I- in the Hague… right?

Yes! Not so much for beginners, but you can practice translation by translating songs on lyricstranslate.com. It’s good fun!

See if there are evening classes you can sign up for in your area. This has a couple of benefits over pure self-study: firstly, if you don’t really know any other languages yet, having a teacher to explain new concepts for you will be a big help. Secondly, it keeps you accountable if you need external motivation to keep at something. It can also be a good way to meet new people!

If you’re going with self-study, look up what textbooks people recommend using for self-study for your target language (i.e. not one that relies heavily on having a teacher explain things for you). Obviously a textbook alone is not enough to learn a language, but imo it’s the best way to get to grips with the basics of grammar before you move on to more advanced stages. There are also plenty of online communities to help you out with any questions, especially for more popular languages.

Finally, do NOT expect to make worthwhile progress with Duolingo or apps like that. They are not designed to help you master a language. You might learn some useful vocab from them, but if you’re serious about learning a language, don’t waste your valuable time.

miniminuteman and Archaeology with Flint Dibble are both excellent archeology channels. They fight misinformation put out by grifters like Graham Hancock and share really interesting actual archaeology.

Esoterica is a fascinating channel which explores the less well-known aspects of religion and philosophy from an academic perspective.

Sebastian Lague makes very cool programming videos. He does coding adventures where he sets out to build something from scratch (e.g. in his latest video, he made a software rasteriser), going through the basics of how it works and explaining the challenges involved. The thing that sets his videos apart from coding tutorials and videos that explain how things work conceptually is that they follow his journey as he is learning himself. He doesn’t exactly go in ‘blind’ (he is a very skilled programmer and has a good idea of what he needs to do), but he also doesn’t immediately have the optimal answer he copied from someone else or prepared in advance.

I lived in Georgia for a few months and can say without at doubt it is absolutely European. I think it helps that Georgians have very close ties with the rest of eastern Europe. Sadly, given the state of the government at the moment, the road to joining the EU is looking very long and uncertain, but I have hope that it will happen one day.

When the abyss stares back at you, maintain flirty eye contact