Somewhere in my busy schedule I apparently managed to find time to bust out my rusty language skills, dust them off, and do this video in Spanish. Here's the original video in case you missed it when it was first released. My accent is muy bueno, don't you think?In high school, I switched from Spanish to German. Here's a German video. I have to say that the pitch of my voice is a bit higher than usual.
And I even dabbled a little in French at community college one summer during high school. Here's a French video.
My memory must be fading with age. I don't recall learning to speak Mandarin, Korean, Russian, and Portuguese, but apparently I did. The proof is right there on the Internet, and we all know that everything on the Internet is true.
Okay, so the speakers in those videos are obviously not me. But I have to say that it's cool to see (and hear) that my work (not exactly War and Peace I admit) has been translated into numerous languages. [ Full disclosure: Some of the slides in videos were created by my talented co-workers. ]
For me, being translated is especially cool because one of my majors in college was Linguistics. I've long been fascinated by languages and enjoy the opportunities I get to practice (a.k.a. "mangle") them when I travel. I don't speak any language (with the possible exception of English) particularly well, but I've always felt that the locals give me credit for trying (a.k.a. "butchering").
My other major in college was Computer & Information Science. CIS + Linguistics is a big factor behind the languages that I do "speak" well:
C, Bourne shell, Korn shell, BASH, Csh, Perl (Tk and DBI), PHP, CGI, HTML, Java, ASP,
SQL, TCL, Expect, sed, awk, Visual Basic, PowerShell, PowerCLI, Orchestrator, Javascript, ActionScript,
SwishScript, and x86 assembly.
Time to pick up one more language: Polish. I'm doing a mileage to Warsaw run in December. :-)
