An old teaching adage says that no matter what the activity, a student can only pay attention for as many minutes as they are years old. For example, seven-year-olds can pay attention to a single classroom task or exercise for approximately seven minutes. When those seven minutes are up, boredom sets in, their attention drifts, and they start planning [...]
The Remarkable Reality of Awake Brain Surgery Imagine answering questions in one of the five languages you are fluent in or playing your guitar while undergoing brain surgery. As you provide the Armenian word for โpuppyโ or strum out the tune to a well known pop song, a team of surgeons is meticulously mapping out your brain functions. No, [...]
The debate over what is a language and what is a dialect may seem like a linguistic issue best suited for the halls of academia, but the distinction actually has far-reaching real-world implications that can affect the welfare of millions of people worldwide. Anything as fluid and nebulous as language is difficult to classify, and linguists, researchers, and politicians [...]
A joke really only has two parts โ the set-up (I'm on the new whiskey dietโฆ) and the punchline (I've lost three days already). The punchline is of course the funny bit and comes at the end, though for a longer joke, smaller humorous parts, known as jab lines, can be sprinkled in. If you've ever heard an unfunny joke, [...]
As students, many of us took part in some type of foreign language instruction at school, and depending on your age and country, this could have ranged from incomprehensible teacher lectures to singing songs, to intense grammar drilling. In the world of education, second language acquisition philosophies and practices change at a rapid clip, and the new breakthrough methodology [...]
From the moment we learn to control our mouths, lungs, and vocal cords as infants, we yearn to speak. As babies, we babble and attempt to copy words, and with no formal instruction at all, we can typically grasp the basics of speaking in under a year and begin to communicate. Neurolinguists have shown that our brainโs superior temporal [...]
Foreign language degrees in the United States have evolved beyond traditional literature-focused programs. In 2026, advanced language skills are increasingly valued across industries such as law, healthcare, technology, international business, education, and government. While machine translation continues to grow, employers consistently seek professionals who can communicate accurately, understand cultural nuance, and operate in multilingual environments where precision [...]
"What's in a name?" Shakespeare's Juliet famously asked. The answer, it turns out, depends entirely on where you were born. As a translation company, we work daily with birth certificates, marriage certificates, and name-change documents from dozens of countries. Few things make the diversity of human culture more visible than the documents people use to prove who [...]
Picture this scenario: A young German executive from a semiconductor manufacturer is sent to pitch a proposal to a high-level business partner in Japan. The German executive knows his companyโs products are superior, and he spends days preparing different documents, case studies, graphs, etc. as evidence. At the meeting he gives these mountains of handouts to the Japanese businessman, [...]
English is the official language of 55+ countries around the globe, but if you ask a random person to name the first one off the top of their head, there is a good chance theyโd give you the wrong answer. England? No. The US? Australia? No and no. English is of course widely spoken in those countries and is [...]
