Author: morausky

Reading how many or better put how few British students took their A levels in German this year, I thought I’d start a series of posts giving some good reasons why studying German might be useful and to do away with some popular but false stereotypes such as German is fairly complicated and difficult to […]

When learning a language, we not only deal with our lessons, grammar exercises or lists of vocabulary. One of the things I tell my students is that they have to read, watch or listen to Spanish media. In the Internet age we have plenty of material that can help us learning Spanish in a fun […]

Any journey will have its difficulties Language learning presents different types challenges at different points along the experience. This time round I wish to look at language learners who have difficulty in achieving blast off.  These are the learners who put in a lot of (well at least some!) energy at the start but don’t […]

As you know, there are different dialects of English around the world like British English, American English, Australian and so on. In most cases it does not really matter which English dialect you learn as long as you try to stick with it and don’t mix up different Englishes. When you learn English as a […]

We already wrote quite a bit about globalization, that the right language skills are essential in the globalized job market and can therefore give job seekers not only a competitive edge over other applicants but also result into better payment and a lower risk to lose a job. While English is still dominating global trade […]

Many language learners do put enough effort in the initial stages to get to a certain level of proficiency but can’t seem to get above that level, try as they might. There can be any number of reasons for this. I will go through a number of them here. Have a read through them and […]

Language is not logical, and does not have to be: it is an art, not a science. An idiom, for example, is an expression whose meaning is not predictable from the usual meanings of its constituent elements. If we hear that someone has kicked the bucket we know he has died, and we never stop to think about kicking or buckets. We […]

What are the languages that will be most widely spoken by the middle of this century? According to so called engco model of language forecasting the top 5 languages in 2050 are going to be Chinese Spanish English Hindi-Urdu Arabic I guess, there is no big surprise in this list in the end but those […]

Have you ever stopped to consider that the world is full of natives? There are about 7000 million of them. And they are restless most of the time. I often feel compelled to ask who wrote a letter, or a notice on a bulletin board, or a simple office sign, that is clearly full of […]

It’s an open secret that the best way to learn a language is immersion which means that you are surrounded by the language you want to learn for as long as possible throughout the day. And the Internet did not change that. If you take a look at surveys on language learners like recent ones […]