Free Rice

It all started with The Hunger Site and it seems there are more and more of those sites where you just have to click to help end world hunger or do some other good deed. FreeRice is another one of those but it adds an interesting twist: your clicks are based on a vocabulary game and they only count if you get the meaning of the words right. For every 3 correct answers, your vocab level goes up one and for every mistake it goes down one. The higher the level, the more difficult are the words you are given. The game is dead simple but very, very addictive and is also a great way to improve your vocabulary. So give it a go and see what level you can reach: the maximum is 50 and they reckon very few people go past 48.

Word of the Day

Dictionary.com's word of the day is potboiler. No, I didn't know it either. There you go, you learn something new every day.

Linguistic Gymnastics

If you ever want to learn Serbian, the good news is that it is a phonetic language: if you can read it, you can speak it and vice versa. The bad news is that is can be written using either the Latin or the Cyrillic alphabet so you may see signs in both scripts. For instance, Thank you can be written Hvala or Хвала. It can get very confusing when you have a map that uses the Latin alphabet but the street signs are all in Cyrillic. Then the even worse news is that Serbian extends both alphabets with extra letters that don't exist in the standard versions of either, such as Đ in the Latin script or Љ in the Cyrillic one. And then comes the practical question: what dictionary order is used? The Latin and Cyrillic alphabets have different dictionary orders so does it mean that when you buy a dictionary, the order the words are in depends on the alphabet it is published in? I'm not sure I want to know the answer.