I am now currently 38% through the course with a 77% accuracy rate that could be a little higher had I known how to do the “magnet” test correctly in lesson one. I tried to redo it, but it wouldn’t let me. You can only review past lessons, but not redo them. So far I’ve done first nouns, negatives, adjectives, plurals, numbers, most of which I already knew, and careers, which completes Unit 1.

As fun as it is and as exciting as it is to learn, I have to remember not to overload my brain circuits with too much too fast, so I set a limit of 3 lessons a day.

As for those who review my writing, they agree the quality and grammar are good while the spelling, not surprisingly, is excellent. Yeah, I’ve always been a good speller.

The plurals and masculine/feminine tense thing drive me as batty as it does with Spanish. We describe a dog as brown or dogs as brown, but with Italian, you must pluralize descriptions if you have plural nouns that come first and it just seems like a stupid waste of time. So dogs aren’t brown, they’re browns.

There are two ways to say these and two ways to say this, and with just the last letter different in each word (questi, queste, questo, questa) it’s very easy to get confused. Same goes for words like girl, girls, boy and boys (bambina, bambine, bambino, bambini). No s’s or es’s allowed.

The more I get into it, the more I develop various strengths and weaknesses. Usually, the hardest thing to do when learning a language is to understand it being spoken, but that’s been fairly easy so far. I’m doing well with reading, listening, and with the magnet exercises which is where you drag and drop the words into a box to form a sentence after it’s spoken to you in your native language. It’s my writing and speech that are not doing so well.

I looked at their list of languages. They don’t have Hawaiian, but after I do the Italian, I thought I’d do the French in which I have a slight head start. Then I’ll do Portuguese, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin Chinese, then possibly Hindi and Icelandic, but I’m not sure about those two yet. That would be a dozen languages! Scary, huh? That 10-year-old back in 1975 who first heard Linda Ronstadt sing in Spanish and thought it was so beautiful that she just had to learn it will have come a long way. This ability really helps make up for the things I’ve been cursed with. It balances things out like my ear, my sleep problem and things like that. This is a definite gift from God. Just a true blessing to be able to do this as learning languages is said to be one of the hardest things a human being could ever do. I don’t expect my first non-European language to be too easy, though! I wish the grammar was the same in all languages. Then all we’d have to do was memorize the words, but I guess that kind of makes it all the more impressive if you can learn it.

I can’t believe all this is free! It’ll be interesting to see how complete it is. I can’t tell right now because as I said, there’s no jumping ahead. They do have a premium upgrade, but from what I read, I don’t want the 3 extra things you get with it, so it’s not worth the $30. Still not bad considering that most language programs are hundreds of dollars. I paid something like $120 for the Spanish books and records I got when I first moved out on my own. Anyway, you get feedback from certified tutors, but I already get enough feedback from native speakers, some of whom are certified tutors. You get MP3 downloads for when you’re away from your desk, but if I’m not at my desk, it’s cuz I’m busy doing something else. Lastly, you get live group tutoring sessions and you know I hate “classes” of any kind and that I do better when I teach myself which is what I prefer anyway so I can go at my own pace.

Just like it’s good to keep physically active, learning is a good way to keep the brain active, and believe me, learning 50-100 new words a day will do just that! I could enroll in more than one course at once but have decided to do one language at a time.

I’ve been neglecting my story and workouts since being directed to this site, but I’ll make sure I divvy up my time better starting tomorrow and get back to all my usual things. The only thing I cut back on is the sweeps. There are just too few good ones these days and too much competition. I do, however, make sure I enter the biggies and the instants. Instants are time-stamped so the number of entrants doesn’t affect the odds.

I slept till 7pm and Tom said it was quiet all day which doesn’t surprise me. Had I been up all day the dogs probably would’ve gone ballistic. It was cold and rainy so Jesse didn’t even go out on the motorcycle.

I dreamt that Tom was talking on the phone to someone about a potential job. Then I later listened to a message left by whoever he had spoken to earlier saying that she had an 18-year-old with two kids to consider as well. I then thought, oh great. There goes his chance of getting the job since people are hired based more on their personalities and personal lives rather than their qualifications.

I also dreamt that we were living somewhere in the mid-eastern part of the country. Tom said we should move up to New Jersey to be far enough below New York in order to avoid the crowds there, but high enough above the Florida crowds, and I insisted I didn’t want to move there because it was too cold.

Ok, I’m off to report to class!