Even the mighty NY blizzard couldn’t prevent me from coming back to France after Christmas. I got back at 2:15pm Tuesday – only 7 hours later than originally planned – because I was lucky enough to change my flight to Lufthansa that didn’t require any layovers in the Northeast. My original Continental flight on Monday [...]
Full Story »About Jennie
Website: http://www.ielanguages.com
Jennie has written 661 articles so far, you can find them below.
Christmas Wonderland in Michigan’s Little Bavaria
Every time I come back to Michigan, whether it’s in December or not, I have to go to Frankenmuth and Bronner’s Christmas Wonderland. Originally settled by Lutheran immigrants from Franconia, Frankenmuth today is nicknamed Little Bavaria and is probably Michigan’s most popular tourist attraction. The city itself is rather small (2.8 square miles with 4,600 [...]
Full Story »Home for the Holidays
My Christmas secret is out! I came back to Michigan yesterday as a surprise for my parents and will be home for the next two weeks. I had been planning this for months and even though all of my friends knew, everyone was able to keep the secret and my mom was indeed surprised. I [...]
Full Story »Tastes and Tours of the French Alps
The following is a guest post by Cynthia Caughey Annet, an American who also lives in Chambéry. She is the author of american-in-france.com, a blog full of great videos, photos, recipes, travel tips, and observations on expat life in France and the French Alps. Looking for unique gifts this holiday season? Does your spouse, best friend or [...]
Full Story »Dr. Paul Nation & Survival Travel Vocabulary
Anyone who has done research on vocabulary acquisition has come across Dr. Paul Nation’s articles and books. His 1990 book, Teaching & Learning Vocabulary, as well as his 2001 book, Learning Vocabulary in Another Language, are the basis of most vocabulary acquisition classes at universities today. He favors frequency lists, extensive reading, and the lexical approach to [...]
Full Story »Education Systems, Creativity, Motivation and Results-Only Environments
Being snowed in for a week meant watching a lot of TED talks online, and a few that really interested me focus on certain established environments and how they are not very conducive to education, creativity or motivation. Sir Ken Robinson on how schools kill creativity and the need for a “learning revolution” throughout the [...]
Full Story »My two year-old niece will help you learn spoken French [New informal French video]
My two year-old niece was recently talking to David on the phone, and she asked t’es au boulot ? Are you at work? However, books will tell you to say es-tu au travail ? instead - or actually it’s more likely they will insist on êtes-vous au travail ? because foreigners never need to use the [...]
Full Story »The best language hack? Speak it!
My name is Benny Lewis, an Irish lad that at 21 would never imagine speaking any language other than English to be possible for me. I took German in school and did quite poorly, and when I visited Munich I couldn’t even order a train ticket – a frustrating place to be after five years [...]
Full Story »Review of Language Learning Websites II: Mango Languages, LangMaster, LinguaTV, and Yabla
Six months ago I posted my thoughts on the popular language learning sites Livemocha, Busuu, LingQ and Hello-Hello. Now I would like to review four other language learning websites that I have used recently. The previous four sites were “communities” where not only can you use their flashcards and exercises, you create a profile and [...]
Full Story »Chinese Food in France (Helps with Homesickness)
Happy Thanksgiving to the Americans, whether you are actually celebrating it or not! This week is always hard for me because I’m usually rather homesick, more so than at Christmas since Christmas actually exists in France (albeit a less excessive form of the holiday… I need an overload of decorations, people!) Luckily we did something [...]
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