ONLINE NEWSPAPER LANGUAGE CIRCUIT

In addition to my dabbling with Duolingo, I've been faithfully (on weekends at least) reading through the headline stories on Der Spiegel, Le Monde and El País in the hopes that it'll help me retain a bit of their respective lingos.

I may be ditching Der Spiegel in favor of the Süddeutsche Zeitung sometime soon, though. The Espejo seems a bit over the top at times, and the Zeitung seems to have a bit better-balanced coverage. Although Der Spiegel'd probs give me a more "authentic" German-centric perspective.

Anyway, today this involves Spanish and German stories on the Obama-Castro playdate in Panama, and a French article called "Le congrès du PS* en cinq questions." So allons-y.

Parti socialiste.

MEUS CAVALOS NÃO COMEM ARROZ: DUOLINGO

My horses don't eat rice.

I've been plugging along in Duolingo now for about a week, tapping out translations to appease the slightly deranged specimen of avian viridity pictured at left. It's not exactly plunge-in-headfirst immersion like I'm used to, but I can't imagine it could hurt anything. The system itself is as streamlined as a greased neutrino, and works just dandy on my iDevice of choice. I would take issue with the lack of up-front and out-in-the-open vocab/grammar lists -- of course this would be solved if I actually bothered to take notes and/or spend 10 seconds on Google -- but Duolingo makes the process of taking a neverending stream of pop quizzes so palatable that it's hard to really fault it.

For no particular reason, I choice to go with Portuguese as a first taste of Duolingo. Unfortunately, this may've been a poor choice when it comes to actually writing a review of same, since the lingo bears such a close resemblance to Spanish/French that it's difficult to tell how well that trippin' bird's actually teaching me. So guess I'll just check in once I start Irish. Or Russian, which is supposedly coming online in the Fall/thenabouts. Once Russian and Yiddish are put up, I will be a happy, happy goy.