Things To Do On Vacation:

By Circe -
Week Four: Things To Start Your New Year's Resolutions With

So you have survived Christmas itself. Congratulations! Now it's time to turn your thoughts to New Year's Resolutions. You need something to do while you lie around digesting the dozen cookies you just ate for "breakfast", and talking about bettering yourself will get your relatives off your back.

How about learning a new language?

Duolingo 
Website | Google Play | iTunes

If you've been hanging around for a while, you know I'm not keen on the Rosetta Stone series of language lessons. (The computer version relies on the premise that all frotzes can be glorked in context, without a lot of the necessary context. I've never taken an in-person class based on them; I assume having a human to elaborate helps.) Duolingo, on the other hand, is overall pretty useful. Their East Asian languages are hit-or-miss, and I have yet to bring up the Hebrew ones to ask the Eccentric about them, but for Western European languages they are pretty consistently useful.

Duolingo has a pretty good selection of languages, including the usual Spanish/German/French spread, but if you want to range a bit farther afield, they also feature some that aren't technically from Earth. If you want to, you can learn High Valyerian or Klingon. They also offer what I found to be a very practical Esperanto course, albeit a very "book" formal Esperanto with a Romance accent.

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