Here's a review of the Edinburgh language learners' meetup that I recently attended. It had a bit of a back-story. A new event for language lovers called "LingoFringo" was scheduled to take place in the Scottish capital. The event website was a mess (with no clear programme) and Edinburgh is a long way to travel just for a couple of days. That's especially the case in January, … [Read more...]
From beginner’s (A2) to intermediate (B1) German: What’s the difference?
If you feel like you've got the basics of German off pretty well but want to know how to break into the ranks of the intermediate German learner, this new series of articles is for you. What do you need to be able to do to call yourself an intermediate speaker? How do you acquire those additional skills? How's the process going to feel and how can you ensure that you keep going … [Read more...]
Learning Japanese: Month One update
How do you start learning Japanese? I'm finding out first hand thanks to my recently-announced "Learning Japanese" project. My goal is to be able to function at a basic level in the language when I visit Japan for the first time for the Polyglot Conference in October. This is the first of my monthly update posts, where I'll be sharing how it's going and looking ahead to the … [Read more...]
The visibility of Scottish Gaelic: a signage safari
In this post I want to share some photos I took of bilingual Scottish Gaelic - English signage from a recent trip I made to the Highlands of Scotland. It was my first visit to areas where Gaelic still hangs on, in pockets, as a minority language. I vlogged the trip in a series of five videos (from Loch Ness, the Isle of Skye, Inverness, Culloden, the Cairngorms National Park … [Read more...]
“Dr Popkins Method?” How I got fluent and you could too
What are the elements to success when you’re learning a foreign language? In this post, it’s time to pull together some of the threads that have emerged from telling my own language learning story in the “Dr Popkins Method?” series. I’ve got fluent in French, Welsh, Russian and German and make good progress with several other languages, mainly thanks to independent study as an … [Read more...]