Katewon1

I agree. My cursive writing is pretty bad too. I did learn in elementary school, but by middle school it was no longer required. I stopped writing in cursive because I was always pretty slow with it and I can write much faster in print. But as a consequence my cursive looks like a third grader's. And although I do somewhat agree that cursive writing is not as important as it once was, I still think it should be taught in schools. I think everyone should have the ability to read in cursive and kids won't be able to if they never learn it.

I would definitely consider ASL to be another language. Certainly if you have not studied it you would have a really hard time understanding what is being said! There are of course some words that are intuitive but not everything.

I would definitely have to go with speaking. It can be very difficult to come up with the right words as you are going along, and of course there is always the issue of correct pronunciation. That dang American accent can be pretty hard to get rid of! I enjoy reading more because you can go at your own pace. Listening can be hard too if someone is speaking very fast.

Although I am not studying Dutch at the moment, I would love to. My father is from Holland and I wish I knew the language!

I've studied Spanish, German, and Russian, and Russian was by far the hardest language. I only took Russian for one year so maybe it would have gotten easier, but I guess I'll never know! It was hard because it has a different alphabet so I never really got past having to sound out each word as I was reading. Spanish and German have the same alphabet as English (mostly) so there isn't really a lot of sounding out words. Russian is an interesting language though. Maybe some day I'll give it another try.

The next language I would like to learn is Dutch. My father grew up in Holland and moved here when he was 14. I wish he had taught me Dutch when I was growing up but he didn't. I would love to visit Holland one day and it would be great to know the language.

Indeed! It seems like every day grammar gets worse and worse, and yet more acceptable. The common argument is that "you know what I mean", but that's a pretty lame excuse. Somewhat of a related subject is that spelling has gone down the hole too. When I went to school, spelling always mattered. Nowadays they don't force it as much. They are much more focused on the content, and although I can't argue with wanting good content but the spelling is equally important. You come off looking foolish when you can't spell properly. I know spell check catches a lot, but it doesn't catch everything. I will admit that I have at times in my life used "could care less" but as you said, I have changed my ways.

I live near Boston, MA and I hear that word A LOT! I think it must have originated here. I remember an episode of Saturday Night Live with Ben Affleck as the host; there was a segment where he was using a wicked Boston accent and he used the word irregardless. Very authentic! I am very surprised that a news anchor used that word though. I've heard lots of people use that word and I know it's wrong. I'm not sure how she thought it was a real word.