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...

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...

There is one language, that I learn by total immersion, but will never speak: Swabian. Swabian is a German dialect, but it's quite unintelligible with Northern variants of German and the Federal State of Baden-Württemberg (located in the South-West of Germany) prides itself with the slogan: "Wir können alles außer Hochdeutsch" (We can do everything except speaking High German). I live deep in the Swabian country (aka Ländle) and my rough estimate is that 90% of my colleagues speak Swabian. I'm South German, but from another southern region and there are many expressions and also traditions, that I didn't know, before moving here. Today I learned about a maypole tradition, that I didn't know. Surely, I knew about maypoles in general. It's a tradition, especially prevalent in Bavaria, Swabia and the Rhineland. Every village decorates a huge tree (there are competitions for the most beautiful maypoles) and sets its up, right before the beginning of the m...