Last October, using a big discount offered to Polyglot Conference attendees, I acquired for my personal language library a healthy portion of the products offered by Glossika, a small but shockingly productive publisher based in Taiwan. Glossika Language Pileup! I…
Today in New York I got into a verbal altercation with a woman at a cafe who refused to move her belongings off an adjacent seat so that I could sit down. (There were no other seats.) Here’s what…
Until a couple of weeks ago I was zipping along with my Pimsleur audio lessons for Pashto. When I don’t like a voice on an audio recording, it is a huge bummer. It doesn’t happen much — I am…
I love the Pashto I’ve encountered so far, but I have a confession: I have been temporarily tempted aside by Arabic. Just as I was about to finish the first 30 audio lessons that Pimsleur offers for Pashto, I…
I am trying to shake up my routine a bit, so I have been testing out a new coffee shop. I realize this is not the most radical alteration one could make to one’s lifestyle, but much of life…
I loved the Polyglot Conference, held October 10-11 at the SVA Theatre on 23rd Street. About 425 people from around the world landed on the isle of Manhattan for two days of language talks and linguatastic extracurriculars. It made me happy. …
For the past months, my language life has continued unabated, on a daily basis, though undocumented here on this blog. I kind of fizzled out on Swedish, not really quite getting where I wanted to go, but it is not…
After a winter hiatus, I am back to doing weekly Big Apple Greeter visits. What that means is I take tourists around New York through the Big Apple Greeter volunteer program. The goal is to show visitors a slice of…
In my neighborhood last week, I auspiciously came across a new Swedish cafe, Fika, pictured here. At least I think it’s Swedish; I guess it could be pretend Swedish. Att fika in Swedish means “to have…
When I studied Dutch in 2012, I had a hard time figuring out how to pronounce things. And I am not a person who can read a text about or in a foreign language without knowing how to pronounce the foreign…
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