Knowledge of a language means being able to communicate – being able to say things and being able to understand what other people are saying. For example, if you can say a few words in English, it doesn’t mean you can speak it fluently, but at least you can say something. Your ability to communicate will get better as your vocabulary gets larger. So how many words do you need to speak a foreign language? Most everyday conversations involve words…
Admit it: Most of us spend hours staring at a screen on a daily basis. Even if we’re just reading the news on our mobile phone, browsing Facebook for a few minutes or watching two or three episodes of our favourite series on Netflix, we are consuming multiple hours of screen time each week. Social media makes up most of this time, but luckily, it’s possible to take advantage of it. Many social media platforms are available globally, which means…
I bet you’ve encountered articles and funny pictures on social media concerning ‘difficult’ languages which appear impossible to learn. Languages with no prepositions (e.g. Finnish, Estonian) are often considered difficult. Tonal languages, languages in which stress and pitch change the meaning of a word (e.g. Chinese, Japanese), languages with many strict rules (e.g. German) or languages with a completely different alphabet (e.g. Russian) are also regarded as being difficult. But the truth is that no language is too difficult to…
’I’m too old.’ ’I would like to learn German but it’s too difficult.’ ’I’ve never been good at languages and I never will be.’ These are probably the most common excuses people make for why they can’t learn foreign languages. Age is an advantage – no matter how old you are People often think that you can only learn languages when you’re young and that age is just a burden. However, this isn’t exactly true, because the experience brought by…
Cultures and languages are constantly changing and interacting with each other. On the level of language, the interaction can be seen in loanwords, which are found in every language in the world. A loanword is a word borrowed from another language that has not been translated to the target language. It also has its own special meaning, usually not found in the target language’s own, original vocabulary. In some cases, loanwords are spelled or pronounced a bit differently in the…
Polytechnic and university studies usually include only a few mandatory language courses. Even if you would like to include more languages in your studies, it might be difficult to fit them into your schedule. I remember that I would have liked to study more languages in high school, but in the end, my schedule was too full of other courses and I couldn’t fit them in. Luckily, it is never too late to start learning a new language! I have…
