Language

Blog posts on Language.

Page 4

Somewhere between monolingual and bilingual?

Talking on the phone with a friend in French, I was trying to find how you say “kidney failure” or “his kidneys could fail” or any other form of explaining the medical tragedy. As it turns out, I don’t know how to say that in French. I had to check in a dictionary to find […]
October 19, 2012
My favourite dictionaries – part 3: Spanish-French

Ok, this is the last part of the series – then you’re off the hook 😉 Spanish is my fourth language and I don’t use it that much. I don’t translate from Spanish and I’ve been 4 days in Spain in my whole life. Nevertheless, I really enjoy learning it, or rather practice it at […]
October 10, 2012
My favourite dictionaries – part 2: German-French

Upon arriving in Germany, I did not know any online German-French dictionary. Needless to say I was not willing to carry my printed edition everywhere and had to find a remedy to my predicament. The first resource I actually used was dict.cc for its very large content but that happened to be… German-English. It’s good, […]
October 01, 2012
Two years in Hamburg – those voices in my head

Well, time flies, doesn’t it? It’s been two years I’ve been living in Hamburg and many things happened, good things, bad things, blablabla – life, you know? While I thought for a very long time I would never manage to learn German to a decent level, I find myself to perform better than expected. I […]
September 26, 2012
My favourite dictionaries – part 1: French-English

Right, I know it’s been a LOOOONG while since I’ve posted anything, but here I am again 🙂 I’ve decided to write a post about online dictionaries, since I am now working for one. I have a very different approach to it, since I don’t regard them from a user perspective any longer. The ones […]
September 21, 2012
What on earth is fluency?

Right, as I was browsing through job opportunities a couple of days ago, I noticed that many required fluency in one or several languages. What puzzles me is that fluency is a very vague word in term of knowledge. What is fluent? Does it mean mastering as your native language? Or being able to hold […]
June 23, 2011
8 months in Hamburg!

Well, 8 months is not really an anniversary people tend to celebrate, but this one is worth mentioning. Anyone who’s tried to learn German knows it is NOT an easy language. It’s even pretty hard, I think most would agree with me. My relationship with German started when I was 10 and started to learn […]
June 11, 2011
How much space do we have?

When it comes to learning languages, many difficulties get in the way. New pronunciation, spelling, different characters, unknown words, sometimes new alphabet and often different syntax. Not to mention learning grammar rules, words and conjugation. Assuming you can take the challenge and decide to give it a try. You learn and practise thoroughly, religiously even, […]
May 26, 2011
The mysterious world of punctuation conventions

Punctuation is very often neglected and deemed as not that important by too many people who are brought to write. Ask English speakers how they differentiate the uses of colons and semicolons, they are not that assertive about how to use them correctly, if at all. But this is not about the use of punctuation, […]
May 21, 2011
Good spelling is attractive

By deciding to write my blog posts in English, I take a bigger risk than writing it in my mother tongue, French. It would be so much easier to write in the language I master best, in which I know what sounds idiomatic, what grammar rules are correct, how to spell most words, etc.
May 14, 2011