Some CD Picks

Here's some of my old favorite CDs plus a few newer picks:

1. Efim Jourist (Classical) - It's a quartet made up of strings and bayan (accordian). They do modern takes on old Russian folk songs. Passionate stuff I LOVED it! I must admit though I liked the "Russiches Roulette" CD better than their first one "Russian Rhapsody" which is a little slower and more traditional.

2. Magida El Roumi (Pop/Classical) - The CD is E'tazalt El Gharam and is at amazon.com. Magida is a very famous Lebanese singer who I have really liked since I was very young. She basically has an operatic type voice and does what I call "epic songs." Basically they are long stories with lots of great orchestration in the background. She does some pop too. Everything is in Arabic but her voice is fantastic. I really love this CD. "Habibi" is my favorite - based on the music of Adagio for Strings. Totally made me cry in the car it's really beautiful. Don't worry if you don't understand Arabic. If you're like me and grew up in a house where opera was the norm and not the exception on the stereo not understanding every last word of something doesn't bother you. Besides with most modern music what they sing about is usually so pointless anyway I don't know that you're missing any kind of profound philosophy on life etc.

3. Etti Ankri (sometimes spelled Eti Ankri) - An Israeli singer who I've liked for years too. Sadly she's a bit hard to find. I would try www.sifrutake.com or www.israel-music.com. Her concert CD with David D'Or is fabulous and I personally adore "Ha Yam" or "The Sea" in English. She has a unique voice that is compelling.

4. Sertab Erener - A really popular Turkish singer who is beyond fabulous to me. She's classically trained so does opera from time to time too. Basically anything she sings is terrific. "No Boundaries" in English is a pop CD which despite the fact I usually hate pop is actually pretty hot. One of her first CDs "Sertab" is great. "Makber" being one of my favorite songs of all time. Her latest in Turkish "Ask Olmez" is also great.

So a couple of CD picks for those of you looking for Chanukah/Xmas gifts coming up. Enjoy!

Great Russian Photography Sites

As an aspiring photographer myself I am a huge fan of Alexander Kitaev. I really love the Ballet and Saint Petersburg series. Check them out at this site:

http://www.pbase.com/belyaevsky/masters_of_photography_

I also really like this site I think she has some interesting pics. Don't let the Russian text scare you off the pics come up automatically on the page:

http://kunstkamera.livejournal.com/

Here's another site I flip to pretty often to check out the latest pics. It's actually where I first saw Kitaev's work. Don't let the Russian text throw you off in the top right corner you can click for English.

http://www.photographer.ru/

Great Resource For Word Meanings

Have you ever run across a word in a foreign language that you couldn't find in any dictionary? Me too and lots of times you don't know the infinitive form etc. etc. to be able to even venture a guess at looking it up. I ran across a neat site:

http://www.wordreference.com/

where aside from the standard dictionaries they also have forums where you can ask people things along the lines of "I found this sentence and I can't figure out what the last 3 words mean." I think it's a great free resource when you run into a wall with a dictionary.

Learn Serbian for Free

Just ran across this free online course. It has audio and a large number of lessons. Looks really good from what I can tell. I really love their music so thought it would be fun to try and understand a bit of it.

http://www.serbianschool.com/

Free French Course

I thought this was a really good online course. It goes through a story by way of grammar topics and is loaded with native speaker audio. Very comprehensive and so far from what I can tell pretty good.

http://laits.utexas.edu/tex/gr/index.html