Friday Five Time

[waitingman]

1. What was a skill you were proud to learn as a kid?
2 languages - French & German. By the time I was 17 I was fluent in both. Not that they've turned out to be as useful as I'd hoped - I haven't been to either country & often lament that I should have learned Mandarin instead...

2. What's something you used to be good at, but can't do any more?
Well, I'm no longer anywhere near as fluent in either French, or German... I also used to be a decent bowler in cricket. Never was much of a batsman though...

3. What's something you haven't done in a long time, but you could pick it right back up again with some practice?
Riding a bicycle... riding a motorbike... swimming a useful distance... &, not to harp on it, speak French & German?!

4. What can you teach others to do?
I can certainly teach/show others what to not do!! I can & have taught guitar, how to drive a manual car, how to 'tune' a television (mostly redundant these days!)... & have recently been showing some people how to set up their Medicare app to show their Covid vaccination 'certificate'

5. What would you like to learn next?
How to easily & properly run my home recording studio so I can record ideas as quickly as they occur to me...

Comments

[paserbyp]

1. Swimming and learned how to swim in four styles which I tried to impress girls on the beach…

2. Many things, for example, I was good goalkeeper in soccer…

3. Riding a bicycle…

4. History, because it’s my main hobby…

5. History, history and another history…

[waitingman]

I started soccer in the midfield, then was relegated to the backs, before ultimately becoming a goalkeeper - which I turned out to be quite good at... certainly better than the whole running & kicking game!!

I like history, because there's rarely anything 'new' to learn... it's just remembering a lot of really good stories

[paserbyp]

I like history, because everyone rewrite history and find out what was done and what was not it’s a big deal to search and understand the roots…

[skullsandink]

Will you be refreshing your French & German?

[waitingman]

It's on the list of things I'd like to do when I have time... which I never have, it seems... to go back to university, or even just a college & bring myself back up to speed in both. these days, I can reel off long phrases, or an impressive stream of swearing, but a lot of the vocabulary is gone & I've lost the 'ear' for the accents, which can make German or French films harder to understand (without subtitles) than I expect

What I'd really like to do, is fly into Paris, or Berlin & to just immerse myself in the place, in a kind of sink-or-swim approach to becoming necessarily fluent without winding up homeless, or starving to death