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March 23, 2006

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Music; no hope for me. My brother got all the musical ability in the family.

Languages; well, I can't speak french anymore but I can still read it and write it well enough to be understood. I can remember quite a bit of esperanto. Never got a handle on the Spanish or Portueguese despite having had to work with them.

Juggling is something I used to do professionally; the most I do now is juggling my torches no the fourth of july for all the kids at the fireworks show, and juggling the weighted balls when I am waiting for my fiance to finish up at the gym when I am done first.

Dancing is something I am currently taking lessons for and that I am getting better at.

Puzzles used to be fun, but I never have time for them anymore.

Ping pong is a thing of the past; when I was growing up we had a table, but I haven't played for almost two decades.

Try piano. The main advantage: The first time you sit down at the keyboard, and play a note, it sounds good!

Well, it was interesting to see that Blaine mentioned Esperanto. I've been reading Mind Performance Hacks over the past few days. One of the suggestions in that book is to learn an artificial language. Esperanto is one of the ones suggested.

It really is easier to learn, and retain than natural languages for several really straightforward reasons.

1) The spelling is entirely phonetic. Spanish is close enough to being phonetic to share some of that advantage.

2) With the exception of a few special words (prepositions, pronouns, some adverbs, etc.) every word is grammatically tagged. The nouns end in "o". Adjectives end in "a". You make either of those plural by adding a "j" to the end.

3) Esperanto speakers are free to make up words out of the parts they already know. That means that many of the words you use will be compounds that you just use on-the-fly. You don't have to remember the Esperanto word for the verb "to accompany". That means "to go with". In Esperanto, "to go" is "iri", "with" is "kun". You put them together and get "kuniri". You would be just as correct to express it as two words and say "iri kun", which means literally "to go with".

4) Esperantists are generally talkative. The whole point of an artificial "bridge language" is to talk and correspond with people outside your own linguistic community without the effort to learn several foreign languages. I've met quite a few friendly Esperantists who were eager to share their thoughts with me.

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