A Thing For Wor(l)ds

Prepositions (those little words like on, at, before, with, as, for . . . ) are often the most difficult part of any language for new learners to grasp. For instance, why do we say “John is waiting for you AT the bus stop,” ...Read More

Today I called the Spanish consulate in San Francisco because I had a question about the visa process. The clerk’s short response to my inquiry: “I don’t know. Send an email.” *click* Spain! How could I forget about your top-notch customer service? About the ...Read More

I’ve spent lots of mental energy this year memorizing German nouns and generating ways to fall asleep amidst my neighbor’s raging dub-step music. But I’ve spent substantially less time considering what comes next. With less than a quarter left of college, maybe today should ...Read More

One of the textbooks for my Endangered Language class, Dying Words, is simply blowing my mind. I thought I’d share here some interesting facts I’ve come across, just to prove that reading for class can sometimes be worth it :) There are some (actually many!) ...Read More

In my linguistics class this past week we’ve been talking a lot about Language Shift, or how language undergoes changes over time. This normally happens over generations, although sometimes it’s not as slow of a process as one might think. Just look at slang: ...Read More

I posted recently about the importance of punctuation in writing, lest Grandpa should unfortunately be eaten at the writer’s expense. As I found out during one particularly awkward moment in Spain, the placement of commas is also extremely important in speech. With the addition ...Read More

In my Teaching English as a Foreign Language class today we learned about the importance of teaching correct pronunciation, so casualties like this don’t occur:     ...Read More