Blog

1. What is Babel Magazine, who writes it and who is your audience? Babel magazine was set up by Lesley Jeffries and Dan McIntyre, two linguists at the University of Huddersfield. Lesley and Dan found it strange that the newsagent’s shelves had magazines for subjects such as history and geography,...

Estimates say that there are up to 7,000 languages spoken in the world today (in around 200 states!).  Some languages have millions of speakers and some have just a few thousand speakers.  But with so many languages to choose from, how do you decide which one to learn?  This blog...

We hope you found our post on writing skills useful.  This is the last post in the skills development series – and it talks about the most active skill of all, speaking.  Speaking is what most people want to do when they learn a language – it is how you...

We hope you enjoyed our post on how to improve your reading skills in another language. Now we are back with tips on how to work on another skill – writing.  Each language has its own writing conventions for different genres. Practice these and you can write letters to your...

Every month we publish a book review on our blog, but this month I have decided to write about some magazines on languages, translation and travelling that I enjoy reading (and yes, I am an old-fashioned lady, as I only have paper versions of them!). They are all available for...

Do you want to get a real taste of Italian life, travel around this beautiful country with ease, appreciate its art and architecture and be able to compliment the chef when you try the local delicacies? This guide to learning the language of the Bel Paese should give you a...

You may remember our blog post from a few weeks ago on how to improve your listening comprehension skills in a new language.  This week we give you more tips on how to optimise your language learning – this time with advice on how to develop your reading in another...

The Czech language or čeština is a language which may look and sound difficult: the words’ endings can change, vowels with acute signs have a longer pronunciation and words are written with diacritics. BUT, it is a funny sounding language due to its soft pronunciation, with many words you may...

We hope you enjoyed our Language Learning experience posts over the past few weeks. In the posts that follow, we are going to look at different techniques to develop your skills in your chosen language in four different areas: listening, speaking, reading and writing. This posts gives you a few...

What makes Polish SO hard? It seems that Polish grammar is the one responsible for these rumours! Many people are led to believe that Polish grammar is impossibly complex and simply un-learnable, but truth be told, it follows a set of logical and regular rules. Let us explain a few...