English

Blog posts tagged with English.

Archive

Is English the official language of music?

It seems to be challenging for other languages to break the international charts, let alone selling over 20 million records to enter the legendary most selling albums – Andrea Bocelli, who sings in Italian, looks rather lonely in this table. Is English better than other languages? English sells well, nobody will question that. It does […]
August 11, 2019
What is your favourite language?

When you’re a language specialist, it is not unusual study more than one foreign language. It usually starts with one or two, learnt at school by chance or by default. Then the passion slowly grows and and leads you to devour more languages. Because they are of the same family and you think it’s an […]
September 28, 2013
The secrets of Chamber

I was recently discussing the difference between “room” and “chamber”. It’s not quite easy to give an explanation without pondering for a moment. Spontaneously, one would think chamber is a more elegant way of designating a room. The word room is a more used than chamber: bedroom, living room, bathroom, etc. However, it does not […]
January 05, 2013
The Dübel Affair

Moving to Altona involved some heavy lifting (still recovering) and of course some DIY, which is not quite where my skills shine. I enjoy it, I’m just not cut for it, except that is, for the immeasurable chaos I create. Presumably a skill of my own.
December 15, 2012
Swag? What the swag?

The good thing about living abroad is that you have the opportunity to learn a new language or sharpen your academic language skills. The bad thing is, after a certain laps of time, your primary language rusts and you feel like you are losing its command.
October 31, 2012
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