Letting go of grades and levels A tutoring client recently asked me how to structure his learning of Turkish. He reads language books, writes grammar exercises, and watches YouTube videos, but he worries that this is too scattered and messy. “I can’t tell if I am making pr

Fun and Frustration with the Spanish Language Like other global languages, there are many different varieties of Spanish spoken throughout the world. While the general structure of the language doesn’t change too much from one country to the next, the accents and especially the

A love letter to public libraries One of my favourite shows, Fringe, is filmed in Vancouver, and one of the fun things about watching it is pointing out all the places I recognize. One of the most distinctive is the central library, which in the show acts as an alternate-universe Frin

Nostalgia and life lessons in learning to read Chinese Mary Leighton’s post earlier this week about feeling like a child when learning a language made me reflect on my own return to childhood through my learning of Chinese. One challenge of being a kid again linguistically is finding

Keetcha, Sungit, and Incidental Language Learning One day last year I came home from the library with the only Ukrainian and Tagalog language textbooks I could find. I had a very specific goal for those books: my boyfriend and I would learn each other’s heritage language and eventuall

A resource for people who care about endangered languages Who uses this book Indigenous language speakers Minority language speakers Heritage language speakers Anyone who wants to pass on or learn a language in a one-on-one, master-apprentice format The rationale for a one-on-one, mas

The Question I Always Ask as a Language Learner, and the Importance of Context “¿Me entiendes?” (Do you understand me?) is one of the questions I have asked most frequently to Spanish-speakers around the globe. I really do wonder sometimes. I consider myself fluent in Spanish but I am