Words to live by

Malaysian steamed buns – what a passer-by might offer you in a rural village.   Brian, who grew up in Malaysia, is embarrassed at any suggestion that he’s a high-achiever.   The 37-year-old, who works as a language translator, educator and blogger, is more interested in helping others learn languages than bigging himself up.   “Where … Read more

Scire linguas: Why Knowing Your Latin Can Help Your Language Skills

Thanks to London Translations for today’s blog post about the value of learning Latin! Latin, a language that is more than 2,000 years old and is still spoken in the Vatican today, has shaped modern European languages like no other. Who would’ve thought that this medium of communication, which spread through the power of the … Read more

Just how bad was Mark Zuckerberg’s Mandarin anyway?

A couple of weeks ago, Mark Zuckerberg shocked the world by taking part in a 30-minute Q&A session in Mandarin Chinese. And we were all super impressed. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fr__vZKWdDE It was obvious, even to a non-Mandarin speaker, that he wasn’t completely fluent, but he managed to keep going for almost the full half hour, and his audience at Tsinghua University … Read more

How Do You Choose Which Language to Learn?

Everyone’s always talking about how useful it is to speak another language – and they’re right, for so many reasons. There’s lots of advice too on how to get started and how to stay motivated when it gets tough. But the first question any aspiring language learner should ask themselves is, ‘Which language do I … Read more

Which language are you learning? (Win an iPad mini!)

**** The survey is now closed. Thank you so much to everyone who took part. Congratulations to our lucky winner, Konstantia Sakellariou! **** Calling all language learners, past, present and future! We want to hear from you… Which language(s) are you learning (or would like to learn), and why? What makes people give up? And how … Read more

Will Online Translators Make Language Learning Redundant?

Microsoft have just unveiled the latest version of their Skype Translator, which will enable us to chat with people all over the world even if we don’t speak their language. This story ran in the Daily Mail here in the UK yesterday, under the rather depressing headline, ‘Don’t bother learning a foreign language! Skype will soon … Read more

A history of languages in the USA

Last week, a report was published using a series of maps to show the distribution of languages besides English and Spanish in the USA. We thought it was really interesting to see the huge number of languages spoken in one country; it’s easy to assume one country means one (or maybe two) languages. Here’s a … Read more

How learning a language can help your career

“Learning a different language has made me the person I am today. I enjoy working with global brands in over 18 different countries, and leading a team specialised in 5 different markets.” Sarah works as a Multilingual Search Manager at Search Laboratory, and she’s taken time out to tell us why and how learning a … Read more

Languages at primary school – what’s the point?

From September this year, it’s going to be compulsory for primary schools in the UK to teach a foreign language. This is causing quite a lot of stress for schools, according to a report published earlier this week, which says that 29% of teachers don’t feel confident about teaching a language to their students. That’s … Read more