Daily Blague

J'allais lire un chapitre de La télé - euh, I was going to read a chapter of La télévision when I discovered that JR has undertaken a new blogue, Mnémoglyphes. I like the playfulness of the name itself, and I refuse to translate it other than as Mnemoglyphes, dropping only the accent aigu. "Nemogliffs" - Greek for "marks of memory," or somesuch. Oh, crikey, there I've gone and translated the new blog's name into something that sounds out of a cemetery. Alors, that's why there's Greek!

Near the start, JR talks of the sentimental journey that he's taking, back to his first Blogger blog.

Mais c'est solide, autant que ça l'était quand j'ai débuté avec eux en 2001 et j'ai la nostalgie de ces premiers temps (un peu).

[But it's sturdy, just as it was when I began using it in 2001 - and I'm feeling nostalgic for those early days (a bit).]

It's yet another reminder that the world in which I spend my days did not exist ten years ago. There were rudimentary precursors of blogs, but even HTML was still in flux.

Although it is not taught anymore, "Reading French" - or "German" or "Chinese" - used to be a respectable academic course. It was designed to equip scholars to read literature written in a language that they would never speak. This was particularly useful to Americans, so many of whom never leave the country. It still would be. Learning to read a language fluently is infinitely easier than learning how to speak it - just as it's much easier to learn to read than it is to learn to write (how soon we forget). Let this entry be a small encouragement to anyone who regrets having let her high-school French fade away. With the help of a nice, fat dico - one that lays out a lot of idioms and prepositional phrases - immense and satisfying progress can be made.

Does anyone know of any good Italian blogs? Mnemoglifi, per esempio?