I have had the pleasure of studying at university in both France and Italy so can really appreciate both countries’ cultures and languages. I learnt French on my Erasmus exchange year and it was my first foreign language to learn. My next language after French was Italian as I had fallen in love with the […]
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Both Polish and Russian are Slavic languages from the Indo-European family. I’ve learnt Russian over a long number of years and have in the past dabbled with Polish. In 2016, I started learning Ukrainian which is closer to Polish than Russian. As a result, Polish has become more understandable on my trips to Poland. The
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Both Polish and Ukrainian are Slavic languages from the Indo-European family. In late 2016, I started learning Ukrainian and have in the past dabbled with Polish. Learning Polish? Read our honest review of PolishPod101. As I already speak Russian, Ukrainian grammar was very familiar but the vocabulary was not obvious as it is a
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I started learning Russian while studying for my Master in International Relations. I specialized in the ex-USSR and Russian was the obvious linguistic match for this choice. Later on, I had the opportunity to use my Russian not only in Russia but also in Ukraine, where it is spoken or understood by the majority of
How different is Russian from Ukrainian? Read More »
Quebec French or Québécois has always been something of a mystery to me. I first came across it when I met a Québécoise exchange student at university and its different sounds (from standard French pronunciation) intrigued me. In 2016, I finally made it to Montreal (a city I had long wanted to visit) but for one
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Traveling around ‘Eastern Europe’ is one of my passions as is learning languages. When I travel across this region I normally use Russian as it’s the most useful lingua franca for communication. Now that may surprise many readers, especially those who are used to speaking in English no matter where they travel. For historical and
Do you need local languages to travel successfully in Eastern Europe? Read More »
I love traveling to both Portugal and Spain (and Latin America, of course). Moreover, Brazil is actually my favorite country … in the world! I learnt Spanish while living adjacent to a Spanish-speaking barrio in Washington, DC in the US. My time in Washington, DC also included my first trip to Brazil and the beginning
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I first started learning the Italian language over 10 years ago and got to a very basic level in standard Italian before going to study in Bologna for one year. When I arrived I was taken aback by the number and variety of dialects spoken on a daily basis by Italians of which I struggled
How different are Italian dialects and languages for the learner? Read More »
As an avid language learner and superpolyglot, I find pronunciation to be my weakest point. In particular, hearing the various sounds that differ from those found in my native language, English, had proven elusive for me when I first started learning new languages. My first foreign language was French. In the beginning, I was tormented
How to learn better pronunciation in 7 steps! Read More »
German and Dutch are 2 languages from the Germanic family and I’ve had the pleasure of learning them both of them in recent years. I’ve also lived in both Germany (Munich) and the Netherlands (Utrecht) for a little over a year each so I’ve had more or less the same in situ exposure to both.
Dutch and German: Similar or Different? Read More »
