Cultural identity is realised through language and it is more than a cliché. Language is the most intimate, the most unmediated access to culture. After all, why do we want to learn a foreign language if we are not drawn to the culture it will unlock for us?
Essentially everyone who has ever started a language exchange with someone else has been asked to “correct all of my mistakes!” or “tell me every time I get something wrong!” You’ve probably said it to your partners yourself. As useful and necessary as it is to receive language feedback from native speakers you shouldn’t…
Read more
Why are you learning a new language? Looking to score a better job, foster multiculturalism? Maybe even travel the world a bit? These are all great reasons, and there are many, many more, but I can’t help but feel as though there is one motivator that teachers and learners alike are often loath to even mention:…
Read more
Hanging on to multiple languages in the United States is hard work. English is ubiquitous. People from many countries around the world want to talk to you in English. And English is everywhere as an international lingua franca of business and diplomacy. Most Americans don’t know what the word “polyglot” means, which kind of suggests…
Read more
It’s an extraordinarily common misconception that children learn learn languages better than adults. One of the claims made most frequently by language software companies is that their product will help you to learn organically. They claim that you can learn a second language the same way that you acquired your first language, by more or less absorbing…
Read more
In the last few years I’ve begun work on several different language projects ranging from Quechua to Kyrgyz to most recently Japanese, with some having come almost naturally, some put on hold for a while, and others that didn’t work out and were more or less tossed aside. Looking back on these projects – successful…
Read more
