A Feast For Language Geeks

My brother just gave me a great present for ‘Eid: he sent me a link to the Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center’s (DLIFLC) Language Survival Kits. It’s unsurprisingly a little heavy on the vocabulary necessary/useful for foreign occupants (yay, USA!) … but it’s still a lot of fun. 😀

They provide the same set of sentences in several dozen languages with translations, transliterations and native writing. To top it off they have audio samples for unfamiliar sounds in each language and with a native speaker saying the sentences out loud and then saying them slow in order for you to repeat them … awesome! 😀

Interesting omissions from the list are German and South Korean, while the list even contains separate entries for several regional dialects of Arabic, Spanish, Portuguese, Pashto, etc. … o.O

Summarizing the NSA Surveillance Program

Summarizing the NSA surveillance program:

Why is this secret?
We had a hunch, you wouldn’t like it.

What did it accomplish?
Nothing yet, we are still waiting for the big coup, that will silence all critics.

How much does it cost?
We don’t know exactly, you know, secret budgets and stuff. Probably somewhere in the billions.

This is basically the confirmation of the things I wrote over a year ago (German).