should i learn italian or german? they're both useful for me, and in the long run i would of course want to have both, so in some senses it doesn't matter quite which i do now, but this is a busy year and i would like to manage my time well, especially since i also want to learn malay. i pulled up some german and italian grammars online to get an idea of each. i haven't worked with a modern language for a very long time, so i'm not terribly confident at all. i may be getting slightly tired of declension tables (my memory gets worse every day - although the counterargument is - in that case do the german now before you get older!) and i also have no experience with germanic languages (other than one year of anglo-saxon) so this is a bit of a challenge. italian: it's a romance language and i've got the latin. there is something to be said for a language i can learn fairly quickly. if i did italian in a year i would have the italian. if i did german i'm rather afraid that i wouldn't have sufficient german by the end of the year and still i wouldn't have the italian. but then if italian were indeed easier i could do it during term time when i'm teaching.

i asked julian if i should do italian or german. german, he said without hesitation. i like german food better. when i asked poach last night she was aghast that julian could think german food preferable to italian. (poach: italian cooking uses really fresh ingredients! me: right, good, you can be a teochew!) she also said she couldn't see me learning german (poach: it's a language for Js!) but when i said well then you teach me italian she said she wouldn't. and su-lin claims not to remember any italian she learned in uni. (humbug! i cry!) so how? addy, i expect, would be partial to italian, yvonne probably german? the boys, with the exception of yeen teck (who has malay and french), are foreign-language illiterate. (very distressing. and very unnatural. why is this so? is this peculiar to our year? darryl seems to do very well with japanese and french and cantonese though.)