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 [...]
Language is one of our world’s most powerful tools, and throughout history, governments and large organizations have used different forms of language planning as a way to control that power. In a broad sense, language planning is an organized effort by a major entity to change a society’s language. These efforts can be, and usually are, done for the [...]
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 [...]
“What’s in a name?” Shakespeare’s Juliet famously asked, and the answer depends on what culture you are talking about and what language you are speaking. Our names are uniquely personal and individual identifiers, yet they often represent the lives, aspirations and beliefs of an incredibly large group of people. In some cultures, names are steeped in tradition and passed [...]
