Ok, so the race is on. I let my Mom borrow my German CD’s because I am so busy with the condo right now. With that in mind, it seems to make sense to focus on Spanish for the time being. I read a bit of news on news.google.es today, but it’s kind of tricky, especially because journalists typically seem to try to use big words to sound more sophisticated. I found an article on the Firefox 2.0 release, which was actually pretty easy to read, since I am a nerd and interested in nerdy things. With that in mind, I figured I would pursue some nerd subjects, then it came to me. I spend hours reading Wikipedia articles, so I might as well read them in Spanish. I’m not sure how that’ll work out, but I’m giving it a try. By the way, if you are gonna pursue anything like this, I highly recommend using Firefox with a translator extension, it makes things SO much easier. Also, try to absorb the words instead of just translating and moving on.

I got to thinking about it, and I think my main problem with Spanish is a lack of vocabulary. I know how to say a bunch of stuff, but I always run into stuff I don’t know. So, I looked it up and found this article talking about number of words. It sounds like if you knew about 20,000 words, you would have a pretty good conversational vocabulary. So, say you learned 10 words a day for a year…but, give yourself some days off, so say 200 days. That gives you 2,000 words. This is going to take forever, but I think 2,000 words will actually be pretty sizable, and it will probably grow exponentially. Oh well, here are 10 stupid words for today:

• Descargar – to download
• Además – also
• Quizás – perhaps, maybe
• Lanzar – to send, launch (used for football, software, and who knows what else)
• Mejora – improvement
• Herramienta – tool
• Prueba – test
• Sencillo – simple
• Sobremesa – tablecloth or desktop (computer form factor)
• Pestaña – eyelash and I think tab (as in firefox)

That’s it for today. If you are a Spanish speaker, feel free to correct any mistkaes I’ve mad.