I am an English as a Second Language (ESL) teacher, and my former students always speak to me in English. Even those who attended my class over ten years ago. Their mother tongue (at least, for most of them) is French; so is mine. Yet, whenever I run into one of them in town or on social media, they address me in English.
With many of my friends wanting to learn French at the moment, I thought I’d put together a list of French songs that aren’t entirely terrible for those of you who might want to diversify your playlist.
Now that I am re-learning Spanish after almost ten years of not using it, I am reflecting on the best strategies to learn a language, which I thought might come in handy to some of you. Here's my no-nonsense rundown, based on my own experience as a serial language learner.
“Oh, you’re researching the untranslatable? Like hygge?” was the most common reaction. The second most cited example was “schadenfreude”. Those untranslatable tokens also were very popular with what looked like an infinite series of listicles invariably titled “Ten Untranslatable Words You Should Know” whose argument always seemed to be “Wow, foreigners are weird lol.”