learning a language blog | learning a language blog
Oct.19.2012
I took French in high school because I was a ballet student and I wanted to understand the terms we used. On the first day of class, my (very young) French teacher told us a story about her recent trip to France. She tried to order a glass of vin rouge in a cafe, but the waiter wouldn't...
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Oct.19.2012
Sehr geehrte Frau M. Barkey,
I’m writing to you because I want to make sure you know that you never actually taught any German in that class about twenty years ago. All you did was tell us to read the book and cram vocabulary words. You happily handed out bad grades and scoffed off comments...
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Oct.18.2012
I’ve always loved languages – starting with English – and I couldn’t wait until I had an opportunity to learn a new language at school. For me that opportunity didn’t come until ninth grade.
But instead of opting to study a romance language I took my father’s advice to study Latin. After all Latin...
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Oct.18.2012
My first real test of Hebrew, my second language, was a matter of life or death. At the time I didn’t have the opportunity to point this out to my professor, who promise this would never be the case to a scared college sophomore struggling to put the sounds of the language in a pattern that would...
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Oct.17.2012
This, my second post on the subject of learning a language, was prompted by another flashback to the Frankfurt Book Fair. (See also my first post, Language at the Speed of Sound.)
After a long day at the fair selling translation rights to people from different countries at meetings spaced just...
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Oct.16.2012
Many years ago I made a last-minute decision to attend the Frankfurt Book Fair, only to discover that the closest hotel available was more than 100 miles from the city. Fortunately, my travel agent had a solution. She would call her best friend Bruno in Frankfurt and see if he could arrange for me...
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Oct.15.2012
I recall High School Spanish 101 (the room's number was really 101) and the sad attempt the teacher had on teaching us, or me, a foreign language. At that time in 1967, seems like BC as I recall, such efforts were quite futile on me. I was already struggling with English grammar, and to master a...
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Oct.15.2012
Oh, this subject brings up so many memories…
Like any other child born and raised in Europe, I had to learn two foreign languages in school. As far as I can remember, being able to speak into another language was something of a great appeal to me. When I was a little girl,...
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Oct.15.2012
“Please blog about your experiences learning a foreign language”, you said. And I thought: this can’t be that hard. I love languages; I’ve learned a few, this should be easy. But it wasn’t. The blank screen stared at me, waiting, but my fingers refused to write.
The problem wasn’t my lack of...
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Oct.14.2012
“S and I got engaged!” I announced to my family, just before my second year at university, showing off my emerald and diamond ring.
My grandmother did not miss a bit. “Congratulations, my sunbeam! Does he speak any languages?”
“No.”
“Oh, dear,” she said, her smile waning. “His family...
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