Category: Languages

In French, you say C’est du chinois (litterally, ‘It’s Chinese’) when you want to express how much what you’ve heard or read is just so unintelligible. A few hundreds years ago, French people were saying C’est de l’hébreu (‘It’s Hebrew’). In English, you say ‘It’s all Greek to me’. In Swedish, you say Det är […]

Boustrophedon writing is a technique that consists in not starting every line over from the same side: the hand goes from left to right, then very logically from right to left on the next line, then again from left to right on the next line and so on. Boustrophedon was mostly used in ancient times. […]

More than six billion nine hundred ninety-nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine other people than you live on Earth. Most of them are multilingual; they speak more than one language, but hopefully not all at the same time­ and everybody manages to understand each other even though sometimes there may of course be a few […]

Fictional languages are languages created from scratch for the sole purpose of being integrated into a book or a movie. The fact that some authors go to the length of creating whole new languages says a lot about their dedication to the rendering of the fictions. In the first decade of the 20th century, Marcel […]

Around four billion six hundred million years ago, gravitation and a cloud of gas gave birth to the Sun. A few million years later, Earth came to be too. We know that. Scientists have studied the evidence (that is, terrestrial, lunar and meteorite rock samples) and thanks to their knowledge (that is mostly in this […]

Motivation in language learning isn’t what people say it is. Motivation as a general rule in fact is a great inner strength that everybody gets endowed with at birth BUT its number one feature is that it comes and then it goes. Motivation does come included in the package at birth, but in fact you […]

We are a lot of animals on planet Earth to be equipped with one body, one mind, two eyes, two ears, one larynx and one tongue. Some animals display two sets of eyes; some have long tails, sharp teeth, strong carapaces. Some others are capable of seeing in the dark quite well or of uttering […]

I must tell you from the start that I am not going to drop you any name ! Because there are none in fact. It’s true that Juan Pablo de Bonet, a Spanish priest, published in 1620 the first known signed alphabet. It’s true also that in the second half of the 18th century, Charles-Michel de […]

For those who are wondering : no, I don’t speak all the languages mentioned below. I just happen to have an unfortunate tendency to feel like learning all languages at the same time … Let me declare it very solemnly : my favorite method to begin learning a language is by far the With Ease collection of […]

This long word list locked behind opaque doors Passive vocabulary are all those words that we understand when we hear or read them, but that we don’t use. It’s logically opposed to active vocabulary that we understand AND use. When we are beginning to speak in a foreign language, we often find ourselves in the […]