If “pilot speak” sounds like another language to you, you’re not far off. Aviation English is the internationally-established language of the skies, consisting of about three hundred terms that are a combination of professional jargon and plain English. With the...
If you’re thinking about learning a new language, it can be tricky to know where to start. Do you want to go for something that’s widely spoken like Spanish, a business-relevant language like Chinese, or a language that’s interesting to...
Don’t get salty, but slang isn’t new. You might think the idioms you use today are the GOAT, but they could easily go out of fashion in just a few years. Phrases, just like fitness or food trends, come and...
Watching foreign language programming can feel like swimming against the current. The unfamiliar words keep coming and coming, and just when you feel like you’re beginning to get the hang of it, a particularly speedy bout of dialogue sends your...
If you have ever studied French, Spanish, or German, you’ve learned about a tricky linguistic nuance that makes learning these languages difficult: noun gendering. In these languages, each noun has an assigned grammatical gender. In Spanish, for example, a mug...
The COVID-19 pandemic has moved many American workers out of their offices. In early March, an estimated 16 million U.S. workers switched to working remotely. Many experts suggest that remote work will remain long after the pandemic is over. Tech...
Iceland is a small island nation in the North Atlantic Ocean that is home to about 340,000 people. The Icelandic people trace their origins to Northern Germanic ethnic groups. Only about 350,000 people speak Icelandic worldwide. Most native speakers live...
Learning a language is full of excitement, frustration and many times, embarrassment. This was perfectly illustrated to me one day when a coworker of mine, Clara, who was in the process of learning Spanish, was doing her best to make...
English speakers use the schwa all the time. It’s our most popular vowel sound, and yet we don’t have any written symbol that corresponds to it. That’s because English spelling – a topic I love to rant and rave about...
If you are fluent in more than one language, your job prospects as a translator — converting written text from one language to another — are growing at a rapid clip in the U.S. market. According to the U.S. Bureau...
In recent years, research has shown that languages like Mandarin Chinese, Korean, Turkish, and Japanese use more simple number terminology and express math concepts like fractions more clearly than English. This makes it easier for speakers of these languages to...
Can you name the English vowels? If you rolled your eyes and answered A, E, I, O, U and sometimes Y, you’re on the right track, but you’re still missing nine out of fourteen correct answers, including epsilon, open o,...
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