To all my American readers, have a happy Thanksgiving!  Let’s take time out to count our blessings, however abundant or meager, and let’s enjoy our time with friends and family, while consuming a few birds in the process

(FYI — bucking convention, as the FL doctor’s lovely wife is adamant about not wanting to ever have to roast a turkey, our own tradition is to make Chinese Hotpot…  To each their own…)

Via CNN:

With the boom in social media, it makes sense that learning a language online would take on a Facebook-like component. My general impression is that these are great ways to exchange languages with people all over the world, but you might not always get helpful feedback.

With Livemocha, you get to learn the language of your choice while helping others who want to speak your native tongue. Once you complete a structured lesson, you submit your own writing and audio recordings to other users for feedback. Reading a sentence aloud and then sending my recording off was pretty intimidating, but I got a response within 10 minutes from a girl in Russia who gave it five stars and a “Good!!” — although she was surely too kind.

Britons love to travel to exotic destinations, but don’t expect them to speak the local lingo, a new study reveals.The survey by online travel service travelsupermarket.com showed that more than half of Brits going abroad on holiday refuse to embrace local languages.

More than one in 10 of the 2,012 respondents said that they felt there was no point in learning foreign languages as everyone speaks English anyway.

But protecting culture is not only about objects. In a time of Twitter and other quick communication, tribes are seeking a deeper connection to themselves, an appreciation of culture, the very DNA of who they are. That connection often starts with language.

Of the 54 languages identified in the Pacific Northwest, many verge on extinction. Only one speaker of the Wasco language is still living. Forty speakers of Nez Perce remain. Linguist predict that within two or three generations, no one will speak these languages.