Some school lessons give students a sneaking suspicion that they're being forced to learn something they won't need in real life - long division, memorizing the periodic table, writing in cursive, etc. Learning how to write an argumentative essay, however, will pay dividends down the road. Strictly speaking, an argumentative essay is "a piece of writing that uses logical [...]
Most language learning systems address four basic skills – reading, writing, listening, and speaking. The grammar-translation method focuses solely on the first two, largely ignoring listening and speaking. This method has been around since the days of Ancient Greece and Rome, then experienced a bit of a resurgence in the early 1900s. Since then, it has fallen out of [...]
A joke really only has two parts – the set-up (I'm on the new whiskey diet…) and the punchline (I've lost three days already). The punchline is of course the funny bit and comes at the end, though for a longer joke, smaller humorous parts, known as jab lines, can be sprinkled in. If you've ever heard an unfunny [...]
Food is a subject nearly everyone holds dear, but expressing our love of food in different languages is not so easy. Most people are proud of a particular food or dish from their culture, and eager to share it with a visitor. Similarly, most of us are excited to sample exotic new dishes or even try our hand at [...]
As students, many of us took part in some type of foreign language instruction at school, and depending on your age and country, this could have ranged from incomprehensible teacher lectures to singing songs, to intense grammar drilling. In the world of education, second language acquisition philosophies and practices change at a rapid clip, and the new breakthrough methodology [...]
From the moment we learn to control our mouths, lungs, and vocal cords as infants, we yearn to speak. As babies, we babble and attempt to copy words, and with no formal instruction at all, we can typically grasp the basics of speaking in under a year and begin to communicate. Neurolinguists have shown that our brain’s superior temporal [...]
One of modern civilization’s most commonly used tools sits just beneath our fingertips, as our keyboards provide us with an arsenal of approximately 80 numbers, letters, and commands, all ready to do our bidding. For those of us who utilize the Roman alphabet (approximately 70% of all major languages), we press these keys in various combinations and assemble the [...]
Learning a foreign language has well-known social and even cognitive benefits, but people often underestimate the professional value of multilingualism. For starters, bilingualism equates to an average of 10-15% higher pay in the US job market. Specialized careers pay even more, but require a high level of language proficiency and possibly a foreign language degree for entry. Types of [...]
The company of your dreams emails you to set up an online interview. It’s going to be held in a foreign language, but that’s okay. You've spent your entire life studying, getting job experience, and preparing for this moment that will give you financial freedom, a new career trajectory, and an adventure in a new land. And now you’re [...]
English is the official language of 55+ countries around the globe, but if you ask a random person to name the first one off the top of their head, there is a good chance they’d give you the wrong answer. England? No. The US? Australia? No and no. English is of course widely spoken in those countries and is [...]
