Happy New Year, 新年快乐, 明けましておめでとうございます…

Happy New Year to all my readers! I hope 2009 has gotten off to a good start for everyone. 2008 was a rather bad year for my partner and I (we had several deaths in the family) so here’s hoping that 2009 is a much more pleasant and happy year. So far so good…

We had a great Christmas and New Year and really enjoyed our time off from work. My mother was here until early this morning and I’m glad I was able to take off so many days from work and do things with her (lots of shopping and sightseeing!). She’s now back in Gibraltar so I guess I can get back to blogging and looking forward to her next visit, whenever that may be.

Some news/update/thoughts :

• iKnow! has added some Mandarin courses to its ever-growing selection of language courses. The courses are aimed at intermediate/upper-intermediate students and seem to be only available in traditional Chinese. Nevertheless, they look pretty good and jam-packed with useful vocabulary and example sentences. A special thanks to unzum for bringing these new courses to my attention!
• I watched the film adaptation of The Kite Runner during the Christmas break and enjoyed listening to spoken Dari (which is closely related to Persian). I don’t have any immediate plans to learn the language but I did do a little research and came across this fantastic Dari resource : LearnDari.Net. You can find video lessons (with transcripts) here.
• I haven’t made any New Year’s resolutions yet though I have been giving some thought to my language learning objectives and wishes for 2009. I find it very hard to set myself concrete goals so I’ll probably settle for general goals, like my fellow language blogger Geoffrey Barto.
• I’ve added a few more language blogs to my blogroll, including Street-Smart Language Learning and John Biesnecker’s blog. If there are any language learning blogs you feel I’ve overlooked and should add to my blogroll, then feel free to leave a comment with links to them!
• A silly observation but I think the warning slips inside Kinder Surprise eggs are fantastic for language nerds such as myself. Not only do they give warnings about the small parts in every major European language, they also give warnings in Georgian, Armenian, Azeri, Chinese (traditional and simplified) and Arabic!

That’s all for now. It’s time for me to go and give some real thought to my language learning resolutions for 2009.