Archive by Author
Speak German, Yoda Would Posted by Malachi Rempen on Nov 5, 2014 in Archived Posts
One of the most challenging aspects of speaking German in day-to-day life is this whole verb-at-the-end-of-the-sentence business. I’ve been living in Berlin and speaking German for over two years now, and it still trips me up. The fact is, despite seeming otherwise at first glance, German verbs don’t always go at the end. They probably…
6 Tips on Learning to Love Screwing Up Posted by Malachi Rempen on Oct 15, 2014 in Archived Posts
As I argued last week, if you want to learn a language, you’re going to have to learn to love screwing it up. As someone from the comments last time pointed out, you learn by making mistakes! It’s the only way! So learn to be at ease with making a mess of things. But how?…
Screwing Up: Learn to Love It Posted by Malachi Rempen on Oct 6, 2014 in Archived Posts
Language learning in a foreign country is hard. Not only do you have to wrestle with merciless grammar, call up vocabulary from the dusty depths of your memory, parse figures of speech and slang like in-jokes you aren’t in on, and even possibly learn how to read and write legibly in an entirely new alphabet…
Silly French Numbers: “Four Twenties and Ten” or “Ninety”? Posted by Malachi Rempen on Sep 22, 2014 in Archived Posts
Last summer I spent a little over a month in the DRC, or Democratic Republic of Congo, for work. As the DRC is a Francophone country, and my trilingual colleague did not feature French on his résumé of tongues, it was up to me to break out my rusty français. It did not go as…
Romantic Languages: Not Necessarily Romance Languages Posted by Malachi Rempen on Sep 8, 2014 in Archived Posts
Today I’m going to completely disagree with my own comic. I made the above strip a while back and thought I could mine some easy chuckles from a common stereotype. But now that I’m older, wiser, and more proficient in all of the above languages, I’ve come change my tune. Not only that, I’m going…
Flawless, Impossible Fluency Posted by Malachi Rempen on Aug 27, 2014 in Archived Posts
Germans have this funny habit of downplaying how good their English is. I feel pretty confident in saying that, aside from perhaps the Scandinavians and the Dutch, Germans speak the best English in mainland Europe. And yet every time I ask a German stranger if they speak English, they either fidget and shuffle their…
Charts and Checkpoints: A Language Learner’s Friends Posted by Malachi Rempen on Aug 11, 2014 in Archived Posts
Starting to learn a new skill is great. When you begin honing a skill, whether it be chess, whittling, playing the flute, styling hair, writing Hollywood comedies, or learning to speak a new language, there’s an immediate, satisfactory sense of accomplishment. Hey, look! At first you couldn’t do something at all, and now, after ten…