Now that's useful.

I'm getting a kick out of seeing what beginning foreign language textbook writers (sorry, that's a mouthful) choose for vocabulary practice.

I was just working through some vocabulary I should know for tomorrow morning and ran into the model sentence [loosely translated], "Here is a long letter from my sweetheart."

This makes me laugh, because at this point I have virtually no survival skills in the language, but I could tell you where my maternal aunt lives (too bad I don't have one), that I am in a big class with a [choose the nationality] professor, and that here I have a long letter from my sweetheart.

I guess you've got to start somewhere . . .