I am currently trying to learn Spanish, at least enough to get me safely to the Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe* and back again. I am aided by a bargain computer program/audio cd set which I purchased tonight at the local used bookstore, along with a delightful Spanish textbook circa 1943 (authored by that pillar of the field, Arthur Romeyn Seymour of Florida State College for Women). The audio CDs were nice, and I discovered that if one relaxes the tongue and moves it closer to the teeth but kind of flat on the palate it is possible to trill one's rs (very exciting). The textbook I have not tried yet, but it looks like it's full of my friends Mr. Grammar and Mrs. Vocabulary. The computer program is very slick (I guess that's the Platinum part) but seems to have been devised by the KGB with the Devil consulting. The activities have no apparent end, no way of telling whether an end exists if one is simply willing to give it enough of your life, and no way of knowing what the connection to any future exercises (should you live to see them) is. It does have a fun thing which compares your pronunciation of the word to the ideal (it turns out my computer has a built in microphone, God bless it). Unfortunately, it's not clear what the comparisons mean or whether this is an unending keeps-going-as-long-as-you're-having-fun thing, or whether some kind of explanation of results and moving on to a new skill is supposed to happen.
I wasn't expecting to feel so much better about my purchase so quickly, but I was bemoaning the loss of $29.98 for the darned thing, and now I see that I paid about 11/20ths of amazon.com's price, so I suppose I could be in more pain. I suppose that what I'm going to have to do is click the "show me how" button, which is too bad since directions are for sucks.
*Hope is in the very beginning stages of springing eternally; if you are of a Newtonian turn you could say it is a nascent curve.
