A day with fast internet

I drove into town (a phrase that makes my friends laugh at me because I'm only 15 minutes away from the city, but it seems like I live hours from civilization from how I talk) in order to visit an internet cafe. I had no real purpose - thinking I might delve more into grad schools. Upon arriving at the coffee shop with its glorious wifi I remembered I still needed to download the pdf accompaniment for the Mission Europe podcasts I was raving about earlier.

Good thing I downloaded them. They're officially the coolest things ever. If I was teaching a Polish language class, I would use these for sure. They're so much fun with pictures and color and the words in Polish (but with a bilingual dictionary in the back) and little grammar break out boxes! I'm completely obsessed with it and will most likely be spending my entire evening playing with them.

Which is actually a problem, given the fact that I also received an e-mail asking me where my final report for my grant to Dublin is... despite the fact that I e-mailed her a month ago asking her if she received it. Which means, I need to spiff it up and resend it.

One of my language partners on LiveMocha suggested his website to me. It's very busy and unorganized, which are downsides. However, the website does have some cool features. On the dictionary page (I'll have to do another post on a good Polish-English dictionary online. I've had some real problems when trying do to do translations.) there is the sweetest text-to-speech tool. It looks like it's embedded, and I'm not sure who to give real credit to for this awesome feature. I know tools such as this are out there for French, but because I always found French so easy to pronounce, I never explored them. This Polish one is so useful! Granted, with these online things you get out of it what you put in. So proper spelling and use of the correct accent marks is essential!

The lessons page of his website is a joke. It looks like someone just pulled in random videos from YouTube about Polish. The grammar section is equally unhelpful. It just has a pdf of a book someone wrote about Polish grammar. I've seen the same information in more pleasing formats elsewhere online. But, for that sort of thing, I prefer hard copy text. There are some flashcards that aren't terrible, but, yet again, I'd prefer to go to the original site than suffer through the original interface. It's a great compilation of materials, but there's too much going on and the format is hard to focus on, unfortunately.