Tag - multilingual

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Sunday, May 5 2013

How Speaking Too Many Languages Is Limiting

© Jeremy Sutton Hibbert - Restaurant sign in Figueres, Catalonia., mai 2013

I know, by saying this - that speaking too many languages is limiting- I probably go against years and hours and sweat tears of very dubious as well as very serious research that say the contrary. As a matter of fact, if you go about googling the advantages of speaking many languages, the number of  […]

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Saturday, September 18 2010

Of Language and Thought: Gender Awareness

The sky, a sun, a moon and a pigeon © Joao Vicente, CC-BY 2.0

Partant d'un article du New York Times sur la question essentielle de savoir si la langue que nous parlons décide de nos pensées, quelques considérations sur la langue en général et en particulier l'utilisation de différents genres pour les mêmes choses, notamment en français et allemand.

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Friday, July 3 2009

Vorauseilender Gehorsam

While reading one of the blogs I follow from afar on the "intercultural" scene, I stumbled upon the concet of "vorauseilender Gehorsam" (obedience before the order), an interesting concept which the commenter on the blog thought could be an explanation for the rise in English words within other languages. The idea being that people obey soe "unknown boss" that expects them to strew their conversations with English words to be fashionable, because it is the thing to do.

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Saturday, May 30 2009

Which Language Says it Best?

Quand on apprend une langue étrangère dans le pays où elle est parlée, on apprend souvent des mots dans leur contexte étranger. Du coup, il devient extrêmement difficile de les traduire dans sa langue maternelle. C'est aussi le cas dans l'autre sens, de sa langue maternelle vers la langue étrangère. Certains mots n'ont simplement pas de traduction qui revête toutes les nuances d'un mot dans une autre langue. Quelques exemples.

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Monday, May 25 2009

Pourquoi les français ne parlent pas de langues étrangères

A few months after writing my blog post Why The French Don't Speak Any Other Language, I read Jean-Benoît's Nadeau Les Français aussi ont un accent. Jean-Benoît Nadeau is French Canadian and lived two years in France to study the French. And he seemed to come to a conclusion similar to mine concerning why the French don't speak any other language, ie. that the mastery of the language is a very important thing for the French and unless they speak a foreign language perfectly, they just won't speak.

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