I was thinking of broadening my horizon's and taking some kind of class that would have the potential of being useful at some point in my life (unlike a trigonometry class).

I was thinking of Sign Language as my first choice. Where would I use it though? I could get some deaf tenants and then see if they say anything bad right in front of me...

I took 3 years of spanish in high school (that was a zillion years ago) so I thought I could take a few more and el-speeko to some of my tenants, or at least figure out what the hell it is that they are saying about me.

Anyone have any other idea's? there is a local community college around me, a branch of Penn State and some kind of center that has a bunch of classes from a bunch of different universities.

 

No language is going to be as useful on a daily basis as Spanish. It also happens to be a comparitively easy language to learn, due to the subject-verb orientation. Other languages which use a different grammatical structure will be significantly more difficult to learn, and even more difficult to remember.

Sign language will be fairly easy to pick up, many of the signs are characteristic of motions that you would associate with that word. For instance water is simply, making a "W" with the middle 3 fingers on your right hand and tapping your lips with the side of your pointer finger.

I've had a year of Latin, 6 years of french, a year of Spanish and four years of American Sign Language. Learning a language is simple, retaining a language is very different.

Immersion is by far the best technique, if you want to learn fast and retain the knowledge, buy a plane ticket and drop yourself in the middle of that culture.

 

why dont you learn sign language as well as spanish...sign language is not that hard...

by the way hablar would be the verb to speak

and i think you were looking for hablo instead of el speeko...looks like you have a lot of work ahead of you

by the way i havent taken spanish since HS either but i think you took HS 20-30 yrs before me!

 

I have a friend who signs for a living: she's an interpreter for the IRS. She makes very good money at it.

One nice thing about sign language is that, because it has no apostrophes, it naturally has no superfluous ones. (idea's?)

 

 

i think a useful class for you would be "high tech surveilence and spying 101". this way you'll know what your tenants are saying about you 24/7.

 

If you wanna frutstrate yourself, there's always taking up a musical instrument.

 

Take an art class. Nude models.

 

Driving lessons?

 

Cooking.


Seriously. If I wanted to take an adult education class I would go to one of the many culinary classes and learn to make good food.

As far as languages go, unless you use them frequently you lose what you learned. I took four years of college german and about the only thing I remember is

"Miene mutter sind so gross wie ein flugzuegtrager."