In 2006 I actually made some progress towards learning French. For a while I was good enough to read political stories in Newspapers and not to do too horribly with hotel staff and restaurants.
But after my kids were born I had to cut out a number of things (don't regret it for a second!). But now that Thomas is 4 and Audrey is 2 they are a little bit more self-sustaining, and I can actually work on stuff while watching them. So I realized for this year's resolution I could commit to something that would take advantage of the new time.
For the last few weeks I've been unclear what this would be, but today it was immediately clear after I discovered THIS AWESOME WEB SITE, which is organized by a research group at École Normale Supérieure.
It's a weird de ja vu because from what I can get of the publications and presentations, something similar to my own increasing intersection of analytic (check out the papers on David Lewis at the Atelier) and continental philosophy. Not only that, but in addition it is clear that some of the participants see this intersection, like me, as leading of necessity to a serious study of Speculative Realism and Object Oriented Ontology. Man I will learn a lot from these people as I get much further up to speed on the language.
I'm completely hyped about this, and I really do think (without sacrificing writing) that within a year and a half I can get my French good enough to read the materials on the web site. Anyhow that's my New Years Resolution.
In any case, if you read French, then Joe Bob says to check it out! If you don't, it's yet another strong argument for learning the language.
[Footnote: This New Years Resolution actually ties to my children too. There's a decent chance that we will get them in to a public French Language immersion school (one of the best reasons to live in Louisiana), which will be an issue for Thomas next year. It will be awesome to do this with them. Since kids learn languages so quickly, it is very much to my and their advantage to get even more of a head start this year.]
