Raising a multilingual child has often been given a bad rap. We have had people ask us if we are stunting their development. This came up as our second child didn’t start speaking until he was almost two, and only then with very intentional coaching by me (I will post on that later). We also had […]
St. Patrick’s Day Wouldn’t Be Possible Without Language Learning Happy St. Patrick’s Day! If your family is anything like mine, your kitchen smells like corned beef and cabbage today. Though my family has many of its roots in Eastern Europe, somehow, a few generations back, the Irish managed to sneak into our family tree, so […]
Ok, maybe you aren’t like my wife and read the dictionary for fun, but if you are serious about language learning, one tool that I literally never leave home without is Abbyy Lingvo. They have a variety of products available (see their website here), and the best dictionary app I have ever used, hands down. […]
Get your move on! Perhaps one of the best methodologies I have encountered for language learning is Total Physical Response, or TPR. As the name suggests, it really gets you up and moving! TPR is a method of language learning that began developing in the late 1950s as a way to both decrease stress in language learning and increase […]
Did you know that there are well over 100 different distinct sounds that can be produced by the human vocal system? Yet the average language only uses a couple dozen of them. The sounds used in a given language are known as phonemes, or the smallest unit of sound used to distinguish between utterances in a […]
Below is a chart of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). These symbols are used to represent all of the possible sounds that can be produced by the human vocal mechanism. This can be a very helpful tool for figuring out exactly how to pronounce utterances in a new language. Think of the chart like a […]
A right thing for a wrong reason. I remember one day when we heard our three-year-old son washing his hands. We’d had talks with him about germs and the need to wash up after using the restroom, and thought, “Oh good, he’s starting to get it!” We even decided to reward him to reinforce this […]
Dirty Dinner (R. from Iowa) I had the chance to spend some time among the Roma people in a few places in Eastern Europe. One time, I was invited to dinner with a group of men. I didn’t know that the Roma have a very strong sense of “clean and unclean” in their culture, […]
If you have spent any amount of time learning a language, you’ve made a mistake! The trick is to not let it scare you away. The best way is to learn to laugh at yourself. Here are some of our language and culture learning fails. Feel free to share your own, and if we like them, […]
I this really communication? “Hello, my name is Sergey, and I forgot 500 English words.” I can’t even count how many times I heard my Ukrainian friend say this. Sergey, who is a brilliant, highly educated man who studied English all throughout school and college, has now, at the age of 45, found himself unable to say […]