I’ve been learning Swedish in April. Here’s what I’ve been doing it.

Read on »

So I’m going to be learning Swedish. That is because I am going to Stockholm, Sweden for the summer of 2012 (it’s almost confirmed). Moreover, I was always interested in Scandinavian languages and after having read why Norwegian is the easiest language for English speakers to learn, I knew I wanted to learn one.
In that article, Mithridates states:
[W]hy [learn] Norwegian and not the two other Scandinavian languages?Swedish is spoken by more people for example. Well, if you have some reason …

Read on »

Hello everybody!
So, I am back provisionally because I will be having another language learning challenge! I’m (very likely now) going to move to another country for the summer and I’m going to be learning the language of that country. In fact, I have already started learning that language by doing lessons and even attempting to read in it. So far, so good.
I’m going to let you guys try to guess which language it is going to be this time in …

Read on »

Alright, so this blog seems dead. I think you do know that. I do kind of feel bad about this because this is only of the few sites that I run online. But oh well, I guess I should have found a better niche. This blog simply ran out of ideas.
The question, though: are there things you would like to hear about? If so, tell in the comments.
Finally:
What does IONA mean?
IONA means Islands of the North Atlantic.

Read on »

I’m just going to leave this here so you can see how the alphabet has changed:

Click on the image to see the full and live version.

Read on »

Here are somethings that you might not have known about the months of the year and how language can help you decipher it.

The first month used to be March. This can be seen from months like September where sept stands for the Latin seven, October where oct is the root for eight or December where dec is the root for ten (in Portuguese ten is dez).

Since March was the first month, the last one was February. That explains why it …

Read on »

I’m bored, that’s why.

Read on »

Well, I had a Greek 6 month challenge under my belt: I intended to study three months at home, and then three months in Greece. I also intended to achieve level B2, which would mean I could understand the main ideas of complex texts, interact quite fluently with native speakers and express myself fluently after these six months which seemed quite reasonable at that time. Time’s up and I give you some of my recollections of how this whole challenge …

Read on »

I have just come back from my stay in Greece where I tried to learn Greek (more on the results of that in my next post) and that experience got me thinking about: those of you who go to foreign countries and try to learn the local language will know that learning it will not come by itself: you actually have to put a lot of work in; and even then sometimes it’s very hard. In this day and age of English as the international language, speaking opportunities are scarce and even then conversations end prematurely due to your low level of the language or you just don’t seem to be able to discuss difficult topics. At the end of the day, you end up staying in the country and not learning much if any of the local language. That’s where I got an idea.

Read on »

I just had this random idea reading a site on the Internet. Isn’t the best way to learn a language discussing in it? Here’re a few reasons why it might be.

Read on »