May 2012
8 posts
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Google Translate now allows website owners and... →
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Stops Signs Around the World →
It’s interesting how many non-English-speaking countries have the word “Stop” on their stop signs.
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The Secret Languages of Twins →
An interesting article from Slate.
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Learn to read a sentence of Chinese in 3 minutes! →
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Color-coded text reveals the foreign origins of... →
Whoa. Cool.
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April 2012
11 posts
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Learn to Read Korean in 15 Minutes [COMIC] →
All language instruction should be in comic form. No, wait. Everything should be in comic form.
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I Learned to Speak Four Languages in a Few Years:... →
Interesting Lifehacker article with some solid tips in it.
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Choose Your Own Career in Linguistics →
This may be a bit too accurate for comfort…
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“Language does not always have to wear a tie and lace-up shoes.”
– Stephen King in On Writing
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Bilingual Children Switch Tasks Faster Than... →
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March 2012
16 posts
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Shakespeare's Accent: How Did The Bard Really... →
Reminds me of this video.
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My New eBook: 1001 English-Spanish Cognates →
I’m excited to announce my new ebook, 1001 English-Spanish Cognates: Spanish Vocabulary Words That Sound Like Their English Equivalents. It’s only $2.99 on Amazon, and it’s a great way to quickly and easily bulk up your Spanish vocab.
It’s a Kindle ebook, but you don’t need a Kindle to read it. Once you buy it, you can read it in your browser, on your Mac or Windows...
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Why Bilinguals Are Smarter →
Interesting short article from the New York Times.
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Santorum to Puerto Rico: Speak English if you want... →
Yikes.
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The QWERTY Effect: How typing shapes the meanings... →
This 6-page PDF report is a really interesting read.
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Sorry, there's no such thing as 'correct grammar'... →
Finally, an article that gets it right.
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In a Nutshell: Famous Linguist Noam Chomsky
From a post on Reddit:
Chomsky as a professional linguist was one of the founders of the “cognitive revolution”. Following up on the ideas of Pāṇini, in the 1970s he proposed the idea of grammar and syntax as being based on structured rules in a series of books on the subject.
He identified language as resulting from innate human capabilities, specifically recursion. The innateness...
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February 2012
16 posts
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Seventh Grader Suspended for Saying "I Love You"... →
This still happens? *sigh*
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An Awesome Chrome Extension for People Studying... →
[Note: If this extension doesn’t work for you, try Mind the World]
If you use Chrome (and you should, because it’s awesome) and are learning a foreign language, you should definitely install this extension. What does it do?
Polyglot [the name of the extension] translates randomly selected words on the sites you visit into a language of your choice, allowing you to learn and practice...
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Daily List of Free Kindle eBooks for Foreign... →
Earlier this week I published a list of free Kindle books that were related to language learning. I’ve decided to make that a thing, and I’ll be updating the list every day. Today there are materials in French, Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese, Hindi, Indonesian, and English. Go check them out and download them ASAP. Most of them are free for today only.
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How do you become fluent in 11 languages? [BBC... →
This 20-year-old is fluent in English, Greek, German, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Afrikaans, French, Hebrew, Catalan, and Italian.
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Today's Free Language-Related Kindle Books...
These ebooks from Amazon may be free only for today (and only in the US), so grab them while you can. They can be read on Kindles, in a web browser, on a Mac or PC, on an iPhone or iPad, and on Android devices.
Every day there are new free Kindle books in or on a variety of languages. If this type of list is something you’d like to see more often, please like it or reblog it so I know.
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Dotsies: An Alphabet Designed for Reading, Not...
Dotsies is a font/alphabet designed to help us read more efficiently. Its letters look like this:
As the Dotsies site says:
Since latin letters (a, b, c, etc.) are optimized to be written by hand, they take up a lot of unnecessary space. Your eyes have to move at a frantic pace from left to right to read. Use screen space more efficiently! Have a more relaxed reading experience!
So in other...
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Do You Need to Know a Foreign Language to Major in...
Someone asked me this question recently:
Hello! I’m interested in pursuing a degree in Linguistics in the near future. Would you have any advice on the usefulness of knowing a second or third language (and to what degree - how would four years of GCE ‘O’-level German stand)? Did your course focus on English or were you to choose a specific modern language to study (e.g....
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Hundreds of company name etymologies →
Very cool Wikipedia stating the origins behind hundreds of companies’ names.
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Language experts to help identify internet... →
From the BBC, so it’s legit.
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Why You Should Always Keep Learning Vocabulary →
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