I am doing random computer grunt work right now, but I am actually getting paid for it...yay! It actually isn't too bad. I've got my headphones on, and caffeine at the ready, so life feels pretty good...now if I could just update my bloody profile pic, I would be in business.
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You did read that last night, and subsequently deleted it on a paranoid jag after reading about how Mr. Spitzer's call girl "Kristin" had her life filleted by the media fueled with her online information. Whatever.
Okay, so you rank Japanese after French, too -- good. My Japanese friends speak English and French, so there's the triumverate. I like the idea of a Scandinavian language. When I hear/read them they seem so close to English in some ways, like, an additional step removed from pig-latin.
The TypeMatrix Dvorak keyboard -- note that finger movements are drastically reduced, movements become more natural (fewer keys found on diagonal paths), and the world speed record was set using one. On the Bonneville Salt Flats. (JK)
So, your comment made me think. Speaking another language does unique things for your sense of self: first, you feel like you've cloned yourself; second, you become more heroic because not only can you access another culture but its natives generally respond enthusiastically because you've done all the work to build a bridge to their curiosity (even in France where everyone speake a leetole eengleesh but few speak it well enough for their comfort); third, it creates a new galaxy of the ideas we associate with words -- new worlds of nuance and connotation that enhances your own perceptions because you gain new tools to hold ideas and think about things; fourth, something I can't define well, but it makes you more objective of the human condition; and fifth, it makes you feel SO damn urbane, Rico Suave Citizen of the World (perhaps a justified conceit). As your comment about your Norvege friend suggests to me and evoking the competitive thread in our nature, speaking someone's tongue better than they speak yours is sublime one-upsmanship. Seriously.
Oh, and then there's the fun of eavesdropping on unguarded supermarket conversations between people who assume Americans won't understand.
Finally, subtitles suck.