Word for the Travel Wise (08/08/06)

Every time I go to the tourism site of Sri Lanka I am impressed. First off, the site is designed rather nicely and feels like a vacation within itself. Secondly, the country always has so much going on year-round. If it isn’t a huge spice festival of sorts you can bet you’ll get something just as cool to view. Right now the Randoli Festival is taking place, tomorrow the Grand Festival and the day after that will be the Day Festival. In November the country will host an international surfing competition. With all these things happening, you may wish to make plans early to make sure you’re well accommodated.

Today’s word is a Sinhala word used in Sri Lanka:

ida netu – no vacancies

English is spoken by ten percent of the population and Sinhala is the official and national language of the country. I’ve actually never tried to learn this one much, but judging from the alphabet it looks like a challenge. Omniglot has a great starter page on learning all the characters and use of this English to Sinhala dictionary could slowly help in distinguishing common travel words. Let’s Speak Sinhala offers lessons at a very small and reasonable fee. They appear to be one of the better Sinhala language learning websites.

Past Sinhala words: hari shook, a da, ga ma