How Not to be a Jerk to Your Foreign Language Teacher – World Teachers’ Day

October 5th, is World Teachers’ Day. When I set out to write this I was really just looking to express my regrets about being part of the bullying of a foreign language teacher who came to my high school when I was at the worst of ages. I didn’t realize that there is such a…
Read more

10 Weird or Endangered Languages You’ve Never Heard Of

Sometimes it feels like we spend a lot of time talking about languages that everyone knows about. Your biggies. Your French, German, English, Korean etc. But if only a tiny fraction of the world’s languages make up for more than half of it’s population, we must be missing something. Amid these throngs of dominant state…
Read more

International Talk Like a Pirate Day: The Origins O’ Pirate Speak

Avast me hearties! September 19th be International Talk Like A Pirate Day! Talk Like a Pirate Day is a “parody holiday” on which everyone, everywhere, is instructed to, well, talk like a pirate. Go figure. However, it has taken the Internet by storm lately, and the population in general since it was created in 1995.…
Read more

Indigenous Siberia: the Chukchi Language

A few years ago I ended up composing this tiny little “article” about the Chukchi language and people. It was one of my first articles and it’s just about as God-awful as you’d expect. To show you just how awful, I’ve taken a screenshot of the article and published it here as an image…  …
Read more

My Review of Drops Language Learning App

It’s not every day that I come across a new language learning app that I actually like, and I’ve done a lot of product reviews lately – something I kinda swore off several months ago. What can I say, I’m being retro. In any case, several weekends ago, I was lying in bed after an…
Read more

Duolingo vs Memrise: The Best Language Learning Program

As is the nature of technology, a lot of things have changed since I last wrote product reviews or discussed my experiences with language learning apps or software and Duolingo vs Memrise is one of those toss-up questions everyone seems to have. A few years ago I wrote reviews of both Memrise and Duolingo –…
Read more