Author: morausky

Have you ever noticed that the French have a funny way of interchanging le and la depending on what they are discussing? The waiter may bring you le café but when it comes time for dessert you’ll be ordering la glace. One of the first thing you discover when studying French is that all nouns have a gender […]

Why did you choose to learn Hebrew? I was accepted for an internship with a tech start-up in Tel Aviv and decided that learning Hebrew would go a long way toward helping me fit into Israeli society. I firmly believe that learning a country’s language is not only an amazing intellectual and linguistic endeavor, but […]

Reading StrategiesWhen it comes to reading in a second language, strategies are every learner’s best friend. Making sure you start off with an engaging text that contains words you already know is step one in employing a new strategy . But being aware of how the strategy works and what it is designed to do is […]

French. The language of love. Paris is the most visited city in the world year after year and I’m pretty sure a crazy little thing called love has something to do with it. Did you know that a bridge in Paris was recently closed due to the amount of love locks weighing it down? I […]

There are plenty of things we do know about the Irish: they live in a country full of sprawling green countryside, they’ve produced some of the world’s best writers, James Joyce among them, and they have a very lively way of telling stories, both in Irish and in English. But one thing you might not […]

Why did you choose to learn Arabic? Actually, I was originally just learning French. But because I have many friends from North Africa, it bothered me that I was always missing out on half of their sentences when they code-switched between French and Arabic. So, I decided to start studying both! What’s the most difficult […]

Anyone who has studied abroad or visited France knows that the last thing you want to do is walk into a bar and alienate yourself by using awkward expressions or overly formal constructions. Slang is a register that helps you shout “I’m casual, easy-going and cool” to anyone who’s listening. And when you’re trying to […]

Vocabulary in a second language seems like a relatively straightforward entity to assess. You either know a word or you don’t, right? Unfortunately, that’s not really the case. There are many ways to know a word and not all language assessments measure the same kind of knowledge. So, have a read through this post to ensure […]

A few weeks ago I received an email from a friend asking which foreign language his daughter should learn. She was entering high school and had several options, including Spanish, French and Chinese. He wanted to know which language was the best. While I specialize in language learning and work in world languages, I still found his question hard to answer. Here’s why. […]

You’ve probably only encountered a word like the English ‘platypus’ a handful of times in your life, but that doesn’t mean you initially had trouble remembering it or that you’re ever going to forget it. So what is it about a foreign language that makes words so difficult to capture, transfer, and recall? More importantly, […]