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Feb. 19th, 2012 09:21 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
nonionayYesterday, I went to Bellingham for a quick visit. It's times like this that I look forward to May, when I'll have had my drivers license for a year, and can sign up for ZipCar. That would have saved me a lot of trudging around in the wind and rain. As it was, however, I took the train, and that was pleasant. I finally got around to sifting through my most recent Nano Novel.
And so it was that, hanging out with the old gang like in old times, I was told about Memrise, which, as![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
kehrli describes it, is a cross between flash cards and those stupid addictive internet games. So now I have, not only a new way to avoid writing, but an actually viable way to polish up my Spanish, which I've been trying to do ever since I took two semesters of it in high school. I feel very strongly that everyone should know more than one language, even if they never really need it.* It's just shameful that America's privilege lets us calcify our brains while everyone speaks English to us.
*I have actually used Spanish at my work, to help distinguish between a couple different documents we were printing. We do a lot of printing for the city, and the city puts out a lot of materials in different languages** It's actually pretty useful to be able to identify different languages, even if I can't understand them.
**primarily (IIRC) Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Korean, Spanish, Tagalog, Amharic, Somali and Oromo, the last of which I'd never heard of before.
And so it was that, hanging out with the old gang like in old times, I was told about Memrise, which, as
kehrli describes it, is a cross between flash cards and those stupid addictive internet games. So now I have, not only a new way to avoid writing, but an actually viable way to polish up my Spanish, which I've been trying to do ever since I took two semesters of it in high school. I feel very strongly that everyone should know more than one language, even if they never really need it.* It's just shameful that America's privilege lets us calcify our brains while everyone speaks English to us. *I have actually used Spanish at my work, to help distinguish between a couple different documents we were printing. We do a lot of printing for the city, and the city puts out a lot of materials in different languages** It's actually pretty useful to be able to identify different languages, even if I can't understand them.
**primarily (IIRC) Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Korean, Spanish, Tagalog, Amharic, Somali and Oromo, the last of which I'd never heard of before.
