I’m learning German. You could stick learning in air quotes, though: I have a million more important things on my plate, and my strategy of playing it in the background while I work, rather than “language through osmosis,” seems to result in nothing but me becoming distracted and irritated.

I signed up for Live Mocha tonight, a neat (free) online service with language lessons. And I decided that learning languages is neat. I learned Spanish in high school, but never enough to be fluent. What’s interesting is that podcasts and VoIP are playing a role, as people can chat in real time with other speakers, and language lessons can be put onto iPods easily.

I’d like to work on picking up a little more German. After that, I’ve come across a decent number of pages in Polish and Slovak (which, to an untrained completely oblivious eye, look similar), not to mention French. And my interest in the Netherlands continues, so Dutch continues. (Not to be confused with Deutsch, the German word for “German.”) Learning either Chinese or Japanese would be helpful, as would Arabic. (Unfortunately, none of these languages really have anything in common, unlike the Romance languages, and supposed similarities between German and Dutch.)

And after learning all those, I’ll move onto Luxembourgish.