IronMike

Introduce your Great Aunt to Skype and talk with her regularly!

Grasyas for this!

Your comment here reminded me of this funny demotivational poster:

Sometimes the kids' shows can be too hard/colloquial/fast. What I like to do is watch shows that I know in my native tongue but watch in an L2. I watch Воронины/Voroniny, which is basically Everybody Loves Raymond done Russian-style. The episodes are pretty much the same, so I can follow along easier than watching something like Comedy Women or other Russian sit-coms. They also have a plagiarized version of Married With Children, but it is so dang colloquial I just can't follow it. What also works for me is watching some reality TV in Russian. They've got a show called Магаззино/Magazzino, where a guy goes around and inspects grocery stores. He speaks quickly, but the subject is pretty limited in vocab, so not too bad to follow. There's also one called Орел и Решка/Heads or Tails, where two hosts show up in a city somewhere and flip a coin. The winner gets to spend whatever they want while in the city and the other gets $100 to spend for the weekend. Very fun to watch and the vocab isn't too difficult.

My first experience living overseas (well, except that I was born abroad, but left when I was 18 mon old) was in Germany in the late '80s. I didn't know a lick of German, not even ein bisschen. My first night I went to a restaurant with a couple of guys who knew German. They had found out where a nice place was, so two U-bahn changes later, we're at the Italian place (only to find out later there was one about 200m from where we were living). We all ordered pizza, not knowing what else to order, and of course pepperoni because, well, pepperoni. Imagine our surprise when we were each served our very own pizza with long squiggly green peppers on it. At that moment I looked at those two "German speakers" and laughed. I promised myself to take a German course as soon as possible. Since then, anywhere I was living (Italy, Saudi, Afghanistan, Iraq, Denmark), no matter how short (2 weeks to 4 months to 4 years), I made sure to learn enough of the "Berlitz-y" stuff so that I could at least get food, beer, shelter and use the bathroom.

Another new podcast: Aminda Radio: https://djpod.com/amindaesperanto

Whenever I travel, I try my best to learn some of the language before going, and then insist on trying to speak it as much as possible while I'm there. I "refreshed" my Croatian when we went to Croatia (3 weeks!) and it certainly helped. Same with Gaelic when we went to the Outer Hebrides and Cornish when we went to Cornwall. I've never officially traveled specifically for language reasons, like to attend an immersion or something like that, although I'd love to.

I read a novel in Esperanto (Viktimoj) as well as many short stories. Lots of short stories in Russian and BCS. In the non-fiction realm, I've read a couple linguistics books in Russian and plenty of periodicals in Russian, Esperanto and BCS.

Thought I'd start this thread to save Esperanto resources as I find them. I put (dot) in the video URLs to keep the site from embedding the videos. Video: https://www.youtube(dot)com/user/Evildela https://www.youtube(dot)com/channel/UCvPiONpmjJEyvC5tWBKg1hA https://www.youtube(dot)com/channel/UCe37NyafpwjSoDXsXG1qFoA https://esperanto-tv(dot)com/ http://filmoj(dot)net https://www.youtube(dot)com/watch?v=9GGdi_nFQA0 Reading: http://edu.i-lo.tarnow.pl/esp/lern/librejo/0032/index.php http://www.liberafolio.org/ http://esperanto-ondo.ru/ http://facila.org/ http://www.esperanto-sumoo.strefa.pl/libroj.html http://www.gutenberg.org/files/24525/24525-h/24525-h.htm http://esperanto.net/literaturo/noveloj/index.html http://lingvakritiko.com/ Listening http://claudepiron.free.fr/enregistrements.htm http://members.aon.at/aldone/retradio/ http://esperanto.cri.cn/ http://pola-retradio.org/ http://esperanto-tv.com/vinilkosmo http://sezonoj.podfm.ru/esperanto/

The lifeprint.com site is good for ASL. My daughter used it for a while. Love the language. Would love to study it more seriously someday.

@sillylucy and @Trellum, if either of you want to start a thread for your languages, I would certainly follow them. I am terribly interested in both your languages.

I loved српски, so much so when I learned how easy genitive plural is in Serbian!

I studied Slovene years ago. Unfortunately, I started with the Teach Yourself, which was horrible.

Parts of it are phonetic. I recommend highly the book Middle Egyptian by James P Allen.

I studied Lakota for about a month years ago. Loved it. Would love to study it again someday.