Blog

Travelling Corner: My 5 Best of Prague

Prague, my dear Prague… I always experience a whole load of feelings here: from laughter, disgust, admiration, astonishment or surprise; it’s true, you can be amazed and rationally challenged everywhere. Example one: When I arrived in Prague, I wanted to buy a weekly ticket for public transport. The middle-aged saleswoman was switching between several languages…
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Learning a Language: Are Group Lessons Really for Me?

When we decide we want to learn a new language, we want to find a suitable tutor or a course to guide us through our new learning journey. When is it right to have group lessons? Let me share with you some ideas. FIRST STEP Let’s learn a new language together! We have more support…
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Learning a Language: Is Individual Tuition Really for Me?

When we decide we want to learn a new language, we want to find a suitable tutor or a course to guide us through our journey of learning a foreign language. When is it right to have individual lessons? Let me share with you some ideas: LANGUAGE SPECIFICATION You might want to learn an unusual…
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Language Learning Tips: How to Use Your Language Skills Daily

What happens to a skill that you don’t use in a while?  You will be familiar with the phrases, “I’m out of practice” or “I’m a bit rusty…”.  It is a well-known fact that if you don’t keep up a skill you can forget it or it won’t come as naturally as it once did. …
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Travelling Corner: My 5 Favourite Places in Belgium

Belgium is an interesting country with three different languages, five parliaments and 1150 different types of beer!  There is a lot to see there too.  I used to live and work in Belgium and spent six years in the country in total, three in Brussels and three in Antwerp.  In that time, as well as…
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Book Review: My reading companions to Crete

What did I read when I travelled to Crete? A rather eclectic selection of travel writing, which I enjoyed reading and from which I learnt a lot more about Crete. Greek Islands, Lonely Planet I think I have a good relationship with the Lonely Planet guidebooks. I’ve been using them for a while and find…
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On Languages: Russian

What do we know about the Russian language? Russian is the 5th most widely spoken language in the world with 277 million speakers. Russia itself has 142 million native speakers and is the world’s largest country. Russian is one of the six official languages of the United Nations. Due to the size of the Soviet…
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Merry Christmas | Joyeux Noël | Fröhliche Weihnachten | Feliz Navidad | Veselé Vánoce | Wesołych Świąt

As the year is officially coming to an end, many of us will reflect back on the past twelve months and make plans for the upcoming year. Do you already have a list of New Year’s resolutions? Will you want to learn a new language or improve your skills in 2017? I definitely want to…
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Travelling Corner: My 5 Best of CRETE

“The truth is that the Cretans are the Scots of Greece; they have lived through countless crises to emerge always just as truly themselves – indomitable friends or deadly enemies” Lawrence Durrell writes in The Greek Islands. Alexandra Fiada in the Xenophobe’s Guide to the Greeks points out that ‘[t]he Greeks come second only to…
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On Languages: Dutch

The Dutch language is a West-Germanic language (others in this family include English, Frisian, German and Luxembourgish) and its use goes back to the fifth century. Modern Dutch (Nederlands) is spoken by about 23 million people as a first language in the European Union —including most of the Netherlands and Flanders in the north of…
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