Exnilingo
Recent posts
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Why Packing a Suitcase Won’t Make You Fluent
“The only way to really learn a language is to move to the country.” “Stop studying and just go. You’ll pick it up naturally.” You’ve heard it all your life, and you may even believe it. And if you’ve read me a little, you already know I have a tendency to reject what is commonly advised when it comes to learning languages. Not out of contrarian instinct, but because of what I’ve seen and lived m…
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"How many languages do you speak?"
If you’re anything like me - openly interested in foreign languages from a very young age (or not), and occasionally overheard speaking a few of them - you’ve probably ended up being known, willingly or not, in your small circle of family or friends, at work, or in your tiny rural town, as ✨a polyglot✨. Whether that’s a good thing or not really depends on what you plan to do with that flattering …
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Learning a language is like moving houses
Learning a foreign language often feels like moving houses, except no one warns you how many emotional phases are involved, and there is no checklist that actually applies, no method that truly fits your linguistic profile. At first, it’s pure excitement. You haven’t moved in yet, but you’re already mentally hosting dinner parties. You walk through empty rooms in your imagination, assigning them f…
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The Cost of Speaking Too Early
This is it. You have decided, at last, to learn that language, for reasons that made perfect sense at the time and are now slightly blurry. You have been diligent. You followed the first lessons in the book. You did some of the grammar drills. But more importantly, you are on an impressive Duolingo streak, which is basically fluency gamified. You are, by any reasonable metric, doing great. Even mo…
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What makes a text feel off, even when it's grammatically correct
Something caught my attention last night, as I was inspecting the automatic translation Google made of my last article into my native French. An early 90s kid, I was raised during the toddler years of the internet, when little existed yet, and most of what did was in English. Back in the early 00s, translations were awkward, to say the least, and nobody would have suspected they would become so go…
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On pronunciation fossilization
There is a moment, often easy to miss, when pronunciation stops feeling tentative and starts feeling settled, not because it has reached some ideal form, but because it has become familiar, almost backgrounded, like a piece of furniture you no longer notice even though you still navigate around it every day, and I find myself returning to that moment when I try to think about why poor pronunciatio…
- accent
- fossilisation
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The Power Of Predictive Listening
When the brain becomes familiar with the sounds and rhythm of a language, listening starts to work ahead of time. Speech is no longer heard as a chain of separate sounds that need to be decoded one by one. Instead, it is followed as a movement that already points in a certain direction. The ear begins to expect what is likely to come next, guided by patterns that have settled through repeated expo…