Author: morausky

If you read this blog, you probably know I have been learning Spanish. It has been my first attempt to learn a foreign language in a functional, life-enhancing way, which would enable me to play, live, and do business comfortably in Latin America (among other things). I’ve discovered some things that work, and some things […]

Here’s the final post in our five part series to guide you through some of the key terms you need in your language learning vocabulary. T is for Travel and Teaching One of the best ways to stay motivated to learn a new language is through travel. People, place, culture, they are all experiences you […]

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 […]