Mluvíte česky?

My sister went to Czech in October 2011 (around the time of the euro crisis), and at the time I gathered together some links on learning Czech. Who knows what value it has now, but I enjoy putting together a linkblogpost from time to time.

Czech was really fun the first time around that I studied it a decade and a half ago. It has such a great, transparent Latin-alphabet writing system, for one thing. A case system was kind of strange for an English speaker, but it's pretty usual for an Indo-European language. More recently I have advocated for spaced repetition systems (electronic flashcards) like Anki for memorizing vocabulary lists.

First you have to find a good dictionary, like Slovnik (tho I suspect too many people will just rely on Google Translate). I always point to some regular sources, like the Wikipedia entry and Omniglot, although Omniglot has significantly embiggened its catalogue of Czech phrases recordings. BBC Languages QuickFix has a few nice MP3s if you just want some basic essential Czech phrases. The FSI language courses like Czech FAST are often a great free resource, and a country's national broadcaster also often puts out free courses. Radio Praha, the Czech public international radio broadcaster, has the long-running MP3 segment SoundCzech, on Czech phrases through song lyrics. I also love this precious little Web site, the Little Czech Primer.

There are plenty of other Web sites that have spottier information, mostly phrases and commentary: Digital Dialects, czech-language.ca, bohemica.com, Czech-American television lessons (which worked on Internet Explorer on Windows), phrases and idioms. Czech has an interesting system of name days.

And maybe one day I'll get enough Czech to play tarocky. Hodně štěstí!

Šlapeto performs some "Staropražské písničky" (old Prague songs and pub songs). Tady je to...

Blog lifecycles

It's sometimes frustrating that 95% of blogs are abandoned after their authors lose interest:

The home run scenario for blogging is incredibly alluring -- thousands of ravenous fans fawning over your next thought-provoking or comedic masterpiece -- but time and time again I fail to meet these expectations or manage them more appropriately. I enter the same cycle each time:

Blog Lifecycle
1) Euphoric moment of inspiration
2) Pseudo-maniacal and self-indulgent perusing of domains
3) Careful consideration of theme and design
4) The inaugural post - "Hello world!"
5) The 2-4 post honeymoon phase
6) Waning and changing interests
7) Feelings of desperation and apathy from low engagement
8) Inevitable abandonment :(

It turns out that this cycle may not be uncommon. Surveys have shown that 95% of blogs are abandoned within 120 days and 60-80% of them abandoned within the first month.

Panglott's Garden has been running for some two and a half years, mostly because I think of it as an infrequently- and irregularly-published public commonplace book of interest to few, more than a blog of the Twitter Age.

Lists of 2009

I enjoy the "best of" lists we get at the end of every year; it's a great time to recharge my DVD queue, at the least. 2009 is several months into the past by now, but at least we're past the "Hurt Locker" v. "Avatar" awards chatter: The Academy Awards were last weekend, but the Pulitzer Prizes for 2010 are coming up (April 12).

LEO's December 30,2009 issue had some top five lists for film and music. Time had a list of lists, as did Nerve, but those are nothing to compare with the exhaustive Lists: 2009 and the recap.

There's also the best cycling blogs of 2009 and even more "best movie" lists of 2009 and the 2000s.