Turkish Foods: 19 Must-Try Dishes & Essential Vocabulary
Discover the best of Turkish foods with our guide to 19 must-try dishes, from kebabs to baklava. Learn essential food vocabulary too!
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5 steps to overcoming your fears and conquering the world
Today’s guest post is from my friend Matt Kepnes (aka Nomadic Matt), who wrote here earlier about How to travel the world like Indiana Jones. He has extensive travel experience, and his book How to travel the world on $50 a day has just been published today. If you are in any of these cities, […]
9 of the most unlikely countries to find the language you want to learn
In the last five months, I have definitely received the most double takes of my life whenever I said that I had been learning all my Egyptian Arabic in Brazil.
It’s just such an unlikely combination! Brazil has never had a huge or even tiny wave of Egyptian immigration. While there, I only managed to meet one single Egyptian in person in my entire 3 months. This was partially the reason I did it – to prove that even if there are no natives nearby, you can learn to speak the language entirely online.
Standard Arabic or Local Dialect – Which Should You Learn First?
Probably one of the most frequent comments I’ve received on my videos over the last months, usually from people in Arabic speaking countries that are not Egypt, or from elitist academics, all of whom ignored my travel-in-Egypt focus, has been “You should be learning Modern Standard Arabic (MSA)! It’s much better than dialect!”
Now that I’m actually using what I spent months preparing for, in the country itself, I can confirm that learning a dialect is far superior to learning MSA if you plan to speak the language.
Walking from the Nile to the pyramids, and the people I met on the way
Don’t worry, video updates in Arabic are coming soon 😉 Today I’ve just recorded the first of many videos to document my time in this country, and it should be on my Youtube channel by Monday (need time to upload HD videos on slow connections, as well as subtitling). But first, it’s time for another […]
Walk like an Egyptian: Why Blending in Matters
I woke up groggy, still trying to snooze off a sleepless night of New Year’s parties, looked out my window and could see that we had just flown over a small bay of some sort that showed the Mediterranean sea part of my journey was done. Our flight had just entered Egypt, and it was […]
How I learned to speak Arabic while living in Brazil
My three months are officially up! In a few hours I’ll be getting a flight back to Ireland to spend Christmas with my family, then heading to Germany for a few days to celebrate the New Year in Esperanto with some good friends as always. Then, a few days into January, I fly into Egypt, […]
“It’s a big bad scary world out there!” Are you sure North America?
Edit: I wasn’t expecting this post to cause so much debate, but like the one linked just below, the reason I wrote it isn’t to be “anti-American” as far too many crybabies are claiming, but because you guys need to read a different perspective and understand how us non-Americans think for a retrospective look at […]
Dozens of xmas gift ideas to cheer up your language-learning loved ones
Language learning can and should be free, and there are many ways to do it without spending a penny, which I discuss regularly on this site. However, there is one time when spending a bit of bob can certainly be justifiable – when giving in to the consumerist frenzy that we celebrate just after the […]
“Skype me maybe” – Inspiring music video sung by 17 polyglots in over 30 languages
After a LOT of work to prepare the lyrics, round people together, send way too many emails, have contributors pick verses and languages, give them feedback for several different takes, blend it all together, get through the immense task of video and sound editing, and making sure everyone was happy with it… “Skype me maybe” is finally ready for the world! 🙂
As you can see, the storyline is that I’m a hopeless language learner, ready to give up, when 16 of the Internet’s most famous polyglots show up to give me some encouraging words… in the tune of Carla Rae Jepsen’s “Call me maybe” that was popular this year, and inover thirty languages. Yes, it’s as crazy and as good as it sounds! 🙂
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