Words, Woords, Woorden
In this video David Crystal, a linguist with great authority on the English language, discusses his favorite words in the English language.
Lately I’ve been thinking about my favorite words. I don’t necessarily think I have chosen any favorite words consciously, but I think I subconsciously choose to use certain words and certain constructions of words without realizing it.
This phenomenon is even more interesting to me when I think about it in the context of learning a second or third language.
Read More
Signs of Life
Mr. Dorian takes a break from attempting to catch snowflakes.
Although freedom is rather temporary at this point, the taste of it is still sweet. I finally have some time to let my brain rest and to publish my first blog post of 2013! I can’t say that I have any interesting stories that will bring a smile, any weird new Dutch words, or any other interesting event in particular to talk about. My last 30+ days were dedicated to a whole-hearted effort to pass the University courses I was taking this semester. The most that I can say about them is that (for the most part) they are over. I’ve learned that I seriously have to work on developing a better learning technique to deal with the whole ‘learning things in another language’ thing.
Read MoreShaken not…shuffled?
Time is a precious commodity for me at the moment as I’m trying to rise to the seemingly impossible challenge of preparing myself for yet another exam period. I wanted to take a few minutes to post the most recently encountered curiosity concerning this quirky language called Dutch.
Read MoreBe wary of the egg whites.
It is apparent to me now that my interest in languages has always existed. I can clearly recognize my early fascination when I think back on how I used to read the foreign words on shampoo bottles, food packaging ingredient lists and any other place where these functional little translation dictionaries were presented to my young eyes. French and Spanish were the forerunners on American packaging. Now that I’m living in Europe there seems to be a whole array of tiny language dictionaries placed at my fingertips. In fact, in Belgium nearly every package contains at least 3 languages – Dutch, French, and German. A common mistake that those who have never attempted to learn a second language often make is assuming that language learning is a simple task of taking the word which you want to say and translating it to the corresponding word in the target language. Sometimes it works like this and when it does it’s a beautiful thing. Often it doesn’t.
Read MoreFalse Friends
The word friend seems to be a very straight-forward word that most English speakers associate with that warm feeling you get when someone does something thoughtful for you or the contentment you feel when you come in contact with someone that seems to look at the world in the same way that you do. We all know what it means to have a friend. I thought I understood the word friend in all of its senses; that was until I moved to Belgium.
Read More
........................................................
........................................................
........................................................
........................................................
