Tag Archives: e-audiobooks

New Year New Language?

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Have you ever made it your New Year’s Resolution to learn a new language? I speak 3 languages: 2 fluently (English and French) and one considerably less fluently (German). During the pandemic, I started work on a fourth language, but it was Klingon, and once the world started up again, it fell by the wayside.

Illustration of a Klingon bat'leth (weapon from Star Trek).

(For now: I have EVERY INTENTION of picking it back up again in the future. Is it useful? No. Is it suuuuuper fun to be able to say, “I’m learning Klingon?” HIja′!) Learning a language is hard. Learning a language as an adult is very hard.

Kids and grown ups learn in very different ways. Kids’ brains are like information sponges. Adult brains are more rigid: always trying to save energy by reusing what they already know. If we grew up here in Canada (which I didn’t but that’s beside the point for the moment), we probably learned French as a second (or third) language in school.  That’s important: we learned French as kids, and we probably stopped using it just as soon as we weren’t being forced to take it anymore.

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My Quick & Easy Guide to Curing Housework Boredom

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If you’re anything like me, there’s always one thing that you end up dreading throughout your week: the ever-growing mountain of household chores. Whether it’s the dishes staring at you judgmentally from the sink or the endless piles of laundry, it’s just always there and it’s tough to find any fun in it. It’s why it usually stays that way, at least until Mount Housework decides it’s time to have its weekly avalanche. Plus, add in either a move or a renovation like I am next month, and it just makes things worse.

A-black-and-white-cartoon-of-a-cat-sitting-in-a-chair-with-headphones-on

I sometimes try to fill the time with music, but you need to be in the right sort of mood to listen to it. Plus, after the tenth time of having a verbal struggle with Google Home where it’s determined to send you to the abyss of YouTube’s repository for strange cover bands, you end up wanting to listen to anything but. That’s where I found myself when I stumbled upon the wonderful world of podcasts (ironically, thanks to YouTube. Sometimes the algorithm knows what it’s doing).

The great thing about podcasts is you can take them pretty much anywhere no matter what you’re doing, so long as you have a phone and some headphones (hooray for mobile entertainment!). There’s such a wide range of podcasts too, from self-help to science lessons to my personal favorite, the fiction stories. I think there’s something to be said about how full circle these kinds of podcasts are, taking so much from radio theatre from the 1920s. But that’s another blog post for another time. I’m here to introduce you to my go-to for making housework anything but a pain and a bore: the fun world of aural storytelling.  

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