When the recent article in The Cut came out proclaiming Duolingo useless, the glee was palpable. I get it. You’ve spent countless hours at the beck and call of that owl, and you still can’t speak Spanish, …
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In the spring of 2019, when I first wrote this post, I had just booked a trip to Prague, Bratislava, Lviv, and Kiev. Of course, this meant I had some new languages to learn (Czech, Slovak, and …
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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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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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If you try to cram a foreign language on short notice, how long can you actually retain it?
Not long, I can tell you from personal experience.
In 2019 I traveled to fifteen countries, and crammed as much of those languages as I could in the weeks before departure. 🧵
I love that you can take the flag of the last language I was studying, and flip it around, and you get the flag of the language I've just started 😉 #langtwt
Happy International Mother Language Day! My mother language, or “mother tongue” as we say in the US, is English. This is fitting for a linguist. Not because it is currently a so-called lingua franca, but because it …
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Hej allihopa! This weekend I participated in Sandra Schellhase’s Language Jam social media challenge, in which participants have four days to study a language which they are randomly assigned. I was so happy to get Swedish! …
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Working on your accent? So am I — in six languages. As a native speaker of English and an adult learner of Spanish, French, Mandarin, Korean, Indonesian, and ASL, I’ve had my fair share of phonetic struggles, …
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