Surfed into a killer PDF of the most pertinent science vocabulary in Polish and English. Very useful!

Wow! While researching Quizlet on Free Language, I found an amazing stack of vocabulary cards specifically for preparing for the HSK examination. Currently there are four stacks with a collective total of over 8,700 terms with definition, characters and pinyin!

Chinese HSK A
Chinese HSK B
Chinese HSK C
Chinese HSK D

If you want to be an accredited Chinese user, you can work at it and take the test.

The Hànyǔ Shuǐpíng Kǎoshì (simplified Chinese: 汉语水平考试; traditional Chinese: 漢語水平考試), abbreviated as HSK, is the People's Republic of China's only standardized test of Standard Mandarin Chinese proficiency for non-native speakers, namely foreign students, overseas Chinese, and members of ethnic minority groups in China. It is also known as the "Chinese Proficiency Test" and the "Chinese TOEFL."

Read more about Hànyǔ Shuǐpíng Kǎoshì on Wikipedia.

I do not endeavor to learn every foreign language that I embrace to the point of being able to give a dissertation on a complex subject or boast an immense and scholarly vocabulary. What I am interested in is communicating with other people, understanding them, making them laugh, sharing thoughts and ideas, learning from them and having them somehow benefit from their interactions with me. En bref, an exchange.

It is the ability to communicate with the world, one person at a time, that propels me to dive into the next set of sound sequences and decode them.

That is part of what makes me a freestyle language learner. I don't mind neglecting my French or Spanish (letting them get a little rusty) in order to dedicate time to becoming conversational in Chinese or Russian.

I say conversational (or conversationally fluent) because that's what I'm all about: conversations. Of course, I also love to read and research in other languages, and I will always make a concerted effort to learn their writing systems, but my main focus remains the person in front of me. Or perhaps the group with whom I am enjoying a meal or a coffee or a beer. I want to create sparks where darkness exists.

Another motivation when it comes to learning languages is stretching and expanding my mind linguistically and culturally; learning new ways to express myself and the world around me. I am at the center of my own Universe, and in learning myriad ways to ingest, digest and express where I am and what I am up to, I become more powerful inside of myself. In doing this, I become more aware by developing a "meta-understanding" of the world in which I exist.

Learning to understand and be understood in foreign languages has allowed me to explore and appreciate more things and meet and greet more people in life. As they might say in German, it has expanded my Weltenschauung.

I have often heard that "language is power". I know this to be a fact. Power, as I understand it in this context, refers both to pure information and to the ability to extend myself in a broader network. In learning to communicate in a multiplicity of tongues, I consciously place myself where most others are not; I intentionally empower my human form to give and receive a wider range of thoughts, ideas, cultural patterns, literature, art, music... You name it, and I'd love to learn to say it.

I have know about the Urban Dictionary for a while now, but I happened across it yesterday while looking for definitions of eurotrash, of all things. (I will soon be eurotrash of the best variety). There are loads of varied, interesting and humorous definitions for this term.

The idea behind the Urban Dictionary is simple: users create terms and define them; then other users come along and vote on the validity of the term and how it's defined.

The result is a collective dictionary with various terms for loads of slang words and expressions, including those hot off the street. Some of the terms are vulgar, but most aren't. And there are loads of new terms to discover. It is fun to poke around and see what kind of freestyle language is happening throughout the (mostly US) English-speaking world. Here are several I ran across: collateral misinformation, terrorist voting and expiration dating.

People are good with melding language to their needs, and English is a particularly promiscuous language, in my humble opinion. It flaunts foreign terms left and right, makes nouns into verbs and verbs into nouns and so on. English is a very selfless language, in this respect. It absorbs, morphs, much like a chameleon. Freestyle English - check it out at Urban Dictionary.

FYI: If this article interests you, I wrote about another take on this type of freestyle English use the other day: Verbotomy.com Community for Truly Freestyle English Language Verbiage