A poll that is going to indirectly produce some read worthy controversial comments about the true culture of slashdot users.

That is the same reason I got interested in ham radio. In my opinion, you have a very valid point. Looking at the world today we might have to use our skills very soon to get information outside of our village/town.

Good to see the Russians are using there own words. Unlike Germans who just use the English word. The sad thing is, it doesn't only affect geek speek. Even if you don't speak german, you can almost read any newspaper article.
In television you don't watch the "Nachrichten" anymore. It has completely changed to "news". (except for the Tagesschau).
During the news, they almost always use "location", "meeting", "vote", "live",... instead of the german words.
And don't get me started on advertisement!

If there is no one to speak to, you can at least train your reading and writing skills. Read a book or even better: join an irc channel using the language you want to train. That way you can talk to people about projects and stuff you like. Every major project has multiple irc channels.just add -es, -de, -tld to the channel name.

looks like global warming is not enough, now we melt our remaining ice actively.