The uTalk Guide to Italian Plurals

If you’re learning Italian, one of the first issues you may have come across is how on earth do plurals work? But, don’t despair! Norma, uTalk’s Marketing Intern (and Italian extraordinaire!) has created this guide to help you so you’ll never have to worry about those pesky plurals again. Contents 1. Identifying Gender 1.1 Articles … Read more

Beware of German Gifts!

English speakers should be wary of receiving ein Gift from a German! That’s because Gift just happens to be the German word for “poison”! And more incredibly, both the English and German meanings stem from the exact same Proto-Germanic root – giftiz! Our friend and language guru Brian Loo Soon Hua explains all: The word … Read more

The Origins of the name “Canada”

By our multi-lingual friend Brian Loo Soon Hua aka uTalk’s Language Guru   Did you know that Canada was almost named Efisga? Or, even more unusual, Hochelaga? Imagine the jokes Americans would have been making about their Efisgan or Hochelagan neighbours to the north! Thankfully, “Canada” came into official use in 1791 when the Province … Read more

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

Junior Language Challenge Final 2017

Friday 13th may be unlucky for some but for one young budding linguist it could mean holding the Junior Language Challenge 2017 trophy high with pride and winning a trip to Africa! A record number have taken part in the UK’s only national language challenge for primary school children this year. 32 finalists from all … Read more

Blog: European Day of Languages

26th September is European Day of Languages, and in honour of this special day we thought we’d have a look at some interesting facts about the European languages. Did you know that the root of many European languages can be found in the Indo-European language family, which has many subdivisions including the Italic, Celtic, Germanic … Read more

Blog: The problem of translating – does it ever end?

Last week, we talked about the problem of translating certain words and concepts into other languages (if you missed last week’s blog you can take a read of it here). This week we’re moving onto family and colours. Surely family correlates easily across languages, right? Words for ‘relatives’ are often some of the first things … Read more

uTalk enters the classroom via Kahoot

uTalk has launched 10 free language quizzes on popular game-based learning platform Kahoot. The fun and addictive quizzes are based on the free Starter Words in our utalk.com/app and covers core languages in the curriculum (list). There’s even a Learn English from Spanish quiz specially designed for the US where Spanish is the second language. The quizzes were … Read more

The Problem of Translating – Where Do We Start…?

Here at uTalk, we’re five years into our epic project to localise our app in over 200 languages. Lovers of uTalk will know that we’ve already released over 130 languages, and there are plenty more in production as we speak, including Manx, Dzongkha, Shanghainese and Lebanese Arabic. Whenever we produce a new language, we do … Read more