September 2008

My Languages

I love learning foreign languages.  They are a window to culture and a door to meeting interesting people all around the world.  They may also be a kitchen table, a few chairs and some other corny domestic metaphores. ;-)

Around 2004, I started studying Russian language and in 2006 began studying Polish language.  I speak neither perfectly but at this point, I speak Polish much more fluently.  But I'm still learning!  Studying language is one of those tasks that you can keep working on forever and never complete.

Polish

YouTube!

Inspired primarily by The Linguist Blogger's YouTube videos where he demonstrates his Spanish and Portuguese abilities, I created a short video on YouTube, where I speak in Polish. I've never put anything on YouTube before and, honestly, in the sea of videos to be found there, I didn't expect anyone to notice it until I linked to it.

However, within an hour of posting it I was getting messages from other users and later comments! YouTube is awesome! I met a bunch of really nice people. So, I think I may post more videos, maybe even do a "video blog" in Polish for the practice.

Anyway, the video follows. Its not terribly interesting, I didn't really plan what I was going to say before I did it. But it at least "proves" that I speak Polish and gives me something to gauge my progress against. I imagine that in a year I'll listen to it and laugh at how bad my Polish used to be. ;-)

Engage

Over the weekend, I asked Carrie to be my wife and she agreed! :-)