[csail-related] GSB Tonight: Languages

[jamoozy at csail.mit.edu (Andrew "Jamoozy" Correa)]

Languages have been a passion of mine for as long as I can remember.  The
funny thing, though, is that I really hate learning languages.  It's so
hard!  The payoff at the end makes it all worth it, though, so I bear it
[1].

So, most recently I switched back to learning Spanish [2].  It's the
easiest language I've attempted to learn, so far [3].  As far as I can
tell, it has 3 major bonuses:
  1. It consists of only phonemes that are familiar to me.
  2. The writing system seems perfectly phonetic.
  3. There are so many Latin roots, that picking up new vocab is easy
enough.
I don't see why everyone isn't learning it [4].

Contrast that list with this one that I made of Mandarin [5]:
  1. It consists of a healthy chunk of phonemes I can't quite hear.
  2. I see no common roots to anything I know.
  3. I think I gave up on learning to read and write before I even started.
  4. Don't even get me started on tones.
That looks like a whole lot of time that I just can't quite spare yet [6].

Let's start a religious war about which is the best language in the world
[7] at this week's:


*Girl Scout Benefit*
*5:30 pm ? 32-D4 S. Lounge*

For those coming from elsewhere: Building 32 is here:
http://whereis.mit.edu/map-jpg?selection=32
Once you are in 32, just take the D-elevator
to the 4th floor and you will be looking at us.
http://projects.csail.mit.edu/gsb


[1] Sound familiar?
[2] For the curious, my attempted language list goes: German, English,
French, Mandarin, Dutch, back to Mandarin, Arabic, Japanese, back to
Mandarin, back to Japanese, Spanish, back to French, back to Spanish ...
man ... I'm really bad at *a lot* of languages.
[3] I thought Japanese was easy, but no.  Spanish has it beat for ease of
learning.
[4] I feel like a car salesman in that "Everyone should drive one of these
bad-boys!" sort of way ("Now that'll be 300,000?.")
[5] Why pick on Mandarin?  Well ... it's hard and stuff.
[6] I forget what, exactly, I just remember that I'm doing something else
this summer ...
[7] Esperanto!