Tuesday, August 22, 2006

1:02:33 - BF Parkway past boathouse row (6.3 miles) - LearnItalianPod.com

It was a pretty day, so although I was pretty beat from Bikram this morning, I decided to run. I ended up clocking just tover an hour. Currently I have Italian lessons loaded on my MP3 from http://www.learnitalianpod.com. I really like LearnItalianPod. They are an Italian woman and man that do a simple dialogue in each PodCast. Their lessons are about 10 minutes each, which are enought that I can listen to a couple when I walk to and from work. They seem pretty simple-- of course, I can't vouch for that, because learning Italian when you already have pretty good Spanish is really simple. It's not exactly the same (and my Italian co-worker tells me it's really annoying to listen to a Spaniard who thinks they *are* the same). But some essential stuff is in both-- gender matches in most cases, and probably the most important: 17 shared verb forms. So once you've got your brain around the Past Subjunctive in Spanish, you don't have far to go to learn it in Italian. If you've been reading my blog for a while, you may remember that I was studying Mandarin for a while. I haven't abandoned that, but I was getting a little burnt out on it. Italian's great because I'm already somewhat conversent in it after just a few weeks (I talked for quite a while with some Italian folks in San Diego after the ESRI conference). It would have taken years to get that far in Mandarin.

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