Monday, June 30, 2008

A second language

I've been wanting to do this for a while, but couldn't ever decide on a second language. My father is Colombian and has been giving me grief since I was young about not being able to speak Spanish, or not wanting to. In college, I took three semesters of Italian - my mother's influence. Needless to say, I don't speak Italian on an everyday basis, so that's scrapped too.

Anyway, today I found this really neat site called LiveMocha. It's FREE, but in Beta, meaning it may be a paid service once it goes officially live - like Mango did. LiveMocha not only provides courses in multiple languages, but also acts as a social networking site to bring people together. You can help out people from around the world who are trying to learn your native language. As far as I've messed with it, the site works well (although the pages don't quite render properly in Firefox - use IE Tab add-on).

Two of my future travel locations include China and Brazil, so I began my 200+ hour course in Chinese today. We'll see at the end of the month how this has paid off.

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