In DuoLingo, they often show you a sentence written out while also saying it and then ask you to provide a translation. I have started not looking at the sentence to practice figuring out what they are saying just by listening. (Which I stink at.) Then I check by looking at the sentence. And only then do I type out the requested translation ( Read more... )

In my continuing quest to experience media from every country, I picked up Michael Burgan's Kenya, another installment of the fabulous Enchantment of the World series (2015). FYI, I'm barely discussing any of the depressing stuff ( Read more... )

I think compound verbs are fun. Why, yes, I did enjoy studying German (where the word for glove is handschuh = hand-shoe), except when trying to read sociology articles (yikes, those were some very long words ( Read more... )

We had a section in our text about Spanish names, but it's described very well and somewhat amusingly in a few paragraphs in James Michener's Iberia so I'll give you that quote below. (I'm adding more paragraph breaks to make it easier to read.)

A word about Spanish names. To explain the tradition fully would require many pages, for it is ( Read more... )

One thing that is handled much better in Spanish than English is reflexive verbs. We learned a bunch back in the chapter on waking up and getting ready and are now learning more in the chapter on well-being. These are words for describing actions you take that are focussed on yourself, in other words, when the subject and object of a action are ( Read more... )

Robin recommended some novels based in Thailand by Timothy Hallinan. He'd just bought his own copies, so I started reading. But I accidentally started reading "Crashed" first, which is set in Los Angeles and turns out to be a whole different series (the Junior Bender mysteries ( Read more... )

Since I hate memorizing, I'm always looking for patterns when I'm studying Spanish. In the chapter on housing, I noticed a lot of words with similar endings and research showed that these were "agent nouns." These are nouns made out of verbs in a certain way to give you a person or object that does or helps you do the action of the noun. For ( Read more... )

I just read a book (Lawrence Block's Hit and Run) where a stamp collector always carried around a stamp catolog in which he had circled all the stamps he had so that he could make sure not to re-buy those stamps ( Read more... )

Sometimes we have different words for the same thing based on whether the living creature is still using it or whether people are using it. For example ( Read more... )

We have now learned two forms of past tense in Spanish. The imperfect is used for descriptions and ongoing or habitual actions. I like to think of it as setting the stage. It is used for sentences like these ( Read more... )