Anna Wierzbicka is a Polish-Australian linguist who has extensively researched intercultural linguistics, semantics and pragmatics. I have been reading many of her books and articles for my PhD research because she is interested in how language reflects ways of living and thinking, and more specifically, how the lexicon or words of a language can provide [...]
Full Story »Notes from Symposium on Language Education in the Asia-Pacific Region
I attended a symposium last week at my university on language education in the Asia-Pacific region. It was very interesting and fascinating and left me wanting to learn every Asian language and visit every Asian country. I also attended the new postgraduate student induction and have been finishing up the final revisions on my research [...]
Full Story »New language tutorial on ielanguages.com: Danish / dansk
Thanks to Anders, we now have the 20th language tutorial on ielanguages.com: Danish / dansk Tutorials I to III are available, though some grammatical explanations and sample sentences still need to be added, especially in the last part. Anders plans to record mp3s to go along with the tutorials and I will be adding the [...]
Full Story »Say it in French Phrasebook and Swedish Listening Resources Now Available
My Say it in French phrasebook (Dover Publications) is now available through Amazon.com for $5.95! I have recently updated the Listening Resources podcast to include Swedish mp3s. Transcripts, English translations, and an RSS feed are also available. Check out the Swedish Listening Resources page for the first eight mp3s. (The mp3 player is not Flash-based [...]
Full Story »Most Studied Languages in Europe, Australia and the US
Yesterday was the 10th anniversary of the European Day of Languages and Eurostat has provided statistics about the most studied languages in the 27 member states of the European Union plus Iceland, Norway, Croatia, Macedonia and Turkey (though stats for Portugal are missing). “In the EU27 in 2009, 82% of pupils at primary and lower [...]
Full Story »Variation and Standardization: Romansh in Switzerland
An article about Romansh in the latest Weekend Australian is very interesting and relevant to my PhD research on the teaching of variation in language. Romansh has been the fourth official language of Switzerland since 1996, but there are five main dialects of the language among its 60,000 speakers, and none of the dialects are [...]
Full Story »Pronunciator: Free Vocabulary & Phrases in 60 Languages
Time flies when you’re having fun! It’s been nearly two weeks since I last posted and my only excuse is that I love working on my PhD so much that I spend all my time with my books and articles instead of my computer. I’m barely keeping up with updating the site and responding to [...]
Full Story »Multicultural and Multilingual Australia
One of the many reasons why I love Australia: an official Multicultural Policy From the government’s Multicultural Policy released in February of this year: “Australia is a multicultural nation. In all, since 1945, seven million people have migrated to Australia. Today, one in four of Australia’s 22 million people were born overseas, 44 per cent [...]
Full Story »Comparative Grammar of French, Italian, Spanish & Portuguese Available as PDF
I have finally finished scanning the 1868 book Comparative Grammar of French, Italian, Spanish & Portuguese Languages by Edwin A. Notley that I first mentioned in April. It is 412 pages total and available to download in PDF format. The original 19 x 13 cm book is set up with two columns on the left [...]
Full Story »New Language Tutorial on ielanguages.com: Latin
Thanks to Brandon, Latin is now featured on ielanguages.com! The Romance languages derived from Vulgar Latin, the major spoken language(s) of the Roman Empire. Classical Latin is what is taught at universities and written in books today since most of Vulgar Latin was never written down. The Appendix Probi is an interesting list from the [...]
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