the spam, I’ll give you ten reasons I would never vote for Mitt Romney (Wiki: his positions).

1. His campaign manager spammed me.
2. He is a conservative.
3. He is for abstinence-only sex education.
4. He supports drilling for oil in ANWR
5. He is against equal rights for gays and lesbians.
6. He supports the atrocities happening in Guantanamo Bay.
7. He supports censoring the internet.
8. He opposes federal funding of stem-cell research.
9. He advocates a repeal of Roe v. Wade.
10. He falsely mentioned his sons in the military (none of the five have ever served).

The fact that he’s Mormon? I could care less. I’m an atheist. The whole argument about what kind of Christian he is strikes me as ridiculously irrelevant. It’s like arguing whether or not his tie should be red, crimson, scarlet, or rose.

Beth Myers, shame on you for sending spam. I’m looking forward to watching your candidate’s sobbing concession.

After a long time of realizing how much it sucks to back date entries in Wordpress (especially if you’re using the Firefox Expandable Form Fields extension) and trying to remember the passwords of a whole bunch of different blogs that are powered by various systems, I downloaded MarsEdit 2.0.3 last night just to check it out.

Yesterday’s Evaluating RSS Readers post was authored using this software. I added 50 Words to it and played around with it last night (which resulted in my staying up a little too late).

I have no idea how I got along without it. Occasionally, posting on blogs, particularly from my on-again-off-again wifi connection at home, is slow enough that it inspires me to put an entry in a Ta-da Lists to get around to the post later. With MarsEdit, I can save things as drafts, mess around with an entry or idea on the train.

I like that I can manage multiple blogs from one interface. I enjoy the fact that I can edit all the fields from this same interface and that I can tab to the month, date, and time in the date fields. The only thing that gives me pause is that I use the Textile 2 Plugin on one of my blogs and the post list doesn’t interpret those posts.

The inline Technorati tags are nifty and the fact that it’s scriptable means that if I’m ever terribly ambitious, I could write something amusing. Fortunately, other people have beat me to the punch.

See?

Currently playing in iTunes: Friday the 13th by Thelonious Monk and Sonny Rollins

I’m getting really tired of Google Reader, primarily due to its slowness and the way that it reacts to my keystrokes. The v key in Firefox-based browsers opens the item in a new tab. If I fill my browser (usually Flock — which I’ll likely replace) with tabs, Google Reader will occasionally refuse to continue opening tabs and give me the whole blocked popup guff. When this happens, even when I stop close all the tabs, it continues to refuse until I quit and restart the browser.

Since I use multiple old RSS readers as well as Sage, NetNewsWire, Flock’s built-in news reader. I thought I’d update my software, try a few new things out, and look around for Mac OS X RSS Readers.

The Candidates

NetNewsWire 3.0

NetNewsWire has updated from the Lite version I’d used before. There are multiple options for posting to del.icio.us, posting to a blog, handling podcasts, and reading feeds. It’s pretty easy to add feeds and categories. I like how fast it is and the interface is clean, if basic. It costs $29.95.

endo

endo has a unique interface that, quite frankly, befuddles me. It doesn’t look anything like any RSS feed reader I’ve ever seen. There doesn’t seem to be a way to save bookmarks to social bookmarking sites. It’s $17.95.

NewsFire

NewsFire is pretty, reminiscent of other useful little Mac OS X applications, like Unison or ColorSchemer. Key commands make it easy to bookmark things on social bookmarking sites. This one is $25.00.

Shrook

Shrook has a slightly unusual interface as well, but since it has no social bookmarking functionality, which I use heavily, it’s a no go. Its strange iTunes-esque interface is not something I could see myself useing very long.

Conclusions

I think NetNewsWire 3.0 has the broadest feature set, but NewsFire is a close second. Google Reader’s only advantages are its accessibility from a mobile browser and its GMail interface. All of the Mac RSS readers outperform the browser plugin and web-based solutions, both in speed and flexibility.

I’m planning on travelling very soon. It’s been a long time since I have left the United States. So, in order to prepare myself for my future travels, I am making a list of the languages I either need to brush up or learn, so that my travel experience can go as smoothly as possible. I can’t expect everyone to be able to speak to me in English, just because I carry a US Passport.

1. French – The language of France, Monaco, Quebec, Switzerland, part of Belgium, Luxembourg, various former colonies in Africa and the Caribbean.
2. Spanish – The language of all of Latin America except Brazil, as well as Spain and Andorra.
3. German – The language of Germany, Austria, Switzerland, as well as a well-studied language in other countries nearby.
4. Arabic – The lingua franca of all of North Africa, the Middle East, and Muslim countries everywhere.
5. Mandarin – The most-spoken language in the world, useful in China and in nearby countries.
6. Portuguese – The language of Portugal, Brazil, Angola, and Mozambique, as well as various former colonies.
7. Russian – The language of Russia and a second language in many places formerly behind the Iron Curtain.
8. Italian – The language of Italy, San Marino, and Switzerland.
9. Greek – The language of Greece and Cyprus.

Fortunately, I have books and I have signed up for an account on Mango, which includes all of these languages and more.

For the last couple of years, I have been the primary reviewer over at 50 Words. Since I consume lots of the media, especially the music, somewhere away from my computer, I put a time stamp and a title in a text file, so I can correctly backdate an entry (aha, now you know my secret!). There are 20 backlogged items in my list, which I have yet to review. Fortunately, the whole point of 50 Words is that I can easily write fifty words about anything. I’ve just been procrastinating.

I’m going to try to knock a bunch of those out tonight, while I’m catching up on my movies. Last weekend, I rented three movies. There are also four movies in Netflix envelopes in my house, three of which have been sitting there for a while. Since I recently got a job in San Francisco and I live an hour away, I seem to have less and less time to watch movies. But, my list is up to date. I’m hoping to get to everything this weekend.