About

Welcome to my language learning blog!

My name is Miriam and I'm a language enthusiast. I'm interested in languages from a linguistic point of view and because I want to know more about other cultures. My mother tongue is German and I'm fluent in English. At university I studied Japanese, Chinese and Teaching German as a Foreign Language (DaF). I have studied one year in Japan and taught German in China for six years.

In this blog I want to share my language learning experiences with various languages and also some cultural insights, that I gained while looking into the languages. I'm especially interested in languages with their own script. So far, I can read the Greek, Kyrillic and Arabic alphabets as well as the Chinese, Japanese and Korean scripts.

Lingotopia on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lingotopia.blogspot.de/
My language map: https://www.lingholic.com/mlm/Miriam/
My Dutch blog: https://hetnederlandseexperiment.blogspot.com/ My Kurdish blog: https://ezkurdihindibim.blogspot.com Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/miriams_lingotopia Twitter: https://twitter.com/Lingotopia_Blog
Tumblr: https://www.tumblr.com/blog/miriams-lingotopia/

Beliebte Posts aus diesem Blog

Mixing Chinese and Italian (Zhenjie Paifang vs Archi di castità)

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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...
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What's in a face? About Stereotypes

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This week I finally started my new job as a lecturer in a masters studies program called "Germanistik und Interkulturalität/Multilingualität " ("German Studies and Interculturalism/Multilingualism"). As you may figure, this seems to be just the right thing for me and I'm excited to go back to teaching again. Interestingly, a new colleague asked me, if I was from New Zealand. It seemed that I looked a bit Maori to her. Not long ago, I talked to another italki user and told him, that I was mixed-race to which he replied that he always thought of me being American Indian. This prompted me to conduct a little experiment on stereotypes and I posted this discussion on italki:  https://www.italki.com/discussion/165794 . If you're not an italki user, you can't read the whole discussion, so I'm going to summarize it. My initial post was:  I had some discussions with other users that it seems to be difficult to guess my ethnicity and my age from...
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Talk to my hand! Learning sign language with one hand

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The first time I learnt something about sign language was when I visited a dormitory for deaf youngsters who pursued a vocational training in Munich. The director of the dorm explained that German Sign Language (GSL, Deutsche Gebärdensprache) was a language completely independent of spoken German. I learnt that GSL had its own complex grammar and even dialects. After the tour through the dorm, the visitors could have drinks in the dorms café and suddenly I felt mute. How was I supposed to communicate that I wanted a coke? I didn't know any sign language! It was an interesting experience and since that time I was fascinated by sign language and by Deaf culture . Yes, Deaf people have their own culture. A world that is unfamiliar to hearing people. But I love it that the Deaf community embraces their own culture rather than seeing themselves as disabled. "Able-bodied" or "disabled" are just terms defined by society, but not necessarily how people feel themsel...
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