Results > Posts Filed Under > Learning
Jun
25
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 …
Sep
16
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.
Aug
24
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.
Aug
12
Just a couple of tips that I think are helpful to learn languages while you are living in the country (like me in Greece). I assume most people should know them but I get surprised by how many times they don’t. Here we go.
Jun
18
There are quite a few dialects of Arabic. The question is: which dialect of Arabic should you learn if you want to communicate with as many Arabic speakers as you can? I attempt to give a summary of this question.
Apr
11
A few months ago, I made a switch which has helped me improve my Russian. The switch was simple and it didn’t really require me to dedicate Russian any extra time for learning at all. It is quite common sense, really, but many people still don’t do it. What did I do? Well, the TV shows(!) and the movies that I watch anyway… I started watching them in Russian instead.
Apr
6
The Greek alphabet has only 24 letters many of which are very easy to recognize and we happen to have borrowed an awful lot of letters from the Greek alphabet for our needs. Whether you want to learn how to read the alphabet to read some Greek signs or remember the names of the letters to impress your friends, it’s easy and worth doing. Here’s how you do it.
Apr
4
On one hand, it seems that languages are very different in their level of difficulty in when starting to learn them from scratch: anywhere from Riau Indonesian to Finnish. On the other hand, the general linguistic consensus seems to be that children need the same time to learn the language and they speak them by four. I have been thinking how to reconcile those two and then I thought maybe that’s because children and adults learn languages differently.
Mar
28
There are many guesses and people suggesting you can learn a language in a night, a week or similar short periods of time. Let’s be realistic for a bit. Let’s look at some data and see what it can tell us for if people in general need a certain time to learn the language, let’s not assume that it can be done way faster with some magical woodoo-learning methods. Here’s what the data tells.
Mar
27
If you have ever read about the Chinese language, you will probably know that all the variations of Chinese have tones. Tones are ways to pronounce words so for example if you say dā (with an elongated sound) it means “to hang” while dá (with a rising sound) means “to answer” even though it would feel like the same word in English. All Chinese words have a tone (in one way or another)! Mandarin (the most-widely used variation of Chinese) has four tones + one neutral one. In this post, I’m going to attempt to teach you how to pronounce all the 4+1 Chinese tones in a minute. Let’s start.
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