New Year’s Day marks the end of weeks of winter celebration. There was Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa and then New Year’s Eve right at the December’s end. Students wrapped up their …
Russian Words That Don’t Exist in English
Comparing English and Russian is like comparing apples to oranges. English is a Germanic language and Russian belongs to the Slavic language family. This means the languages have completely different …
read on
3 Min read
Essential Italian Verbs: Essere and Avere
Verbs are a crucial part of any language. Try to make a sentence without using one and you will realize that they are truly indispensable. The more of them you …
read on
5 Min read
The Curious Case of the Verb “To Be”
Let’s take a quick trip down memory lane. The very first thing most of us learned after the English alphabet was “I am…”, “My name is…”, and “How are you?”. …
read on
4 Min read
Boost Your Conversation Skills: Use French Transition Words
You are at the Cannes Film Festival in France. You want to describe all of the marvellous sights you see on the red carpet as the stars arrive for a …
read on
4 Min read
Japanese Sentence Structure Explained
In English, there is a concrete grammatical structure. In a simple sentence, you have the subject, the verb, and the predicate. Of course, this changes as we get into more …
read on
7 Min read
Master the Conditional Tense in French in a Few Easy Steps
Je voudrais un café s’il vous plaît. I would like a coffee please. This sentence in French uses the conditional tense. Voudrais is the conditional tense of the verb vouloir …
read on
3 Min read
Conquering the Genitive Case in Russian
The Russian language is notorious for its six cases, which, along with the endings, arguably make up the biggest challenge for learners. Do not be daunted, though. If you take …
read on
3 Min read
The Ins and Outs of German Pronunciation
It’s pretty common knowledge that German has a very regular writing system. Unlike some languages (say… English….) the German-speaking world has agreed on a series of spelling reforms that have …
read on
4 Min read
Break it Down: Chinese Radicals for Beginners
Chinese is a language that has no alphabet, which can be daunting for the Chinese learner. Instead there are characters, over 50,000 of them. However, if you want to learn …
read on
3 Min read