It has been a while since my last post due to some personal issues.
Pure laziness.

In parallel to my love/hate relationship with learning Traditional Chinese, I have been studying Spanish for almost two years. Why Spanish? Because my ultimate goal is to dominate the world. In that case, what else is there to do than acquiring language skills? I am on the way to master two of the most spoken languages, English and Chinese. The next logical step is Spanish. I am not sure if it is the most used language next to English and Chinese (Arabic…Arabic…Arabic…), but Spanish does offer the following advantages compared to others.

• Spoken in many countries and regions. The whole Latin America is in your hands! I've heard Brazil speaks something slightly different (Portuguese, probably due to rivalry between Argentine the history), but I had a Brazilian friend who spoke Spanish fluently so I should be fine.
• Close to English. Because many Europeans evolved directly or indirectly from Latin (I didn't have courage to tackle the 'origin'), Spanish shares many words with English – or maybe the other way around. For example, the whole "…tion" nouns in English change into "….cion" in Spanish. Actually, I suspect this similarity works more as a 'hook' to encourage English speakers to study Spanish than as a real advantage for making learning easier, but it is not a bad deal anyway.
• Sounds damn good. It is one of those languages which turns everyday conversations into poems or songs. Sadly, Chinese and Japanese aren't in this category.
• It is the eternal 'next big thing'. People say Spanish is 'the' language that dominates the world after Chinese. Presumably they started saying it 20 years ago, they are still saying it today, and probably 20 years later too. Never mind.

This is running long, so that is it for today. In the next topic, I will look deeper into the frustrations in learning Spanish, the verbs.

P.S. If this entry is going to make it into Google search, then someone who is looking for an entry about the Golden Age might hit this. The picture below might make them even more confused realize the content does not follow what the title suggests.