So far I am very, very impressed with Livemocha. People are really taking this seriously and I'm getting email and chat requests from complete strangers wanting to practice their language skills and mine. One lady from Cameroon just emailed me and told me, in English, about her day today and asked me to tell her, in French, about mine. I replied, in part:

Aujourd'hui, j'ai essayé d'apprendre le français mieux. C'est très difficile pour moi, mais, j'adore la langue et je voudrais parler couramment. Je suis allé au magasin pour acheter des livres et maintenant je veux lire un peux plus français.

I struggled with some of the words and I know it's ridiculously simple, but it's lots of fun connecting with people all over the world and practicing. Because you can record some lessons with your computer's microphone, people can hear you speak. One native French speaker even said that I sounded Parisian (my last girlfriend -- she is French -- would have laughed at that thought and she would be right -- my accent isn't that good). I'm now pretty handy at typing all of those funny characters on my Mac. As an added bonus, because I got tired of Firefox telling me I was misspelling all of those French words, I've installed a French language pack and switched to French. Now Firefox is telling me I'm misspelling all of my English words.

LiveMocha is really making language fun for me. The only annoying bit is how lazy people seem to be in their writing. Often when I'm trying to give feedback on people's English, I see stuff like this:

the man is at the store he is not at home he is going to school she does not want the cabbage

So, that's probably four grammatically correct sentences, but it's very hard to read. I usually mark stuff like that as high on spelling and grammar, but low on quality and I add a note about spelling and punctuation. I suspect that our Internet culture is harming people's communication skills.

Update: the lady from Cameroon has gotten back to me. Apparently it's not "j'ai essayé d'apprendre le français mieux", but "j'ai essayé de mieux apprendre le français." I've been corrected on this before. I should remember it.

My brother Greg (yossarian69) moved in Yesterday. We'll probably stay here for a couple of months prior to moving closer to central London. Meanwhile, my temporary housemate, Armgard, who speaks English, German and Afrikaans (she's Nigerian, if you're curious), is studying Spanish. She told Greg and myself about a wonderful Web site named LiveMocha, another social networking site. Why would I join yet another site like this? Because they are centered around offering free language lessons. So far, they seem to be pretty good. Greg and I have signed up to learn French. I thought about jumping ahead to French 102, but decided to play it safe and stick with 101. Good thing I did. The lessons are much more comprehensive than I thought.

The site requires Javascript and Flash, but that's OK because the quality of the courses is fairly rich. You'll need speakers to listen to people, but you'll also need a microphone to record your voice and let other people listen to what you say and give feedback on how well you say it. The "social networking" aspect is that you can add friends and you can ask complete strangers to review your work. This is pretty common and I've reviewed the English of people from Japan, the Russian Federation, Brazil, and quite a few other places. Enjoy!

Update: even though livemocha is a social networking site, I do find it a bit odd that you can set your "Relationship Status". If I'm looking for a relationship, I certainly wouldn't be doing that on a language learning site.

This is a rather long post of little interest to anyone outside of my immediate friends. I'm recording it here mainly so that I can write it down immediately after it happened lest I forget too many details.

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This was my first Christmas in twenty years spent with my family. Watching my half-sister, Lynne, introduce her mother and father to one another — only appropriate since they had never met — gave me a sense of just how difficult our family history has been. Of course, while it seems strange to me, it might even seem incomprehensible to the casual reader, so with the permission of the parties I spent Christmas with, I've decided to finally write out what little I know about how this strange situation arose.

Unfortunately, what I do know is often filled with strongly contradictory accounts. Some differences may arise from maliciousness, but most, I suspect (hope?) are merely due to memories fading over time. I'll never quite know the truth of any of this, but I'm close enough to it to be content. Or perhaps I'm merely tired of guessing. Who knows? What follows is what I think happened. Some of you know bits of this, so my apologies for being repetitive (and you might recognize bits I've left out).

( A Family Christmas )

Perhaps what most intrigues me about the UK are the inevitable cultural issues which will arise. Culture, when viewed without context, can be a curious thing. I've had women get very upset with me for holding a door open because I'm being patronizing to women. What??? I could equally argue that women in the deep South were the ones in the wrong for expecting men to run around and open doors for them. Give me a break, folks. Culture is culture and so long as all parties are consenting, no harm, no foul.

While culture is frequently exhibited in behavior (I still don't feel comfortable wearing a hat indoors but it's no longer universally considered rude), more often than not, the issues arise through language. When my brother in London told me he was getting pissed, I felt very uncomfortable until I realized he was "getting drunk". When I first moved to the Pacific Northwest, I couldn't help but laugh the first time a lady offered me a "pop" because I was used to little kids referring to "pop" and adults referring to "soda". I heard a grown woman talking like a little child.

Perhaps one of the worst issues with culture arose in Texas when I first realized that my friends' use of the word "nigger" was offensive. Vowing to not be a racist, I altered my vocabulary to show proper respect. This shocked my mother. She, to her credit, informed me that the word I was looking for was "black", not "negro". That I could have thought "negro" was acceptable tells you a lot about Texas culture (and perhaps why so many Texans like Bush).

I've barely started on the German lessons and it's killing my throat. French is much easier.

Möchten Sie etwas trinken? (Would you like something to drink?)

That first word is a pain to pronounce and I still can't quite get it. However, coradee tried to get me to pronounce Eichhörnchen (squirrel). Möchten is a piece of cake compared to that tongue-twister. No wonder the Germans are famous for being so humorlous. They're pissed about the language they had foisted off on them.

Ich verstehe nur ein bisschen Deutsch: "I only understand a little German."

Given that two of my best friends, pdx42 and coradee, are fluent in German, as is my father (who's lived in Germany for the past two decades, I might add), it seemed only natural that I should want to learn the language. There's really no reason I need to learn the language, though, other than a love of learning. Still, being trilingual can't be a bad thing.

I purchased the Pimsleur "German in Ten Days" course. Having already learned French, I'm not so naïve as to believe that I'll be speaking German in ten days but hopefully I'll pick up enough to be able to terribly embarrass myself.

Feeling rather nervous about this, I wasn't planning on telling coradee since she's German and I was certain I would butcher the language, but I had dinner with her last night and had some questions about pronunciation which I couldn't exactly ask the Pimsleur course. Fortunately, she informed me that my pronunciation was excellent, so there were no worries there.

I'm rather torn about the Pimsleur course. Since it focuses exclusively on spoken German, there are no written materials. I'll not be able to read or write German while I'm learning to speak it. On the plus side, it means less of a distraction and I can focus on the spoken part more readily. Still, it would be nice to have transcripts. The word for "only", nur, sounded like "nua". When spoken quickly the distinction is subtle and can be lost. I had to look the word up since I couldn't quite hear what was being said.

The introductory course is a series of ten half-hour lessons. The course promises that I can "spend just thirty minutes a day on each lesson." Uh, nein. That's a crock. I'm doing one lesson a day (I'm on lesson four today) and I have to repeat each lesson four or five times to get it down. Maybe I'm a bit slow, but unless one is phenomenally gifted, I doubt anyone is going to get by on a half-hour a day. I knew that "spend just thirty minutes a day" was a lie when I picked it up, but it still irks me that they would be deliberately deceptive.

Assuming I finish the ten lessons and feel comfortable, I'm going to buy the "Pimsleur German Level 1" course. It's thirty lessons and should give me a good start.

Auf Wiedersehen.