Lingotopia

As a teacher myself, I'm a difficult student. I have my own ideas and methods for language learning and I'm not easily convinced by the ways others teach and learn. The easiest way to scare me off is using a boring textbook. Yes, textbooks are important in language learning.They cover the most important topics of daily life and also all the basic grammar. But the problem is, that I only learn well when the topic is relevant to me. When going by car on holiday to another country, knowing how to talk to a doctor or a car repair shop, is very relevant to me, so I make sure that I learn about this topics right before the trip, but in my daily life in Germany, I don't need to know, how to call a tow service in any other language than German. That's why I prefer to learn vocabulary and expressions when they are relevant to me and not when I happen to reach lesson 8 in a textbook... Also, I don't like to learn grammar structures in a certain order, just because that...

That was the beautiful view from our terrasse at Lake Garda. We stayed for two weeks in August at a holiday apartment in a small town up a mountain and all our neighbours were Italian. Prior to travelling there, I asked on italki, if it would be possible to communicate in French or Spanish in Italy. I have tried that already when I once went to Bologna many years ago and couldn't find help when asking for the way in English. So I asked in French and with my knowledge of Latin, I somehow deciphered the reply in Italian. But some (non-Italian) italki users told me that it would be extremely rude to ask the way in another language than the local one. A user asked me if I wouldn't find it rude if someone asked me the way in Dutch instead of German. No, I wouldn't feel offended at all. I don't expect tourists to learn German. But since I don't want to be rude, I started to familiarise myself with the Italian basics two weeks before the holiday and took two online clas...

One of my preferred methods of learning multiple languages at the same time, is reading something in one language and then writing about it in another language. So, this month, I take part in the Chinese reading challenge by Hacking Chinese and decided to read an anthology by Yu Qiuyu  ( 余秋雨读本 ), one of the most famous and influential contemporary writers in China. I want to use what I read as an inspiration for writing texts in other languages. So, yesterday I wrote a short text in Italian about a topic inspired by this book. Let me first explain the topic a bit. The first essay in the anthology is about paifang , traditional Chinese arches. When I stumbled upon the word zhenjie paifang (贞节牌坊), which means chastity arch , I remembered that I've been to a village called Tangyue (堂樾) in Anhui Province 14 years ago. The village is famous for their seven memorial archways built by the Bao family during the course of several centuries. The first archway can be traced back to...

I studied Chinese at university as a minor, lived and worked in China for six years and have a Chinese husband. So, I should be pretty fluent in Chinese, right? Sadly 还差很多 (= I'm still far from it). Chinese is, next to Japanese, one of my strongest target languages but in the last six years, I haven't really done anything to both maintain and improve my Chinese level. I only took two years of Chinese classes, the first year at university and also the first year  So, in order to push myself to do something for Chinese, I signed up for this months "Hacking Chinese Reading Challenge" . The goal is to focus on extensive reading. I will try to read a book for a change instead of always staring at the computer or smartphone screen. Hacking Chinese by Olle Linge is my favourite website with tips for learning Chinese. It offers methods, ideas and links to resources not only for beginners and intermediate students but also for advanced students. On the picture you c...