Lockdown acclimatised many of us to near-revolutionary changes in how we live and work. Services such as healthcare, essential retail and postal services were able to continue to keep people healthy and supplied with the food, medicines and materials they […]
It is hard to imagine a more dramatic short-term shift in the way people do business than the one we have seen in recent months. Companies that had previously resisted flexible and remote working have had to adapt and find […]
Filling our free time during lockdown became an unexpected 2020 challenge – suddenly we were all becoming experts at making the perfect cake or loaf of sourdough bread. But many people turned to learning a language, finding that they finally had the time to not only complete the lessons, but also to practise their new-found skills.
Now that the world has sped back up again, the challenge is to hold onto that language-learning progress and all its many benefits. In this article, the second in our ‘Life after Lockdown’ series, we summarise some of the many benefits of learning a second language during lockdown.
Life in the UK and around the world looks very different now to how it looked before the Covid-19 pandemic. We have entered a period of recession for the first time in over 10 years, and it is hard to imagine what the future might look like.
During lockdown, many people were able to focus their energies on developing new skills, including language skills. In this article, the first in our ‘Life after Lockdown’ series, we explore the journey through lockdown and consider how you can turn your freshly acquired language skills into a new career opportunity.
Learning a second language is quite a different challenge to learning your native language. When you are gradually developing your native language skills, you are also learning a myriad of other things – but learning a second language as an adult is a completely different experience because you are translating what you already know into a new way of communicating and understanding.
In this article, we consider just how far you need to take this process by asking the question: How many words do you need to learn to ‘get by’ in a language?
One of the most helpful ways to understand how languages are related to each other is to think of them as families, where closely linked ‘family members’ share more in common than distant relations – just like a family tree, where languages are grouped based on common linguistic ancestors.
In this article, we explore the way languages are linked through their family histories, with a special focus on the Indo-European family (home to English and many other European languages).
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