Metrolingua

A couple of weeks ago, I said that I was studying Portuguese more intensely and thought I would be done with the Duolingo course more towards June. But I decided to try to finish the course by ...

http://blog.metrolingua.com/2024/04/i-finished-duolingo-portuguese-course.html

When I had more time between jobs, I decided to spend more time on Twitch to listen to electronic music, especially from Germany because I was trying to improve my German while listening to musi...

http://blog.metrolingua.com/2024/03/i-translated-bit-of-german.html

After I finished the Japanese Duolingo course, I decided to try to finish another course. Before trying to attain the Japanese goal, I'd been spending a lot of time on German, with other langua...

http://blog.metrolingua.com/2024/03/getting-more-into-portuguese.html

Welcome to the post I've been writing for a while, and rewriting, which I've been asking people and thinking about for a long time: is it better to be rich? My short answer is yes. Commentators...

http://blog.metrolingua.com/2024/03/do-rich-people-have-it-better.html

I decided to set a Duolingo goal to finish the Japanese course this month, and I did it! At first I didn't know if I was really done because there was no celebration from the app. Usual...

http://blog.metrolingua.com/2024/02/i-finished-duolingo-japanese-course.html

Five years ago I wrote about a guy who's in the people business, who I assumed was helping people and speaking to groups of people because he liked people. But when I met him he was quite unfrie...

http://blog.metrolingua.com/2024/01/i-met-someone-who-likes-people.html

As I said previously , I've been doing Duolingo and reached the 200-day milestone on the last day of 2023. When I was working a lot, my language learning was limited to Duolingo and foreign langu...

http://blog.metrolingua.com/2024/01/2024-is-going-to-be-about-language.html

I joined Duolingo to learn Swedish 6 years ago but didn't continue because the lessons were silly. The sentences often featured animals doing weird things; they didn't make sense and weren't prac...

http://blog.metrolingua.com/2023/10/ive-been-studying-languages-on-duolingo.html

I was going to write a long post about how I've noticed that people have been using "sort of" in their speech more often, such as hearing in a discussion or panel, "Tell us what you think of your...

http://blog.metrolingua.com/2023/06/sort-of.html

Posting online is like a message in a bottle. We write something or post something to connect with the outside world. It's easy to write something for ourselves in a diary, or take pictures and k...

http://blog.metrolingua.com/2023/05/message-in-bottle.html

Chapter 3 of one of the best advice books I've ever read, The Asshole Survival Guide, begins with Robert Sutton saying, "I believe in quitting" and that's what I did. I wasn't going to consider ...

http://blog.metrolingua.com/2023/04/quit.html

I was reading an article in the Miami Herald about an ancient wishing well in Germany.  At the bottom of the article it said, "Google Translate was used to translate the news release from The Ba...

http://blog.metrolingua.com/2023/01/using-google-translate-to-report-news.html

I just finished listening to the Audible original Once Upon a Christmas Carol by Karen Schaler (who I did a three-hour livestream with ), which will eventually become a podcast (because it's t...

http://blog.metrolingua.com/2022/12/once-upon-christmas-carol-audible.html

I'm one of those lucky people who was over-employed during the pandemic. I was working at least five gigs at the same time, and one part-time job that was 100% in-person went from a couple of day...

http://blog.metrolingua.com/2022/11/thankful-to-be-employed.html

A lot of people are now saying "no worries." It's a trendy phrase that I wasn't going to comment on until I heard someone use it in the wrong way.  This is what happened: I made an appointment...

http://blog.metrolingua.com/2022/11/no-worries.html

Whenever I want to write about TV, I think about the disparaging comment I saw that someone made about this blog years ago, that they didn't see much language-oriented content. That's because I'v...

http://blog.metrolingua.com/2022/08/i-finally-watched-red-oaks.html

Sometimes I meet people who've been adopted, or who have adopted kids, and I tell them that my dad was also adopted. Because he was born in the 1920s, adoption wasn't openly discussed, so he didn...

http://blog.metrolingua.com/2022/08/adopted-in-last-century.html

I've been thinking about this for a long time. I think that when someone hits the jackpot in a difficult industry and gets lots of attention for their incredible success, other people think they ...

http://blog.metrolingua.com/2022/07/just-because-they-got-lucky-doesnt-mean.html

I ended up getting a Letter to the Editor published in the Chicago Tribune about how downtown Chicago isn't a scary place, and mentioned that the 1970s and 1980s were worse. Then Marilyn Cosenti...

http://blog.metrolingua.com/2022/06/guest-post-experience-in-1970s-downtown.html

A while ago, I was talking to a boss about how much work they have and how many fires they have to put out. They also have to deal with lots of different people in different jobs and departments,...

http://blog.metrolingua.com/2020/05/i-like-people-who-like-people.html

I think I've already written four or five versions of this post because I feel like I'm over-sharing or being too detailed and personal. But this work-related milestone is worth noting because I ...

http://blog.metrolingua.com/2022/02/new-year-new-job.html

I recently went to Southern California for a family event, and I made it into a mini-vacation that was very different than the life I live in Chicago. Even before the pandemic, I didn't travel mu...

http://blog.metrolingua.com/2022/02/i-finally-took-vacation.html

I saw Timo Torikka  in a couple of episodes of one of my favorite shows, Maigret (the French version with Bruno Crémer), and I kept wondering how he learned to speak such fluent French even t...

http://blog.metrolingua.com/2022/01/i-wish-i-understood-this-timo-torikka.html

I would've written this earlier, but I wrote other blog posts that I haven't posted yet because they might be too personal. I showed one to a friend, and she said it was fine, but I still am not ...

http://blog.metrolingua.com/2021/11/getting-booster.html

One time I was in a person's house that was so large, I forgot the way back to the room where I was staying, and that was one of their two homes; they had another one in another state. The person...

http://blog.metrolingua.com/2021/10/its-easy-for-people-to-say-they-dont.html