Ready to learn, once and for all, how to pronounce the names of the Indian languages we hear so much about? After all, 7 of the top 20 most spoken languages in the world are Indian languages …
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Mandarin Tones Are Not As Hard As You Think
Mandarin tones do take some getting used to, but they are not as complicated as you might think! I have noticed that language learners often decide not to try learning Mandarin because they are daunted by the …
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Shadowing: This Exercise Will Make You Sound Like a Native
Since I posted my blog post on the importance of prosody, many of you wrote to ask for more explanation of how my shadowing exercise works. It is a very powerful exercise and has helped me immeasurably. …
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Linguistics 101 Series: Why You Need to Master Prosody to Speak a Foreign Language
When you learn a foreign language, you usually study pronunciation, grammar, and vocabulary. Maybe even a new alphabet. But how many of your language teachers have ever mentioned prosody? Prosody is the “music” of language. In spoken …
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Learn Like a Linguist: Using Swadesh Lists for Rare or Minority Languages
The United Nations has declared 2019 the Year of Indigenous Languages. I know a lot of you are taking that as your cue to try your hand at learning a minority language, from Occitan to Teochew …
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You Might Want to Learn These Languages
If you’re reading this blog, there is a good chance that you’re a hopeless language addict, suggestible to any new language recommendation, and forever putting languages aside to try out the new hot thing. So maybe I …
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The History of Malaysian Sign Language (and Yes, There Is More Than One Sign Language)
I get this question a lot: “You mean, there is more than one sign language?” And don’t feel bad, before I studied linguistics and started doing research on Nicaraguan Sign Language, I hadn’t thought about sign languages …
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