A life-changing experience Learning a new language changes you. Your brain shifts as you begin to think and perceive in a new way. Research shows that people even express personality differently. With this in mind, I wonder why language memoirs are not more popular. After all, many pe
One of many languages in the Sandcastle Girls My mom recently passed on to me the Sandcastle Girls, a novel set during the Armenian Genocide around 1915, when Armenians were deported en masse from the Ottoman Empire and over a million people were killed or died of diseases, starvation
For those who know I grew up in Saudi Arabia, it may come as a surprise that I only started learning Arabic when I lived in Morocco in 2009-2010. After that huge wasted opportunity (liasaf jadid!) in Saudi Arabia, I was very eager to learn the language spoken across so much of the Mid
Ibrahim is Abarham, but is Serra Sarah? Is Homer Ömer? I was hanging out with a Turkish friend last week and we started talking about names that appear in Christian and Muslim communities. Some are obviously from the same root: Abraham / Ibrahim Joseph / Yusuf Mary / Maryam or Meryem
¿Partir o llegar? Los diferentes tipos de migrante Es interesante como en español tenemos tres variantes para una palabra que expresa el abandono de la región natal y la búsqueda de oportunidades en una diferente: emigrar, inmigrar y migrar. De la última, el Diccionario de la Real Aca
Reviewing writing with my student Norma. Photo by Nataly Smakhtina. This blog post was prompted by a coffee date I had last weekend, with someone who wanted to know about my journey as a language teacher. It made me reflect: Wow, I have been doing this for ten years! What’s more
On the other side of the canola harvest This past weekend, my friend CJ and I went on an adventure to Luoping, which is about a 3.5-hour train ride away from Kunming, in Yunnan province, China. Luoping has several scenic tourist spots but is best known for its canola fields, which sna
Oaxaca’s Ethnobotanical Garden: 10,000 years of history in the middle of the city Following my last post about the Children’s Library in Oaxaca City, Mexico, I’d like to share another of my favourite places to visit in my wife’s hometown – el Jardín Etnob
Picking up words as they come Last week I blogged about different vocabulary retention methods, including using a digital flashcard system called Anki. I recently sat down to enter my new Turkish words into the Anki program, and I smiled at how disparate the words are. If I were learn
Trusting myself to take less When this post gets published, I’ll be in China! The countdown is finally over. And along with all the excitement and nerves and last-minute errands of the past few days, I made the startling and liberating discover that I can travel light. A few wee
