Learn A Foreign Language By Yourself
With more than 35 million speakers in the world, a magnificently beautiful country with friendly people, and a vast international diaspora, there are plenty of great reasons for learning Thai. Thai might take some time to learn, but it’s not the most difficult language in the world. The main difficulties are the 5 tones and … Read more
You’ve started studying Tagalog (or Filipino, which is basically the same thing) – good for you, it’s an extremely rewarding language to learn, but now you’re wondering how long you need to keep at it in order to reach some tangible results. This obviously depends on a ton of different things, and nobody will be … Read more
The Scandinavian languages are known for being extremely close. With little effort, A Swede would understand both Danish and Norwegian. Some dialects are harder to understand, and some people might not have the same knack for understanding the fellow Scandinavians, but the languages do have a lot in common. How similar are Norwegian and Swedish … Read more
Recently I’ve seen this question asked on the internet, but with no direct answer. Is Swahili a language? In order to respond with a good answer, I’ll have to consider what exactly is meant with the question: If Swahili wasn’t a language, what else could you suppose that it would be? Swahili is a language, … Read more
Spanish and English are two of the more important languages in the history of Europe. They both have long and complicated histories and the languages didn’t just appear out of nowhere but rather evolved from the meeting of numerous ancient dialects throughout the ages. Both languages can be traced back to the Proto Indo-European language … Read more
So, what’s up with the backwards letters in Russian writing? You probably came here wondering about the И’s and the Я’s you often see in languages written with the Cyrillic alphabet. Well, they’re neither backwards, nor N’s and R’s. The alphabet used for writing Russian (as well as Ukrainian, Bulgarian, and a lot of other … Read more
The Romanian language is a Latin-based language that really mystifies people. Geographically, it’s relatively isolated compared to the other descendants of Latin, which are all grouped in the area around the Mediterranean Sea. (Originally). This means that Romanian has had a quite different history since it started moving away from the “Vulgar Latin” spoken in … Read more
Polish is one of the outliers among the Slavic languages, namely because it has a quite distinct sound. Some elements of its pronunciation are quite difficult, but they’re also part of what makes Polish sound so unique and – to some – beautiful. But what does polish really sound like? Any description is, of course, … Read more
The Japanese and Korean languages are two of the most widely spoken languages of East Asia. They’re also getting increasingly hyped and popular in popular culture, which means that a lot of people want to learn to speak one of them. Geographically they’re spoken in regions close to one another, and they do also share … Read more
Italian and Spanish are two languages that are both descended from Latin. The languages are related, in other words, which is also the case for German and English for example. But how close are they actually? I’ve previously asked the question in my comparison between Spanish and Italian. The answer is, that they’re pretty close! … Read more
