As part of my study of Spanish, I’ve been looking around the web. Here are a few resources for learning Spanish I’ve found so far.
Spanish.about.com - I have a bit of a love-hate thing with about.com. On the one hand, they stick sponsored content inline with real content, they use banners and skyscraper ads, and navigation can be a real pain. On the other hand, each subsite is maintained by a human editor with a true interest (and generally, real knowledge) in the subject matter, and if you can navigate your way around the site, you can often find tons of good info. The Spanish subsite is just chocked full of resources for English-speaking students of Spanish. A few pages will even get separate links below.
Online Spanish lessons from About.com - This is an entire series of Spanish lessons, based on a Spanish I textbook available in most bookstores. It is recommended that you buy the book and follow along. Includes written lessons as well as audio instruction (mp3). I’ve browsed the book in the book store, and looked at some of the online lessons, and I think it could be useful. I’m planning to use this course after I’ve finished Pimsleur’s Spanish II or Spanish III.
Spanish for Beginners (about.com) - The last of my About.com links, this is an index page of brief lessons about basic spanish grammar, parts of speech, etc. A good first stop when trying to understand the basics.
Diccionario de la lengua española from the Real Academia Española - This is a Spanish dictionary for Spanish speakers, not an English-to-Spanish dictionary (I haven’t found one of those I like yet). Since I know so little Spanish so far, it’s of limited use, but it does have a nice feature - if you look up the infinitive form of a verb, the definition will have a blue-box icon next to it; click the blue box to see a thorough list of conjugations of the verb.
blog.com.mx - A blog, written in Spanish. I’m not entirely sure what it’s about since I don’t read much Spanish, but my intent is to try to read new posts as my understanding improves. You have to start somewhere.
Think Spanish! Maganzine - I’m thinking of trying a subscription to this. It’s written in Spanish, but each article has a glossary of words used in the article. They assume a fairly low level of knowledge. It got a decent customer review on Amazon.
UPDATE: Learn Spanish: Free Online Tutorial - Don’t know how I missed this one when I first built this list. This is a very good set of grammar lessons - about 97 so far. Many are brief, but a few are quite extensive. I wouldn’t recommend as a sole source for learning Spanish, but as a second source of info it’s great. A good amount of explanation of tricky concepts as well (e.g., estar vs. ser).
To the folks at EOS Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers:
How do you define the word “Now”? Let me use it in context for you: “Now Available.”
Over the last few years, I have made it a personal policy not to read books in an unfinished series. Thanks to authors such as Robert Jordan and Terry Goodkind, I despair of growing interested in a series of books, only to learn that the series will not be complete until long after I am in the grave. In fact, I am beginning to actively seek out books published as stand-alone volumes or trilogies, to avoid being tied up in never-ending series.
Recently, I purchased The Magicians’ Guild at a mall-based bookseller. Not having the convenience of Internet research, I checked the inside-front-cover, and learned that this is book 1 of The Black Magician Trilogy. I made my decision to buy this book based on the words “Now Available” printed directly above pictures of the covers of volumes 2 and 3 in this trilogy.
Imagine my shock and dismay upon searching for these books on Amazon.com. It appears that Volume 2, The Novice, will not be published until April 27, 2004. It also appears that Volume 3, The High Lord, will not be published until September 1, 2004. Willing to give the benefit of the doubt, I have consulted my calendar. As today is April 15, 2004, it would appear that neither of these books are “Now Available”, unless you define “now” to mean “sometime in the future”. How would you define “Truth in advertising?”
When I purchase books in the future, I will be very careful to read not the inside front cover, but instead the back of the title page. To avoid any further deceptive marketing, I will be checking to confirm that the name HarperCollins is nowhere to be found.
Much noise has been made in the last year or two about WiFi as a revenue stream. On the one hand is T-Mobile HotSpot, the 500-pound gorilla of paid wireless access. I don’t know if they’re making any money, but they’ve got access points HotSpots all over the place. Borders, Starbucks, and Kinkos are among the many places with HotSpots… over 4500 at the time writing. The problem, like so many new services, is pricing. As of April 14, 2004, T-Mobile offers 4 pricing plans:
Unlimited Annual - $29.99 per month, if you sign a 12 month contract.
Unlimited Monthly - $39.99 per month, with no contract
Day Pass - $9.99 for 24 hours. This might be a good deal, except it’s for a consecutive 24 period.
Pay As You Go - $6.00 per hour, minimum connect time 1 hour ($0.10 per minute after the first hour).
Granted, the Unlimited Annual may not be a bad plan if you travel all the time. Most of us, I suspect, don’t want to pay as much for mobile WiFi as we do for our home broadband connections, as we are likely to use it much less. I could see myself buying a Day Pass, if I were in a pinch. For someone who only wants 15 minutes of service to check email, both the Day Pass and the Pay as you Go option seem a bit high.
On the other hand is free WiFi. Panera Bread Co. is the best known example (at least to me) of a company that offers free WiFi as a service to customers, and as a way to bring in customers. Like many others, I’ve commented on them before. Many people hope that this will become the prevailing model of public WiFi service. in January, Best Western announced that they will be offering free broadband (a mix of wired and WiFi) in all of their hotels before year end. Once this is complete, I will certainly give Best Western a higher consideration when choosing a hotel. Also in the mix, of course, is wardriving, but for this discussion I’m more interested in intentional public WiFi, and WiFi as a revenue stream.
While I certainly hope to see more businesses take the lead of Panera and Best Western, today I read about a promising third option, from McDonalds (you want WiFi with that?) of all places. Via Scripting News, The New York Times reports that 13,000 McDonalds restaurants will be offering WiFi at the rate of $2.95 for two hours. Wow. I recall reading about a WiFi experiment at several McDonalds in Manhattan several months ago. Guess it went well. It will be very interesting to see how active T-Mobile’s ubiquitous HotSpots are once McDonalds super-sizes cheap WiFi.
I’ve always had a desire to be multilingual, but I’ve never had an easy time of learning another language. I took three years of French in high school, earning solid C’s the entire time. About the only things I learned (that I still know) are pronounciation and numbers. Given a written word in French, I can usually pronounce it correctly, although I don’t know what it means. And if I tried, I could probably still count to one hundred.
While in college, I worked part-time for QVC in an inbound call center, taking orders for items sold on television. There were a few (bilingual) Spanish-speaking employees, and they would take calls from Spanish-speaking customers. I think they even made a little more money. I thought this was pretty cool, so I bought some Spanish tapes at the book store. A few weeks later, I had put the tapes aside. I still didn’t speak Spanish.
Fast forward several years, to around 1997. I was at the local library, browsing for something intersting while my kids looked for books. Walking from the general fiction section to the children’s section took me right through the audio section. Glancing at the shelves, I noticed a fairly large binder that caught my eye. It was the cassette version of Pimsleur’s Quick & Simple Russian. At the time I had a 45-60 minute commute to and from work, and thought this would be a great way to pass some time behind the wheel.
If you are not familiar with Pimsleur Language Courses, they are probably different than any other language instruction you have had. They are based almost entirely on listening and responding to audio instruction, with practically no book work. For most languages there are three courses (I, II, III), each containing thirty 30-minute lessons. The Quick & Simple course I had borrowed from the library was just the first 8 lessons from the Russian I course - not enough to be of any real use. It seems that the Quick & Simple courses are just a marketing ploy by Simon & Schuster (who now own the Pimsleur material), to put an inexpensive product in bookstores to get interest in the full products. This is necessary because the full Pimsleur courses list for about US $350.00.
Although the 8 lessons I borrowed from the library were not enough to teach me very much Russian, I was amazed at how well I picked up the language. The Pimsleur method worked extremely well, and I found that my pronounciation was very close to that of the native speakers on the tapes. I enjoyed learning a lanuguage much more easily that I had before. I considered getting the full courses, but was stopped by the price tag.
Fast forward again, to last year. At my local mega-bookstore, the foreign language instruction section is directly between the front door and the Computer section. Passing through it as I often had, I decided to browse. My daughter takes Spanish in school, so I decided to have a look at the Spanish section. I ended up buying Pimsleur Instant Conversation Spanish, which is the first 16 lessons of Spanish I. I listened to them in my car, and enjoyed them, but never quite got around to buying the full Spanish I course.
As busy as I’ve been lately, I’ve been looking for things to do to relax that don’t take much time. Since I’m in the car an hour each day anyway (commute), I pulled out my Spanish CDs again a couple of weeks ago. I’ve enjoyed it so much I finally purchased the full Spanish I course, from eBay, for about $150. I’ll probably sell it when I’m done, and purchase the Spanish II course. I’d really like to continue with the study this time, and truly learn Spanish. To this end, I’ve added this new category to my blog, where I’ll record relevant links, observations on learning Spanish, reviews of learning materials, etc. Maybe I’ll even post a few entries in Spanish; although if I decide to try that I may create a separate blog.
I have been Busy. Busy-with-a-capital-B-Busy. Work. Home. Illness (= falling behind, = busier when I’m healthy).
How busy? It’s April 7, and this is my first post in April. Ouch.
How busy? Yesterday, while at work, I decided I needed some thinking music, so I grabbed my Powerbook from my bag, grabbed the mini-plug for my powered speakers that sits on my desk (I have a Wintel PC at work; why would I plug speakers into that?) and plugged in my ‘book. Two minutes into “What’s the Frequency, Kenneth?”, the music died. Battery. Oops. Power supply is at home. Did I say oops? I don’t think I ever used it all weekend. And this is my primary computer at home. Tonight I finally got around to plugging the thing into AC, only to find the battery had really, really died. Oops.
At least I’m getting things done. Released one major app last Thursday at work. Releasing the other this Thursday (crosses fingers). Nearly finished cleaning the garage.
Of course, when I get this busy, I usually end up looking for a stress-release, and the less practical the better. While cleaning the garage, my attention kept getting drawn to the pair of Sun SPARC/Station 1’s (complete with monitor) sitting on a shelf in my garage. I grabbed these years ago when my employer was discarding them. Of course, I’ve never been able to do anything useful with them. Or anything at all, for that matter. I’ve got an old copy of some version of a Sun OS for them, and even borrowed a SCSI CD-ROM drive at one point, but they were both net-booted workstations and have no hard drive. The only SCSI drive I’ve ever gotten my hands on (for free) I could never get to work.
In the years since I last played with these machines, I’ve gotten a little more Unix/Linix savvy, and have certainly acquired more hardware. As I’ve gazed at these old machines while I clean my garage, sorting through boxes of old memories and old junk, I’ve been pondering the potential. Linux. Net boot. Old hardware. What more could I need?
Well, a keyboard would be nice. At one time, at least, I had a Sun keyboard. I had hoped to find it in one of the remaining boxes. That hope was dashed tonight. I assumed it must be around the house somewhere. After calling it a night on the cleaning front, I decided to check my email for the first time in days (did I mention I’ve been Busy?). This proceeded into Googling for sparc 1 linux. I found scads of good stuff in the UltraLinux FAQ.
You can guess what happened next. With a little help, I got TFTP running on my Powerbook. I was just about to grab a compatible boot image, when I decided to grab some hardware. That’s when my lack of keyboard became more than a minor annoyance. I checked the basement, my office, and double-checked the garage… and I can’t find my Sun keyboard.
I briefly considered a serial port boot, but of course the SPARC 1 has a 25-pin serial port, and who knows where I might have put any 25-to-9-pin cables? Beside which, my powerbook has no serial port (I can’t believe I just complained about that!), and I don’t feel like getting the Win2000 machine involved tonight.