Amor y pesetas

Y'all might have noticed that little "learn Spanish" button over on the ads bar the last couple days. And if you've been around longer than that, you might also remember JP, who did some awesome guest posting here once upon a time, though at the moment I'm too lazy to go find those posts.



Anyhoo, so JP has up and moved to China, because he doesn't care at all if I ever get to see him again, and he's got a new job teaching people Spanish on the internet with the people in this video. Which is a very noble pursuit, I think, since Spanish is an awesome language and the internet is a great teaching tool and everyone knows that the best way to learn a language is to use it, but if you don't live around a bunch of Spanish speakers and can't afford to travel, then the second best way is to listen and speak it as much as possible, even in a somewhat artificial situation. So! Even though I *do* live in a place where there are a lot of Spanish speakers, I'm still relatively new here and don't have a big social network yet, and race relations being what they are, the people I do know all speak English. But because race relations are what they are, I really want to develop a broader network of friends and acquaintances *and* improve my Spanish (and make sure PK learns it, too), so I've been downloading the SpanishPod broadcasts onto my iPod and trying to remember to listen to them and hopefully I'll start practicing them with PK at some point soon if I can just get him to stop playing stupid computer games for a little bit.

And because I've been listening to the podcasts, and because JP is a friend, and because he and I actually really do think that SpanishPod is a pretty good project, I agreed to put an ad up on my blog in case any of my readers also would like to practice their Spanish. The company also has ChinesePod podcasts in Mandarin, btw (which JP is learning, which is why he went to China in the first place and how he first found out about the company--by using their product). Full disclosure: I get paid if you click on the ad and sign up for a free trial. On the other hand, you don't have to join/pay money in order to listen to or use the podcasts. But I admit that because I am a greedy bitch, I'm not going to put a free link in this post--you'll have to click the button in order to go find out if Spanish/ChinesePod is something you wanna play around with.

(More full disclosure: I first met JP through Bitch co-blogger Ding. More more full disclosure: I'm now sharing ad revenues with Ding and LeBlanc, so they each get paid off every click too.)