Last night I had my ninth out of ten lessons in the Norwegian for beginners: module one class. I knew that I wanted to write this before it even started and I’ve written pages and pages about it and deleted it. So now, with the end in sight, I’m starting over. I’m not actually a … More I spent 10 weeks learning Norwegian
Blogmas is over! If all has gone to plan, I’ve been back from Germany just under six days and you should already have five posts on the subject – and now real time has caught up to blog time, yes, you do! So today I’m going to talk about something different: my Finnish language progress. … More How much Finnish have I learned in six months?
As I start to write this post, I finished lesson eleven of my twelve-lesson Russian evening course last night and I have one more lot of homework and one more lesson left and then I’m done. I’m glad for two reasons. One is that this is hard – learning anything with a different alphabet is … More A review of my Russian evening course
It’s now two years since my big Russian adventure and to celebrate the anniversary, and because I was talking about language-learning the other day, I want to talk about overcoming the Russian language barrier. I put off my Russia trip for years. Russia was well outside my comfort zone. It’s so… Russian. It never feels quite … More Overcoming the Russian language barrier
It’s September, it’s back-to-school season and although all that means to someone of my age is that it’s time to go back to Brownies, I thought I’d give you a quick tour of my year abroad student room in Switzerland. That’s partly because this is a travel blog and partly because I had a film … More Year abroad student room tour
I’m a serial language learner. Oh, I don’t reach fluency, nowhere near. I have a degree in French and Spanish, I’ve been learning Norwegian semi-seriously on and off for nearly six years with the intention of becoming… well, not fluent but potentially able to get by if I moved to Norway. I learned enough Russian … More I learned Finnish for a month and here’s what happened!
In honour of it being A Level results day tomorrow, let’s talk about degree possibilities. Specifically – what can you do with a language degree? Considering languages are so important when you’re travelling around the world, and considering the state of language teaching in the UK, I sometimes feel like one of my unique selling … More What can you do with a language degree?
I thought I’d do a post about my Norwegian learning resources. I’ve been doing it on and off since about the end of 2016 but it’s only in Lockdown Three that I’ve really started taking it seriously. It’s been what, a month, and I’ve been introduced to three tenses already that I’d never even seen in … More My Norwegian Learning Resources
One of the parts of connecting with cultures that we the Anglophones tend not to engage with so much is the language. As a person with a language background, that’s something I like to talk about from time to time. And as I look around my office even as I type this sentence, I can … More Stay At Home Storytelling: How to learn languages
I’ve talked a lot about being a language student and having a year abroad – in Switzerland, in my case. You might not know about that. I might not have mentioned it in the last five minutes (I wrote a blog about my year abroad last month). But I haven’t talked a lot about the … More Stay At Home Storytelling: What it’s like to be a language student in the UK
I Am A Polar Bear 