June 2024
March 2015
Don’t Believe You Aren’t Good at Languages!
Have you heard the same thing I’ve heard when adults describe the language classes they took in school? What I’ve heard again and again goes something like this: “I took four years of French and can’t hold a conversation!” The number of years of classes will vary, as will the language, but the feeling of frustration is constant. And no wonder. After so much effort taking classes, people expect to be able to have a conversation. But at the root of this common frustration is a misapprehension, widely shared, that being able to speak reasonably well in [...]
Pragmatism, Not Orders, Drives the Languages Americans Speak
The executive order to make English the official language of the US continues a long history of suspicion toward languages other than English that dates back to some of our founding fathers. Benjamin Franklin worried that the German-speaking immigrants of his era would never learn English and therefore not become true Americans. Yet at this point in our history, an executive order proclaiming that English shall be our official language is like proclaiming that all fish shall be officially wet. English has long ago saturated all aspects of life in America. And besides, Americans have never [...]
You can book Steve for many different audiences
First, know that she has one of those glorious English accents (or what all of us who are not English would call an accent), which makes her a natural for the audio book narration that she does. Although U.S. born, Caroline grew up in England and studied literature at the University of Warwick (fyi for American ears: that second “w” is silent).
