i am now officially a bengals fan.

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i have subscribed to arcamax's free "spanish word of the day presented by onlingo" service and i am proud to say i am learning spanish at the incredibly painstaking rate of one word at a time. it will probably take many years, but it's way cheaper than <snark> rosetta stone version four totale </snark> npr's always going on about. you know, for a station that doesn't run commercials, npr runs a lot of commercials. anyways, this is not <snark> rosetta stone version four totale </snark>, this is onlingo which i think falls somewheres between ondasher and oncomet, but i could be wrong there.

i am going to share with you two of my recent spanish lessons. hay, your welcomed!

¿cuál? - which?
¿cuál es la capital de guatemala?
what is the capital of guatemala?

okay, firstly "¿" and "?" are patently punctuation, not letters, and i know that spanish is different than english in many ways, but no, their words do not have punctuation built in, so how the hoopdeehoo am i supposed to learn my WORD of the day if onlingo is going to merrily throw down punctuation and pretend it's part of the word. c'mon! also, it would be a really big help if they would decide on the definition before the lesson. which? what? ¿cuál one is it?

zapatos, los - shoes
en muchas casas japoneses, hay que quitarse los zapatos.
in many japanese homes, you have to take off your shoes.

that one is pretty straightforward but maybe not too easy to remember, so i'll give you this tip i created. okay, it goes like this, think of a japanese house and then remember: in japan, even frank zappa toes show. okay, i hear what you are saying. you are saying "shouldn't that be frank zappa'S toes?" and i am here to tell you, no because we are not talking about frank zappa's own specific toes. haha! don't be silly. we are talking about toes that are like those of frank zappa, so that if you have these type of toes and you are in japan with your shoes off, someone would say to you, "wow, you have some frank zappa toes there, buddy!" and you would be all, "hey now...." because everyone knows ol' frank got da monkey toe.

this concludes today's spanish lesson.