Archive for December, 2010
Dec
Dec
Language is not a fact
I imagine that’s a confusing title. In fact, that was intentional. My goal was to catch a few of you assuming that the opposite of a fact is a fiction. Maybe it worked. Maybe you even got a little angry and thought, “good heavens, is Randy suggesting that language isn’t true?…”
No. That’s not
Dec
Dec
Italian phrases that play tricks on my ears
Early on while I was learning Russian, I remember learning the phrase не курить (“nye koo-reeht”) meant no smoking…. There may be better ways of saying it, (before you rush to the bottom to tell me I’m an idiot, read this), but this one will always stick in my mind because the moment I
Dec
Dec
A few more Italian idioms
Today, we have a few more Italian colloquialisms, or idioms, or slang… or whatever you like to call them — I still don’t know (or care) what the difference is.
These are fun little phrases because they don’t mean what they say, and it’s important to understand them correctly when you hear or see them…
Dec
Dec
Speaking Spanish in the southwestern U.S.
For the past ten days, I’ve been exploring the southwestern U.S., with visits to six more states to which I’ve never previously been. And as a language-lover, one thing has been clear right from the start: speaking Spanish has made this a much more pleasant experience for me.
In St. Louis, after I’d seen all…
Dec
Dec
Italian and Spanish compared
When I began my year of learning Italian, I was already a speaker of Spanish. And as both Spanish and Italian are descended from Vulgar Latin, they have a lot in common.
At times, having familiarity with Spanish was somewhat of an advantage, and at other times, it’s actually a disadvantage. But a lot of…
Dec
Dec
Introducing the Yearlyglot mailing list
My year of Italian is drawing to a close, and the end of this project is also the beginning of the a new adventure. But don’t write the obituary For Italian just yet. Even as I’m starting to think about starting over next year with a new language, there’s still more to come from Italian.…
Dec
Dec
Be more confident
Have you ever had a conversation like this?
A: Oh let me tell about this really funny thing that happened yesterday! I was in a store… in a… um, hardware? Can I say that?
B: Yes.
A: Yes, hardware store. I was in a “hardware store”, and I saw this kid and he was… um……
Dec
Dec
What I’ve learned in one year
Looking back on this year, I’ve learned quite a lot. And that’s the point of this project, after all, isn’t it? Setting out to learn a new language fluently in one year may not make me the most aggressive language learner, or the biggest, coolest polyglot on the block, but it is quite clearly a…
Dec
Dec
Best of 2010
The end of the year is always a big time for me. With my birthday on December 15th, Christmas on the 25th, and New Year’s Eve on the 31st, there’s already a lot going on. And this year is even worse because I’m also moving this week, so there are a lot of logistic to…
Dec
Dec
More Russian coming in 2011
I wrote a few posts about the Russian language this year, some of which were somewhat popular, but it seemed that most of my readers were either people interested in Italian, or people interested in language-learning in a broad sense. Thus, I didn’t make Russian much of a focus in my writing this year.
However,…