Minnesota

A lot has happened since I last wrote a blog post. It’s been a really great two months, but I thought it was about time I caught up on the blog about what I’ve been up to and upcoming adventures.After leaving Switzerland, which is where I last left off on this blog, I went back…

Taking on a New Language

At the beginning of this year, I was reflecting on where I wanted to go with language learning. I decided I didn’t want to take on any new languages and I wanted to focus on the ones I’ve already started. That’s not at all how this year turned out. At the end of 2014, I…

Playing Catch Up: Chinese Update

This whole summer I told myself I would review everything I learned in my first year of Chinese classes and that I would get ahead so coming back after summer wouldn’t be hard. I never managed get myself to open a book about Chinese, so I was really nervous about coming back to it. I…

Guest Post: Bilingualism in Finland

Today I’m really excited to have my first guest post on this blog! My friend James, who went with me on my recent trip to Finland had some thoughts about bilingualism, so I asked him to write about it for my blog and he wrote a lovely reflection on his experience in Finland. It’s weird…

Chinese Update

Back in February, I made a video of my presentation for my last Chinese oral exam (watch here), and I decided to do that again. This is my presentation for the oral component of my final exam for Chinese 1. I’m fairly content with my progress, but I wish we had learned a little more….

Flirting with French: Book Review

I read mostly non-fiction books in my own time, and most of them are language-learning or linguistics books, so I was thinking about writing about the ones I read. I should come up with a catchy name for this series, but first we’ll see if I actually get around to making a second post. The…

The Road to C2

Ok, let me explain. The Common European Framework of Referencing for Language (CEFR) is a scale that many people use to describe language proficiency levels, rather than trying to understand all those arbitrary terms like fluent, intermediate, conversational, etc. There are three levels – A, B, and C – and each level has two sub-levels,…