Do you know the feeling when you try to come up with a reasonable sentence and pronounce it as eloquently as possible, and at the same time your brain is buzzing with grammar rules and your heart is pounding as if you were running a marathon? For me this is a familiar feeling, especially in situations where I try to speak a language for the first time outside of the classroom. Especially if the person I am talking to is…
“Talent alone is not enough”, says 24-year-old top level judoka, language enthusiast and full-time student of economic sciences, Samuli Viitanen. “The key to success is hard work and doing the right things”, he continues. This is the formula he applies to professional sports, his studies as well as his language learning. “I really appreciate language skills. Language learning never goes to waste. People learn languages in order to cope while traveling but in reality, language skills are about so much…
It is possible to learn to speak foreign languages very well without a degree in linguistics, but there are a few things that linguists and language teachers can teach us. We asked Jaana, a language student towards the end of her studies, what she has learned from her degree in linguistics and pedagogy. – Language students at the university take courses in language structure, phonetics (the study of sounds), semantics (the study of meaning) and pragmatics (how context contributes to…
