Well, It's Been Several Months

Less than three weeks now until the project is due. That means this one will still be short. But I wanted to write it while I was thinking about it.

Recently, I thought to myself, I wonder how I can get closer to my goal of being polylingual? Is that a word? What I mean is, even more than multilingual. I won’t pretend that I could ever attain omnilingual status, but I want to learn MANY languages. Of course, a major restriction for me is that I don’t really have a lot of free time, as you know. This makes it difficult to do some sort of self-study with books at home, much less actually take college classes. Schade, nicht wahr? But then I realized an untapped time resource I had-- those thirty or forty minutes or so per day that I spend walking between places. Or for that matter, the time it takes me to do my grocery shopping. I could be listening to those handy language-learning audio programs! But I don’t want to spend a lot of money…

Hey, aren’t most podcasts free? And easy to get by simply downloading? And doesn’t iTunes have a library of thousands of them that is easy to search? Quick investigation proved my brain correct, so I subscribed to some likely suspects that looked like good Japanese resources. (I figured I’d start with that language since I probably have the greatest toehold in it of any of the smatterings of languages I know. More than Russian, that’s for sure. Of course, there’s still the problem of learning kanji.) Then I realized that I could use podcasts to educate myself on any number of different topics. The problem with chemical engineering as a major is that it doesn’t leave a lot of room in your curriculum for random electives, which is quite disappointing to a would-be Renaissance man like myself. Thus, I added “In Our Time” from BBC Radio 4 (this week’s topic: Chaucer), NPR’s “On Words with John Ciardi” segment (the etymology of the word “midriff”), and the weekly Piano Puzzler from “Performance Today.” And the Onion Radio News, just for fun. So now I will have even more random facts to toss at people. Insert your own punchline/quip here.

In my first post on this blog, I explained my innate distrust of fads, which is why it took me so long to get a blog in the first place. You may also note that in that first post I singled out podcasting and Facebook as the new fads, blogs having become old hat by that point. Actually, I am considering joining the Facebookers some time in the next few months. But what can I say? The convenience of listening to audio programming when I want to, with the help of my iPod mini, was just too good to pass up. Besides, it’s been several months since last summer. The Fad is now… I don’t know… Gmail’s integrated chat program? Video blogging? I’ll take public comments on this one.