Monthly Archives: February 2010

The story of the Πligature

Œ: Who would have thought that a ligature could be so interesting. Article about the oe ligature on Wikipedia traces the association in old Norse with ancestral home and in modern French with eg...

READ MORE | 27 Feb 2010

Voila! Primaries lead national culture shift

Primary children are at the forefront of a culture shift in favour of language learning, a three-year study has shown, according to a recent article in the TES. The major academic investigation conclu...

READ MORE | 26 Feb 2010

Foreign subtitles improve speech perception

Foreign subtitles improve speech perception for second langauge learners according to a new study by the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. The research suggests that foreign language acquisi...

READ MORE | 24 Feb 2010

Vote for your Favourite Bilingual Mini Dictionary

We're running a community poll on our home page and via Facebook to find out which bilingual mini dictionary you like using. Do you prefer Oxford Mini Dictionaries, Collins Pocket Dictionaries, Harrap...

READ MORE | 23 Feb 2010

Kindergartners switch between English, Spanish

Bilingual Spanish-English elementary education would appear to be a win-win for both first language English speakers and first language Spanish speakers according to the latest research reported in th...

READ MORE | 23 Feb 2010

Spanglish: Blending the languages

Interesting article on Spanglish, code switching from English to Spanish, in this Saturday's Chicago Sun-Times. There's plenty of debate about the effect of English on European languages but, judged b...

READ MORE | 22 Feb 2010

French Texting - Les Textos français

Koi29 - How do you text in French with style? This wonderful resource from the excellent About.com web site cuts a path through all those bewildering abbreviations, acronyms, and symbols to enable you...

READ MORE | 21 Feb 2010

Every Language is an Old-Growth Forest of the Mind

Thoughtful talk at TED by Wade Davis on Endangered languages and what we all lose when an indigenous language disappears. An eloquent statement of the fact that a slide to monolingualism will lead to...

READ MORE | 20 Feb 2010

The Future of Language Learning?

Laud help us--Can this really be the future of language learning? This application perhaps has its place, but surely learning a language is all about the journey rather than the arrival?...

READ MORE | 20 Feb 2010

Translating Dan Brown into French

Fascinating interview in French on the excellent Fluctuat.net web site with the translators of Dan Brown's latest blockbuster. They managed to translate all 600 pages of The Lost Symbol into French in...

READ MORE | 19 Feb 2010