These are a few of my favourite things

My friend Jenny who lives in England has been sick with ME for 9 years. She recently posted a list of her favourite things on her blog and asked her friends to do the same on December 1st to bring a smile to her face on a dark day (9 years since she first became ill).

These are a few of my favourite things (in no particular order):

• food of most kinds, especially coffee & cake/pastries, hearty Italian food, deliciously flavoursome Thai or Indian food, icecream or gelato, fresh sweet pineapple, juicy peaches, champagne

• singing harmonies
• reading the Bible with someone and learning together from it
• exploring new places when travelling 
• the beach (rockpools, reading on the beach, walking on the beach at low tide, swimming when the surf is gentle)

• summer evenings spent outside with friends and a summery drink
• observing language patterns and playing language games
• getting packages and handwritten letters in the mail
• listening to singable music while baking - especially at Christmas time, baking mince pies or shortbread while listening to and singing along with classic Christmas carols (A Carnegie Hall Christmas has been my favourite for a long time)

What people are saying about language

There are some big questions that I'm thinking about at the moment and want to start writing about soon, but need to do a bit more reading. So today I was thinking I should find out what other language blogs are out there and what kinds of things they’re on about. Language is a broad topic, after all, so blogs about language could (and do) include funny ones about Chinglish as well as more serious ones about language teaching/learning resources.

There is even a ‘World Top 100’ competition of language blogs run by bab.la – you can see the 2011 top 100 list here. The list is mainly populated by blogs about language learning and teaching, translation, and language humour. Two that caught my attention were The Yearlyglot, by a guy who has made it his aim to learn a new language every year, and A Walk in the Words, with amusing language tricks, puns and observations.

So far I haven’t seen any doing anything similar to my blog – that is, thinking about issues of language and faith. I’m sure there are some out there, including many focusing on Bible translation (like God Didn’t Say That), and there are probably contributions to more generic blogs that do it occasionally (e.g. this one about what language God speaks, or this one about Bible Translation). I’ll keep looking… I’d be interested to hear of any interesting language blogs you know of, too.