For a variety of reasons, I've come to the decision that I should learn how to speak Polish. I know a crapload of computer languages, of course: Perl, Java, Ruby, Bash, Tcl, Logo. But English is the only thing I can speak, even after 3 years of floudering in highschool French and a year of 8am university Latin courses.

It's time to learn another human language.

Sure, you can speak French and sound sexy. But even simply pretending to speak French is enough to accomplish that. Everyone's 4-year-old speaks Spanish fluently these days, and I simply don't need to be shown up by a 3-foot-tall crumb muncher. That's no good for the ego.

So, Polish it is.

I live in a small mountain town and figured correctly that our bookstore wouldn't have any useful Polish courses on CD. Thanks to the zippy folks at Amazon, and my seemingly unending free trial of their Prime cheap overnight service, I possess the first 10 lessons of the Pimsleur system.

For those of you who don't know (I didn't), Pimsleur is purely an audio/spoken system. There's nothing to read. The Polish speaker on the CD works backwards through sounding out words and there is just enough repetition to learn while keeping it all interesting.

So far, I can say

• Excuse me!
• Do you speak English?
• Are you an American?
• I understand a little Polish.

The package of 5 CDs is nice enough. I quickly ripped them to iTunes so I could drop them on the iPod. The CDDB is just whacked when it comes to the Pimsleur CDs, be warned.

Then, for the hell of it, I Googled for Polish resources in my town.

Lo and Behold! The local vocational college, about a mile away, has a Polish class starting next week. I'm heading back to school!