A kindly-looking granny in her Sunday best sees you walking down the street and comments, โWell bless your heart, sugar. That is quite the shirt.โ You thank her and saunter away a little prouder. Congratulations, youโve just been insulted. The Southern belle accent may sound sweet as honey, but like the seemingly innocuous โbless your heart,โ there may be [...]
โI donโt teach. I let them learn.โ This quote from legendary educator and mathematician Caleb Gattegno encapsulates his educational philosophy of promoting learner independence. Gattegno believed that real teaching could never be accomplished by force-feeding learners material they didnโt understand, and even worse, didn't want to understand. The Silent Way of teaching a foreign language aims to largely mute [...]
Raindrops. A crackling fire. Birdsong. There are certain sounds that everyone, no matter what corner of the globe theyโre in, likes to hear. We share an appreciation for these sounds as part of our human experience, regardless of culture, religion, or borders. Similarly, one Harvard study proclaimed that music too is a cultural universal, in that there are certain [...]
Ask someone to do an impression of a California accent and youโre likely to get a laidback โFersure, dude,โ with perhaps a shaka hand sign thrown in for good measure. But does anyone in California actually even speak like this? Fersure, dude. Not everyone though, and the standard baseline โCalifornia accentโ is quite moderate and more akin to โGeneral [...]
A common complaint from those who suffered through baffling and boring foreign language classes in high school or college is that they later canโt remember any of it. Despite all the struggles and sometimes years of work, the end result was like theyโd really never been in the class at all. At some point in time, they could likely [...]
How's your Yiddish? Probably slightly better than you'd thought, as many words from this Ashkenazi Jewish language have schlepped their way into modern American English. And if you're a fan of classics like Seinfeld or Curb Your Enthusiasm, or later hits like Unorthodox or Shtisel, then you've probably picked up enough to be a real mensch. Is Yiddish the [...]
From Southern drawl to Midwest normy to California cool, the United States is made all the more colorful by its abundance of local accents. A region's accent can be as emblematic as its cuisine and history, and they give an exciting new flavor to the plain old English we use every day. No matter how formulaic Hollywood has tried [...]
Although most everyone would like to know multiple languages, there's a perfectly good reason most don't ever achieve that goal - learning a new language is exceptionally difficult. Many young people put in years of study as kids and young adults only to later find that whatever basic skills they had once attained in the classroom have evaporated over time. [...]
Do you remember the day you said your first word? Probably not Although the event may mark a special memory for parents, the young speakers themselves later have no recollection of their first words. We don't start forming long-term memories until we're about two or three years old, which is a shame in this case, as our first few [...]
It's Friday night and Eddie and his friends are out to dinner at a renowned steakhouse. Eddie places his order, the waiter says "Very good, sir" with a slight smirk, and all of Eddie's friends have suddenly gone quiet. There's a pregnant pause as his friends look at one another, smiles growing on their faces. Eddie looks around the [...]
