šŸ™Œ uTalk Release 3.4: More Free Words! šŸ™Œ

Our tech guys have been hard at work over here on all sorts of fun stuff and weā€™ve decided itā€™s time to give you all a little treat. With this new update, weā€™re going to almost double the amount of free words available on the appā€”so alongside such classics as ‘yes’ and ‘no’, youā€™ll also … Read more

How The World Got Neapolitan Ice Cream

This spumoni day, we explain how Neapolitan ice cream came to exist. Chocolate, strawberry, and vanilla? Or maybe youā€™d prefer cherry, pistachio, and vanilla instead? When it comes to ice cream, everyone has their own preferences. This is particularly true in Italy, where food is so closely tied to culture that several dishes, including spumoni, … Read more

Languages are our heart and soul

Languages say something about our culture and our soul, according to uTalk’s language guru (pictured). Which is why Brian Loo Soon Hua, who knows upwards of eight languages, is worried about the number of endangered languages on the verge of becoming extinct. ‘Languages are going extinct and regional differences are slowly dying out,’ he says. … Read more

Valentineā€™s day ā€“ a day for declaring your love in any way you can.

Valentineā€™s day ā€“ a day for declaring your love in any way you can. But love can often be more tortured than a simple declaration. As Alfred de Musset said in his book ā€œOn ne badine pas avec lā€™amourā€: ā€œWe are often deceived in love, often wounded and often miserable; but we love, and when … Read more

New App Helps Save Endangered Language of Reindeer Herders Nicknamed ā€˜The People of Eight Seasonsā€™

Language learning company uTalk has launched an app to help save the threatened Southern Saami language spoken by reindeer herders in Norway and Sweden. The herders are nicknamed the people of eight seasons because their culture divides the calendar year into eight or more seasons to tie in with the life cycle of the reindeer. … Read more

Le MusĆ©e de l’Homme – Paris

7000 languages, 7 billion people ā€“ one museumā€™s answer The word of God, childrenā€™s novels, recipes, drunken talk, rumours or political promises: everything is about speaking. Itā€™s estimated that there are 7000 spoken languages in the world and a billion different ways to say all those things. This uninterrupted discussion among people of generations started … Read more

Blog: Who would you like to say ‘Thank you’ to?

Our word of the month for the #LanguageDare is ā€˜Thank youā€™ (as all of you who have bravely posted your social media entry will already know). And itā€™s got me thinking about all the people who have helped me on my language learning journey, whether by teaching, correcting, encouraging or even just interacting with me, … Read more

Blog: The problem of translating ā€“ does it ever end?

Last week, we talked about the problem of translating certain words and concepts into other languages (if you missed last weekā€™s blog you can take a read of it here). This week weā€™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

uTalkĀ 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 ourĀ utalk.com/appĀ and covers core languages in the curriculum (list). Thereā€™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 ā€“ Where Do We Start…?

Here at uTalk, weā€™re five years into our epic project to localise our app in over 200 languages. Lovers of uTalk will know that weā€™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