Reviews

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New York Has a Lot Going On!

General, Websites, Fairs/Festivals/Parades

This website includes listings of events around town, to enable you (according to its tagline) “see the city like a native ‘New Yawkah.’” I am including it here primarily because of its extensive list of fairs, festivals, and parades, which…

Step by Step Korean Penmanship: Look at the Happy Student on the Cover!

4 Korean, Books, Multimedia

I bought Step by Step Korean Penmanship at Koryo Books in Koreatown, because I was experiencing a language emergency! Specifically, I had come to a dead end in both of the Korean textbooks I was using: I couldn’…

Master the Basics of Japanese with These Useful, Clear Explanations

4 Japanese, Books

Master the Basics: Japanese by Nobuo Akiyama and Carol Akiyama begins with a multi-page diagnostic test to see how much you know. Since I personally knew nothing when I opened the book, I was a bit thrown…

For the AFFOI Website, You Will Need French!

French, Organizations

AFFOI, short for Assemblée des francophones fonctionnaires des organisations internationales, seeks to safeguard the linguistic diversity of international organizations. On its website, AFFOI asserts, “La diversité linguistique, culturelle et conceptuelle est une condition sine qua non…

Kana de Manga: I Think This Is A Kids' Book, But I Didn't Mind

3 Japanese, Books, Kids

Japanese has a complicated writing system combining two syllabaries (hiragana and katakana), as well as thousands of Chinese characters called kanji. A syllabary is different from an alphabet in the sense that each syllabary symbol represents a syllable (such as …

Dictionary.com Can Tell You the Origins of Words Like Schadenfreude and Aardvark

5 English, General, Dictionaries, Websites

I love this free resource. When I need absolute certainty about what I am looking up, I will go to my beautiful and totally current hardcover American Heritage dictionary, but for a quick check of a word’s…

Great Works at University of Rochester!

General, Websites

The goal of Three Percent is to be “a destination for readers, editors, and translators interested in finding out about modern and contemporary international literature.” Originating at the University of Rochester, the website got its name through the sad fact…

Advanced Italian Grammar: Some Great Practice

4 Italian, Books

Practice Makes Perfect: Advanced Italian Grammar by Marcel Danesi is part of a series of compact, more focused books within the larger Practice Makes Perfect series from McGraw-Hill. Overall I like this one. Advanced Italian…

Elementary Korean? I Think I Needed a Teacher to Accompany This

3 Korean, Books, Multimedia

I was pretty quickly overwhelmed by Elementary Korean. It is a textbook, accompanied by a CD to help with pronunciation. It is in fact a heavy, nearly $70 textbook, and the accompanying Elementary Korean Workbook is…

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