Monday, October 20, 2008

Espanol y Turkce

So my degree program here at the Korbel School involves proficiency in a foreign language. When I came out here, I just figured that it would be Turkish, since that's what I had spent the most time working on when I was at Aurora University. OK, now that was about 14 months ago and I still haven't perfected my Turkish. Is this a bad thing? Yes and no.

I've decided to switch over and take my proficiency exam in Spanish. I figure that even though for my purposes it is the less attractive option, it will have to suffice. You see, when I got out to Denver, I started working on Latin again made yet another stab at Greek. Midway through the last school year, I found some free Arabic classes on campus, and even got a little teeny tiny bit of Hebrew. Turkish got pushed aside. Oddly enough, I feel that my Spanish is better than usual, due in large part to interactions with Espanol-proficient folks. I'm linguistically greedy, I guess, and if it's useful to be functionally illiterate in six different languages, then bully for me!

I take notes in class with four different alphabets, but if I could pick one and stick with it, I think we'd all be a lot better off. As my old boss used to say, "Knowledge a mile across but an inch deep is dangerous."

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