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This post is not part of my Biblefeed series of posts, but it is very much related. For the Biblefeed project, I was hoping to consume this web service in order to get the data I need to make the project work. The web service appears to be a SOAP web service written in .Net.

This post was originally posted on Babelhut.

This past Christmas, I received Huevos verdes con jamón, which is the Spanish translation of Green Eggs and Ham by Dr. Seuss. I’ve read the book a few times now, but I just read it again, this time adding quite a bit to my SRS as I went. By total coincidence, this post is in time for Dr. Seuss’s birthday.

This is the second post relating to the BibleFeed Project. If you haven’t yet, you may want to read the first post.

This post was originally posted on Babelhut.

I’ve been trying to improve my listening skills in Spanish. So far I’m terrible at it but I’m picking up more words the longer I listen. I’ve discovered part of the reason I have difficulty understanding words is because Spanish speakers like to compress their words together when consecutive words end and begin with a vowel sound.

This post was originally posted on Babelhut.

Photo by [nati]

One of the great challenges of learning a new language is immersing yourself in the new language enough so that you can almost absorb it through osmosis . In addition to putting index cards up around your house, setting up your mobile phone and your computer in your target language, watching movies in your new language, or installing a new shower curtain, you can also listen to music in the language you are learning.

This post was originally posted on Babelhut.

It is said that the best way to learn a foreign language is through total immersion. So why should your shower be any different? Someone who was Christmas shopping for me found this wonderful shower curtain, which contains 250 Spanish words and their English definitions. It’s also available in French.

This post was originally posted on Babelhut.

While celebrating my youngest son’s birthday earlier this week, I was enjoying a can of my favorite drink from México: Del Valle Néctar de Guayaba de concentrado (guava juice nectar from concentrate) when I realized I had just found the source for my next Frases en Español post! Conveniently the text on the can is bilingual so I did not need to do the translation myself, although I try not to look at the English text normally.

This post was originally posted on Babelhut.

I recently discovered that I could switch my phone’s display language from English to Spanish, and in doing so I was blown away by the new vocabulary that I hadn’t seen elsewhere. This, along with an excellent series of posts from Ramses, has inspired me to help others by sharing what I have learned.

This post was originally posted on Babelhut.

I need to make a confession. Over the past month or two, I’ve not been studying Spanish or any other language as I should. I found myself neglecting my SRS for up to a couple of weeks at a time. I was not studying any new material. I was not playing My Spanish Coach on my Nintendo DS and I was not listening to any of the Spanish podcasts that I had subscribed to. I was not watching Spanish television and I was not practicing speaking and listening with my Spanish-speaking friends.

This post was originally posted on Babelhut.

As I mentioned at the end of my article, Setting up a Spanish keyboard in Windows Vista , I am primarily a user of Linux and the KDE desktop environment. In an small effort to immerse myself in a little more Spanish, I changed my desktop from English to Spanish. To do this, I opened the KDE Control Center. Under “Regional & Accessibility” I selected “Country/Region & Language.” I added Spanish to the list of languages, and made sure it was at the top of the list. After clicking on “Apply,” the new settings only apply to programs that start after the change. So in order to make the whole desktop in Spanish, I had to logoff and log back in.