To learn a language effectively, nothing beats total immersion. The problem is that many learners of Chinese don’t live in an area where total immersion is practical or even possible, so a lot of learners help themselves along by watching Chinese TV shows. But in many countries, very few markets have Chinese TV [...]

It seems like the longer you study a language, the harder it becomes to improve in your ability to speak it. You get into a rut where you’re comfortable talking about certain subjects, and that’s what you talk about, so you hit a plateau. It’s really easy to get stuck on these plateaus [...]

If you’re going to rely on a computer translation to name your restaurant in a foreign tongue, it’s probably best to follow these simple rules:

Know enough of the target language to understand if your translation is at least somewhere in the general vicinity of being halfway near the point of possibly a tad bit close [...]

Click here for a larger image (sorry, nothing hi-res).

Here’s something cool I recently came across in my web surfing. I’ve always found it really interesting to learn exactly how the languages we speak today evolved from earlier forms, so when I found this chart online, I thought I had come across the [...]