Buenos días, amigas.  Otra semana, otra canción…  ¡”Ojalá”, de Paty Cantú!

Canción de la semana

We’ve been sharing a lot of songs from Ms. Cantú recently (well, within the past several posts, at least), and I honestly don’t see any reason to stop.  Esta chica is one phenomenal talent, and I love that I can pick up on her lyrics well enough to understand many of them.  (I have a harder time comprehending what Elton John’s singing, and he’s supposedly recording in English.)

This is another of her sad-but-beautiful ballads from her Corazón Bipolar album (originally).  I love the way her voice builds from a sweet, tender almost-whisper at the beginning to…  Well, just listen and try to describe it as she begins the coro…

“¡Contigo no, no soy quien soy!”  (I dare you not to tear up a bit.)

Coursera

Meanwhile, on the training front, I have been naughty about my Duolingo practice.  To be honest, I got a little bitter about it.  I had a more-than-60-day streak going, and I fell asleep in my chair on evening after a miserably long day — not that any day’s not miserably long since February 2016 — and ended up waking just past midnight.  Since there’s no mercy in the high-stakes game of Duolingo “streaks”, I was bumped back to zero!

Anyway, no hard feelings about that, really.  I’ll get back to Duolingo, I’m sure, and hopefully Rocket Spanish (which is still my favorite training source), but I discovered a pleasant and useful diversion recently on Coursera.org, and my wife and I decided to give it a try.  Overall, we were pleased.  Pleased with the instruction, anyway.

The course is set up so that you can audit it, if you’re not needing a grade.  So, you get the full benefit of the audio lessons, the exercises, the mid-week quizzes, etc.  It’s a lot of fun, and pretty effective if taken seriously.  However, at the end of each week is a final quiz, and being able to submit that requires that one purchase the course, whether or not she wants credit.  The only issue I have with that is that there’s no way to tell whether you answered the questions correctly — not without getting some outside help from resources like SpanishDict, etc.

I still highly recommend the course.  There are actually 5 of them, and we — mi esposa y yo — begin the 2nd course next week.  Will let you know how it goes.  And with that….

¡Hasta luego, amigas!