Still not dead

Current object of interest: trying to learn French via Duolingo. (ysobel, this is at least half your fault. It's because of you that I even knew Duolingo exists.) I'm not anywhere near anything like fluent - Duolingo clocks me at 23%, my vocabulary is still somewhere down in the kindergarten range, and my conjugations are still firmly present tense. But it's fun in a way I didn't expect.

I am much better at reading than I am in interpreting what I hear, much less speaking. I gather this is normal. Or else it's a relic of having been a Classics major, where you barely did the hearing part beyond, like, reading Latin poetry aloud (I can still recite the first line and a half (?) of the Aeneid in the appropriate scansion), and sure as heck weren't expected to speak it.

(Someday, I want to go read things like L'Fantome de la Opera, or Les Miserables, in the original French. I am absolutely sure I am nowhere near that level, but it gives me a goal that's probably more realistic than my other ambition of someday going to Paris and being able to speak to a native without them laughing at my French.)

ETA: In other news, as of two minutes ago, I have my own business cards for the first second time ever! (First time was the Etsy store I helped my mother run.) I have absolutely no idea what to do with them - putting them in with the Halloween candy we hand out is probably not a good idea, right? ;-) But I have them, and they look so nice and official-like.