The Language Learning Specialists
The Indonesian word for ‘dictionary’ (kamus) is almost the same as the Swahili word (kamusi) and is in fact an old borrowing from Arabic that somehow came from the Greek word for ‘ocean’. Confused? Here’s how multilingualism and trade spread three rather unusual words around the world. An ocean of words The Indonesian word for … Read more
If you’re a native English speaker, then you may not ever have noticed your gender affecting the way you speak – at least, in terms of the words you use. However, this is not true across all languages. In this blog post, uTalk’s Language Guru, Brian, set out to find some languages where women in … Read more
uTalk’s regular guest blogger and all-round language guru, Brian Loo Soon Hua, is back with our 500th published post, all about Valentine’s Day! Learn what to call your loved one in different languages—and maybe try some out on the 14th! It’s that time of year again; Valentine’s Day is just around the corner. If you’re … Read more
Greetings are so important that every language on Earth has a different way to say hello. Have you ever wondered what hello actually means and why we greet people with it? What are some more colourful ways to say hello in other languages around the world? Are there languages where greetings don’t exist? Brian Loo … Read more
Happy Cappuccino Day! In today’s post, uTalk’s guest blogger Brian investigates the many different ways of saying ‘coffee’—and where the word used around the world actually originates! Forget about tea. Linguistically speaking, coffee is the one beverage whose name sounds the same in almost every language in the world today. Just landed in South Africa … Read more
London-based language experts uTalk are helping passengers on Emirates Airline prepare for arrival with new inflight language videos. They’ve produced a series of films, which can be seen on all Emirates flights, giving travellers an introduction to five languages, with beginner lessons covering first words, food and drink and getting around. Emirates’ award-winning inflight entertainment, … Read more
The majority of us have seen The Jungle Book or at least can hum along to ‘The Bare Necessities’. And we are super excited about the release of the new Jungle Book adaptation, so we thought we would find out how Rudyard Kipling came up with all of the animals’ names. As the film is … Read more
Here at EuroTalk we love hearing feedback from participants of the Junior Language Challenge! So when runner-up Aalaya Sanjeeva’s teacher Jackie Gliniecka from The Hawthorns School sent us this wonderful message about how she’s found being involved in the competition over the years, we had to share it with you 🙂 10 years ago, in 2005, we … Read more
On Friday 16th October, our 33 Junior Language Challenge finalists came to London to battle it out to win the trophy. The children have learnt three languages during the course of the competition, with Portuguese being the first language, moving onto Mandarin for the semi-finals and Arabic being chosen as the final language. All three heats at the … Read more
After seeing how amazing our Junior Language Challenge semi-finalists were at learning Mandarin, we’ve set our 33 finalists the new challenge of learning… Arabic. Over 250 million people speak Arabic, across 22 countries. There are a number of different dialects within Arabic, including Moroccan, Classical, Lebanese, Gulf and Egyptian. Modern Standard Arabic is understood across the Arab … Read more