various

[paperclippy]

Okay, so I was going to give more detail on my last post, but I think I already hit the important points, so unless someone asks about anything specific I'll just leave it at that.

I am almost done with MFC at work. Yay! But of course I left the hardest task for last. :P

TripAdvisor.com put out their annual best places to visit list. I've been to an okay number of them (particularly the ones in the US and Asia), but here's a list of some I would like to go to:

• New Zealand
  
• Lake Louise (Alberta, Canada)
  
• Sedona, AZ
  
• London
  
• Barcelona
  
• Machu Picchu
  
• Hawaii
  
• Agra, India (Taj Mahal)
  
• Santiago, Chile
  
• Egypt
  
• Marrakech, Morocco
  

There are many more places I'd like to go, but those are all ones listed in the TripAdvisor guide.

While I was in the archaeology museum at UPenn, looking through the African and Polynesian artifacts, I was thinking how cool it would be to learn one language from each language group. One romance language, one germanic language, one polynesian language, etc. I suppose the place to start would be brushing up on my Japanese, and then probably trying to learn Spanish. If I could, I would learn the following languages:

• Spanish
  
• German
  
• Welsh or Gaelic
  
• Hawaiian
  
• Hebrew
  
• Russian
  
• Swahili
  
• Hindi
  
• Mandarin Chinese
  
• Malay
  
• Arabic
  
• Swedish
  
• French
  

and many more. At least I think I ought to be able to learn Spanish okay on my own (with the help of language CDs, TV, and textbooks). That would be the most useful one. Sometimes I really regret taking Latin in high school, despite how much I loved it.

Comments

[partly-cloudy.livejournal.com]

With infinite time, my list is:
* Spanish (took it in jr. high and high school)
* Hawaiian (got off my lazy butt last week and have started working on it in earnest, and it's awesome!)
* Swahili
* Navajo
* Chinese (some characters, no grammar)
* Japanese (a few syllables, one or two random grammer tidbits)
* Russian
* one of the languages of India
* Arabic
* German
* American Sign Language
* The whistling language (silb[a|o] gomero?) of certain Spanish or Castillian herdsmen

There's not enough time to be fluent in all of them, so I plan to focus on getting good understanding (probably not fluency) in a few (Spanish, Hawaiian, and probably ASL or Swahili), basic understanding in some of the others, and just dabbling in the rest. Back in the day, my parents had a computer that came with a copy of Microsoft Encarta, which had spoken samples for the same words in dozens of different languages. It was pretty cool.

[zwilichkl.livejournal.com]

Your travel list looks a lot like mine...