Tag: Language

Serve Large Language Models from Your Computer with Text Generation Inference

Running very large language models (LLM) locally, on consumer hardware, is now possible thanks to quantization methods such as QLoRa and GPTQ. Considering how long it takes to load an LLM, we may also want to keep the LLM in memory to query it and have the results instantly. If you...

My First 10 Years of Programming

As a curious boy armed with a new laptop and a passion for being the next Mark Zuckerberg, I started my university life and jumped into the vast realm of programming and technology in 2013. I can’t believe that there have been 10 years passed on already. These 10 years are not measured s...

It ain’t what you think it’s the language that you think in

A few weeks ago I was talking to Michal, who is a Lead Security Engineer over at Resonance Security. We were planning to discuss cross-chain issues, but as is always the case, the conversation meandered off into different fields, mostly concerning how the programming language you use shape...

Why inclusive language matters in coding

In 2023, our language mirrors our society, echoing our evolving values and attitudes. Nowhere is this more true than in the field of technology, where the language we use to converse with machines can reflect societal norms and ideologies. How is the drive towards inclusivity within our societies...

Program-Aided Language Models

Although Large Language Models (LLMs) are used for a variety of applications, they have typically struggled to solve reasoning-based tasks. This issue was significantly diminished with the advent of prompting techniques like Chain of Thought and Least-to-Most prompting. At a high leve...

Everything You Should Know About Evaluating Large Language Models

As open source language models become more readily available, getting lost in all the options is easy. How do we determine their performance and compare them? And how can we confidently say that one model is better than another? This article provides some answers by presenting training and eva...

Emerging Large Language Model (LLM) Application Architecture

I’m currently the Chief Evangelist @ HumanFirst. I explore & write about all things at the intersection of AI & language; ranging from LLMs, Chatbots, Voicebots, Development Frameworks, Data-Centric latent spaces & more. Why do I say LLMs are unstructured? LLMs ar...

Speech and Natural Language Input for Your Mobile App Using LLMs

Introduction A Large Language Model (LLM) is a machine learning system that can effectively process natural language. The most advanced LLM available at the moment is GPT-4, which powers the paid version of ChatGPT. In this article you will learn how to give your app highly flexible speech interp...

Large language Models: A Calculator for Words

It’s the early 17th century, a mathematician and astronomer named Edmund Gunter faced an astronomical challenge like no other. Calculating the intricate movements of planets and predicting eclipses demanded more than just intuition — it called for the mastery of complex logarithmic and t...

A Gentle Introduction to Open Source Large Language Models

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last year, you’ve witnessed the ChatGPT revolution and to how everyone seems unable to stop using it. In this article, we’ll explore its alternatives, jumping into the world of open source models. This first article of the series ...

It ain’t what you think it’s the language that you think in

Introducing SOL: Sequence Operations Language

Shortly after we started Motif last year, my co-founder Misha asked me to think about what core set of sequence operations we should support. Thus began our quest for a small, yet expressive set of operations that allowed our users to do almost anything they could imagine with their event ...

How to Chat With Any PDFs and Image Files Using Large Language Models — With Code

So much valuable information is trapped in PDF and image files. Luckily, we have these powerful brains capable of processing those files to find specific information, which in fact is great. But how many of us, deep inside wouldn’t like to have a tool that can answer any question about a ...

Program-Aided Language Models

Large Language Models, Part 1: BERT

One of such models is BERT. It is primarily known for being able to construct embeddings which can very accurately represent text information and store semantic meanings of long text sequences. As a result, BERT embeddings became widely used in machine learning. Understanding how BERT builds text re...

Building Your First Indic Language Model: A Step-by-Step Guide

Are you intrigued by the idea of creating your very own Indic language model, but find it daunting? Me too until I did a deep dive into the tech and realised the potential and opportunity. Let’s unravel the complexity together in this step-by-step guide. a simple notebook with all ingredients ...

Introduction to Natural Language Processing with PyTorch (2/5)

In the previous unit, we have learnt to represent text by numbers. Here, we’ll explore some of the approaches to feeding variable-length text into a neural network to collapse the input sequence into a fixed-length vector, which can then be used in the classifier. To begin with, let’...

“Leadership is Language”

The words we use matter. You may not think much of using terms like “resources” rather than “people” or “I” vs “we” but at a subconscious level these words start to infiltrate our minds. For both the person using them and those hearing it. Perhap...

Understanding LLMOps: Large Language Model Operations

Itfeels like the release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT has opened Pandora’s box of large language models (LLMs) in production. Not only does your neighbor now bother you with small talk about Artificial Intelligence (AI), but the Machine Learning (ML) community is talking about yet anoth...

I Love You Is The Most Beautiful Phrase In The English Language

I walked into my grandfather’s home, not knowing what to expect. He normally sat in the living room with a freshly brewed cup of coffee. However, on that fateful day, my grandfather was nowhere to be seen. “Come over here,” said my mom. “Grandad is lying in bed and his con...

How Learning a New Language Improves Tolerance

There are many benefits to knowing more than one language. For example, it has been shown that aging adults who speak more than one language have less likelihood of developing dementia. Additionally, the bilingual brain becomes better at filtering out distractions, a...

“I Love You” Is The Most Beautiful Phrase In The English Language

“Leadership is Language”

You may not think much of using terms like “resources” rather than “people” or “I” vs “we” but at a subconscious level these words start to infiltrate our minds. For both the person using them and those hearing it. Perhaps you’re thinking, &ls...

LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models

Prompt engineering, fine-tuning, and model training are all viable options to get domain or task-specific results from a Large Language Model (LLM). One model training technique to consider is Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models (LoRA). Background First introduced by Microsoft via the...

Writing Terraform Plan Polices with KCL Programming Language

Introduction KCL is an open-source, constraint-based record and functional language that enhances the writing of complex configurations, including those for cloud-native scenarios. It is hosted by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) as a Sandbox Project. With its advanced prog...

Falcon-40B: A Breakthrough in Large Language Models

The field of natural language processing (NLP) has seen tremendous advancements in recent years, thanks to the development of large language models (LLMs). These models are trained on massive amounts of data and are capable of understanding and generating human-like language. The Technology Innovati...

History and Evolution of the Greek Language

The first Greek writing was found on baked clay tablets in the ruins of the Minoan Knossos Palace on Crete. This writing system is called Linear A, but it’s still not understood. On the other hand, Linear B consisted of consonant-vowel combinations and emerged in the 12th century BC. The ...

Practical tips on writing in German to better learn the language

We write to get better at German because it gives our brain enough time to become comfortable with the new patterns of language we need to speak properly. Reading is also good, but writing is more active and therefore more useful. Doing grammar exercises is pointless without doing something with the...

¡Poverty should not be more expensive! Have you ever thought about that?

Imagine you are facing a new culture, a new language, new people realities – very different from each other: the fortunate ones and the most vulnerable ones, exploring new business models with heart-touching missions, new society expectations and regulations, the list goes on and on. On top of...

Two Weeks Language School in London, Was It Worth Achieving C2, the Highest English Level?

Are you considering attending a language school in London for a couple of weeks? Maybe you’re trying to improve your English skills or just want to experience the city’s vibrant culture. Either way, investing time and money in language school can be daunting. In this blog, I’ll ...

Intimacy in Rio de Janeiro as expressed in language

Intimacy in the verbal expression of Rio de Janeiro By Tom Moore Pois há menos peixinhos a nadar no mar Do que os beijinhos que eu darei na sua boca Dentro dos meus braços os abraços hão de ser milhões de abraços Apertado assim, colado assi...

“Talkin’ About Talk: Navigating Language Hiccups with Personal Care Attendants”

Hey there! We all know personal care attendants are absolute heroes, but what happens when the superhero cape gets tangled in language barriers? Let’s dive into the nitty-gritty of dealing with attendants who might not speak English like a native. **Lost in Translation:** So, you need so...

Artificial Intelligence Is Eating Our Language

While working at a fairly evolved digital organization, my colleagues developed a customized bot within the business messaging app, Slack. Most people who use Slack for communication know you can utilize bots inside the application to set reminders, schedule meetings, or even make jokes. Our team...

Your Astrology Language Review: How to Use Astrology to Transform Your Life and Achieve Your Goals

When I first discovered Your Astrology Language, I was skeptical. Could an astrology reading really provide meaningful insights into my life, relationships, and destiny? But I decided to give it a try since it came with a full money-back guarantee. And I’m so glad I took that leap of faith! ...

Your Astrology Language Review: The Ultimate Guide to Discovering Your Soul Purpose and Potential

As an entrepreneur, I’m constantly facing big decisions that can make or break my business. So when I learned about a personalized astrology program called Your Astrology Language, I was instantly intrigued yet skeptical. Could the alignment of stars and planets really guide my career choices?...

Basic Spirit Language for Connecting With Your Guides

Relationships with guides (like all relationships), need to be developed over time — and when you first begin to connect with your guides, that relationship is in its stage of infancy. We often start out too big when it comes to asking for guidance from our spirit guides. We want ...

The Hidden Spiritual Language of the Book of Jonah

The concept of Pardes in Kabbalistic and Jewish thought offers a deeper framework for interpreting the Hebrew Bible through multiple layers of meaning. This approach, deeply rooted in mystical traditions and in Judaism often attributed to the Kabbalist Moses DeLeon, aligns with the medieval Chris...

Top 5 applications of Large Language Models (LLMs) in legal practice

Intelligent automation, also referred to as cognitive  automation, has made remarkable strides in various industries, including the legal sector. However, it is highly unlikely that robots will completely replace lawyers in the near future. Although the legal profession involves a significant a...

Large Language Models and Their Transformative Role in the Legal Profession

The evolution of technology is a perpetual force that shapes every aspect of our lives. Notably, the intersection of technology and the legal profession has created innovative solutions that have the potential to revolutionize legal processes. One of these emerging technologies is Large Language Mod...

America Must Relearn the Language of Struggle

Americans are living through a series of escalating crises. The planet is warming as geopolitical tensions grow. The global economy is teetering. Worse still, our ability to address these crises is held back by a deeply dysfunctional political system — one governed by an unelected conserv...

Lessons in Language

In the middle of an IKEA showroom, I agonized over the transition between two sentences. I was wrestling with a second-grade assignment on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. While I knew any seven-year-old could cobble together two statements about Dr. King, bridging together two thoughts about his achievem...

Reflections on ‘Hotline’: Language, Assimilation, and Identity

Hotline by Dimitri Nasrallah is a captivating exploration of the immigrant experience, centered around Muna Heddad, a determined single mother who navigates the challenges of building a new life in 1980s Montreal. The novel unveils the loneliness and emotional distances inherent in immigration,...

The Importance of Language for a Nation

or as long as I can remember, when I told anyone in my personal life about my Indian heritage there would arise, consecutively, three questions. “What tribe are you?”, “Peoria? What’s that?”, and “How do you say XYZ in your language?”. One two three. Just li...

‘Black Body Language for Dummies’

One widely noted example of how black people react when white people passively aggressively invade our bodily spaces is when they touch black hair, to ‘see how it feels’ (read, I’ve heard you’re so different from me I just want to confirm for myself just how exotic & unre...

Learning My Heritage Language

Why am I learning it? Part of it is to use it as a communication tool. Part of it is the guilt of not having learned it or spoken it at all. Part of it is to overcome some of the obstacles I had to deal with being a 2nd generation immigrant. Growing up, there were various times where I wondered w...

Using protein language models to accelerate their artificial evolution works; the interesting part is why.

The paper also gives a good explanation about their thinking process. If you only have a few minutes (but you should use more), you can start with Fig 1 in the paper. Their hypothesis was that evolutionary pressures favor protein characteristics that are useful in application settings, which means t...

Using Chemical Language transformer model for Molecular Property prediction regression tasks and visualize attention weights : Part 1

Came across the ChemBERTa-77M-MTR at Hugging face looks like it's pre-trained on 77M molecules. ChemBERT is a large-scale pre-trained molecular transformer model based on the BERT architecture, specifically designed for tasks in chemistry, drug discovery, or materials science...

Nature of Language and Language of Nature

Ecofeminism is a critical theory that combines the feminist fight for emancipation with the ecocritical voice advocating for nature’s liberation. The discourse makes connections between the treatment of women and the natural world — seeing them emerging as a result of one another’s...

A List of the available medical large language models: Med-LLMs

Data quality and privacy: LLMs are trained on massive amounts of text data, which may not be reliable, representative, or relevant for the medical domain. Moreover, the data may contain sensitive personal information that needs to be protected from unauthorized access or disclosure. Ethical and l...

Psychopathology of Large Language Models: Foundation Models in a Neurobiological Perspective

The performance of large language models (LLMs) is growing at a breakneck pace. Models provide more coherent and consistent answers, with a progressive and significant reduction of hallucinations. This improvement is mainly related to the overall optimization of model architecture and training data,...

FORCED PERSPECTIVE — The architecture of language

Some words have a ring to them, or whole strands of language seem easy to take in. Then language can almost be judged instantly, based on intuition, guts knowledge. A sense of self-evidence overcomes us, of something being straightforward, there is no need for side-steps, no need to look for further...

Language Runs Deep in Our Species

Back before cell phones were standard, my friends and I used to write each other notes during class and exchange them in the hallways between bells. The boys thought it was great fun to intercept these hallway exchanges and read the note’s contents. To get around this annoyance and privacy ...

What Are Language Families? Part I: The Indo-European Connection

Speakers of most of the world’s languages are at least vaguely aware that their tongue is related to some others. For people in the West, the most familiar example is Romance languages, which began as Latin slang in Italy, Spain, Gaul, and elsewhere and grew up to become great languages in the...

Cornish Language Resurgence: A Revival Worth Raising a Pint to!

In the Heart of England, an Old Language Gets a Second Wind. Cornwall, that picturesque nook of southwestern England, is famous for its cream teas, stunning coastlines, and the indomitable spirit of its residents. But hidden beneath the rolling hills and sandy beaches lies a secret that’s m...

My (Slightly) Controversial Language Learning Routine (You Won’t Get Fluent This Way).

You see, I use the standard stuff for my language learning, I study textbook material, I do grammar exercises, I speak with native speakers and I visit the country where the language is spoken. I don’t do all of this each and every single day though, especially visiting countries where Fren...

Did the Easter Island Have a Written Language?

Rapa Nui, also known as Easter Island, is located in the Pacific Ocean, around 3800 km off the coast of Chile. It was one of the last landmasses humans settled around 1150 and 1280. Initially, it was a lush and forested island thriving with animals and life. However, the arrival of humans led to gra...

Language Teaching through Art

Some schools and companies around the world are already connected to this idea, adopting techniques from creativity courses. Many companies today practice the 20% rule (allowing employees to dedicate 20% of their working time to think creatively and explore new ideas). This tendency to evaluate c...

Cratylus: Challenger of Language and Communication

In Greek philosophy, there are few figures as enigmatic and intriguing as Cratylus, a follower of Heraclitus who grappled with the fundamental nature of language and communication. Cratylus’s ideas were radical, challenging the very foundation of how we think and speak about the world aroun...

Dogri Language

The Dogri language, with its rich history, unique script, and vibrant literature, stands as a testament to the cultural diversity of the Indian subcontinent. Tracing its origins back to the era of the great poet Amir Khusro, references to Dogri can be found in ancient Indian texts, indicating i...

Using Large Language Models as Recommendation Systems

Large Language Models (LLMs) have taken the data science community and the news cycle by storm these past few months. Since the advent of the transformer architecture in 2017, we’ve seen exponential advancements in the complexity of natural language tasks that these models can tackle from clas...

Arabic-Centric Open Foundation and Instruction-Tuned Generative Large Language Models

The Release We introduce Jais, a new state-of-the-art Arabic-centric large language model (LLM). Jais achieves the world’s best performance for an open-source Arabic LLM while matching performance with English LLMs of similar size, despite having been trained on substantially less data. We ...

The Divide between South Asian Muslims and the Arabic Language in Britain

As a British Bengali Muslim, the Arabic language has held great significance in my life. From memorising the declaration of faith (shahada) with my father to performing the five daily prayers with passages from the Quran, it has been an integral part of my spiritual journey. However, I must admit th...

Daniel 1:2 — Semitic Language Study

ויתן is from the root נתן natan — to give and is another example of the waw consecutive, which uses the form of the imperfect (typically non-past) in the sense of a “past tense” when applied to a narrative story. This is also the same root whence we get the names &...

A language dramedy

This time in England, I spent about three or four days deeply desperate after David said: ‘I can barely understand what you’re saying.’ I mean, I’ve been working hard, two years, day and night (well, nearly) to improve my language, and here I am. No, I finally pulled mysel...

How did English become the ‘global language’?

More people speak Spanish than English as their first language. Nearly three three times as many speak Mandarin Chinese in their family homes. Yet few would dispute that English is the leading world language. This is because English is the world’s lingua franca or common second la...

The Link Between Pronunciation and Listening Skills: A Guide for English Language Learners

Pronunciation and listening are two sides of the same coin in language learning. A deep understanding of phonetics — the sounds of a language — serves as the foundation for both. When learners practice pronunciation, they become more familiar with the specific sounds of English, includin...

9 Tips on How to Overcome the Language Barrier in English

After reading the article, you will learn 9 practical hints to conquer a language barrier in English. Here are some tips below: 1. Breath and calm down Primarily, accept the fact that your first conversations with foreigners will not be easy. Remember that your interlocutor is just as embar...

The Importance of the English Language: 15 Reasons to Learn English

In today’s increasingly globalized and interconnected world, the Importance of English Language is more important than ever for individuals looking to succeed both personally and professionally. English is the language of international business and is increasingly becoming the lingua...

Idioms: Improving Language Fluency and Expression

Idioms are captivating language terms that bring color and personality to our talks. Understanding their meanings and applying them effectively will significantly improve your capacity to communicate eloquently and dynamically. Let’s look at some frequent idioms, along with their meanings and ...

Should we teach pragmatic competence in the language classroom?

The next time you are out and about, just take a second to stop and observe the people around you. What do you see? Depending on where you are, you might see commuters, station attendants, security personnel, or people relaxing on their day off. Regardless of what it is, you might notice one thing t...

Should I wait to learn a new language till the perfect day arrives?

At which point did we all lose interest in language learning? Much research has gone about into the methodology of adult language learning. For a monolingual person, forgetting the schema of your dominant language and accommodating the entirely new register of a new language seems taxing and exci...

Quick Tips on Crafting an English Language Resume | TER

In today’s highly competitive global job market, proficiency in English language skills is vital to land positions in multinational companies, both locally and internationally. The success of your job hunt relies on your ability to produce an exceptional English language resume, which highligh...

Intonation in Spoken Language

While vocabulary and grammar are essential, equally essential (but less emphasized) is intonation, pronunciation, and other conventional ways the language — outside of the textbook — is actually spoken. In French, a textbook will introduce the following phrases: Je ne sais pas. ...

Three Unique Ways to Measure your Progress in a Foreign Language

Soon after I moved to Prague, the Czech Republic, in 2015, I went to a used book store and bought a book of children’s fairy tales in Czech. I love reading fairy tales, so I wanted to use this love to motivate me to read in Czech. I had to translate nearly every word. As it was a second-han...

I studied the French language every day for 30 days. Here’s What happened: Language learning tips, progress, and surprising results.

If you have ever tried learning another language, you know that it is a time consuming process and something that you have to prioritize in order to make any real progress. It’s a big task and many put off learning a language for years because they feel they don’t have the time. There is...

What Are Language Coaches?

If you’ve ever struggled to learn a language, you know how valuable an informed native speaker is. I say “informed” because most native speakers don’t know the whys and hows of grammar. Swordsmen don’t necessarily know how to craft a sword, and blacksmiths don’...

What ‘Love Language’ Do You Speak?

When we only knew two languages-English and French-we called it “ Franglais.” “ Français” is French for “French” and “ Anglais” is French for “English.” So, if you speak a mix of “ Français” and...

A Year of Immersive Language Exploration

Over the past year, I embarked on a linguistic adventure with Duolingo, a popular language-learning platform, to explore the enchanting world of the French language. This chronicles my immersive journey, from my first hesitant “Bonjour” to the joyful moments of conversing in French. The ...

Language Learning Tips to Speak Like a Native

I speak, read, and write four languages. Although two of them are pretty similar, their scripts are completely different. I learned all of those scripts in school. It is kind of a part of our culture. Today, I’m going to help you with your language-learning journey. The best tip I can give ...

Why you should meet INSEAD’s Exit Language requirement as early as possible

INSEAD’s language policy requires all students to speak at least three languages. In cases in which English is not the native language, these three languages will be: 1 — Your native language 2 — English (called by INSEAD the “entry language”), that can ...

Reading Your First Book in a Foreign Language

Over the past year I’ve been working towards fluency in another language: French, my family’s long forgotten mother tongue. It hasn’t been easy, not by any stretch of the imagination — their love of grouping things in threes took my American mind a long time to wrap around. ...

Unlock the Secret Language of Germans: 5 Untranslatable Phrases That Will Blow Your Mind!

Have you ever experienced a longing for distant places and unknown adventures? The Germans have a word for that — fernweh! While the English word “wanderlust” comes close, fernweh specifically refers to the ache or yearning one feels to travel and explore far-off lands. It’s ...

Macroscale Language Translations

This paper presents the findings of extensive research undertaken by Makers Lab, Tech Mahindra as part of its ambitious civilizational project called Indus. The primary objective of this research is to investigate and identify the most effective and efficient AI and NLP techniques for macro-scale la...

Understanding the Dynamics between Language and Power

Although it is an essential part of human communication, language is not an impartial tool. It is entangled with power dynamics and affects how people and groups exercise power, create social structures, and uphold hierarchies. This essay examines how language is used as a tool to exert dominance, s...

Dialectal Language Models: Challenges and Opportunities

However, there’s been a surge of new Bilingual Language Learning Models, such as CroissantLLM for French, Jais for Arabic, and the Japanese Stable LM for Japanese. These specialized models tend to excel in handling their intended languages. Consequently, the emerg...

What’s so special about the Basque language?

This is a super basic explanation for people who know very little about linguistics but are curious about the origins and evolution of languages. A friend asked me what’s so special about Basque and here is what I said: Basque happens to be the #1 most interesting language to linguists b...

The Effect of Language on Advertising

These days, it seems like we are always being sold something. From commercials on television to pop-ups online, advertisements are all around us, trying to get our attention. The purpose of an advertisement is relatively simple: to encourage and sell products or services and to promote brand recogni...

Is language innate?

We could say that language is what makes us human. It’s a part of who we are. In almost all situations, with very, very few exceptions, humans end up acquiring language. So, does that mean that language is innate? Are we inherently programmed for language? Do we have a language gene? How do we...

Quid Pro What?: The Unique and Consequential Language of Law

The first impeachment trial US President Donald Trump hinged largely on whether he held out military aid to Ukraine as a bargaining chip to get his counterpart Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate the son of his rival Joe Biden. In other words, was he offering a quid pro quo? For weeks in early 20...

The Witticisms of Word Wrestling: A Humorous Take on Natural Language Inference

Context: Natural Language Inference (NLI) is a critical task in natural language processing (NLP) that involves determining the logical relationship between a pair of sentences, known as the premise and the hypothesis. Problem: NLI poses challenges due to linguistic nuances and the need for machi...

Should Hindi be the National Language of India?

Hindi is the most widely spoken language in India, with over 500 million speakers, which is around 43% of the country. Although there are more than 100 languages spoken in India, Hindi is the most common one, spoken in almost all the states of the nation. So, naturally, it means that Hindi should be...

Scaling language understanding (NLU)

People can “get by” in a new language with only a couple of thousand words. So why don’t today’s systems scale to understand language? An obvious way to scale a system to use human language is to start with a machine that has some of the capabilities of a human brain and t...

Community Language Learning: An overview.

The CLL method was developed by Charles Curran. The latter was a specialist in counseling and a professor of psychology. Curran managed to apply the psychological counseling techniques to learning aspects, which resulted in a ‘Counseling-Learning theory’ represented by the CLL in teachin...

you don’t have to engineer the perfect solution to nonbinary language

There is a theme that keeps coming up in my research and conversations — people are really worried about whether some form of nonbinary language is efficient or optimal in some way. I’ve seen a lot of stuff about this in discussions of English pronouns, but also a ...

Unlocking the Secrets of the Etruscan Language

The following article was written using ChatGPT. I have only recently discovered this amazing tool and have been spending much too much time engaging on that platform. ChatGPT for the one reader who may not be aware (I feel late to this game), is an online interface built by the company OpenAI. I...

Learning a New Language

I’ve made a number of mistakes trying to learn Mandarin. Being passive about understanding how the language works, trying to become less passive, and then experiencing burnout. I had a strong desire to become fluent, but I realized that I needed to take another approach to understanding ...

Is Chinese really the hardest language to learn?

Is Chinese really the hardest language to learn? It can be, if you’re a monolingual English speaker. But even if you ARE a monolingual English speaker, Chinese doesn’t have to be as hard as the doom-sayers make it out to be. That’s because learning Chinese is like usi...

Finding Your Language Parents

Whether they do it consciously or not, parents (and parental figures) are the people who teach us how to speak our first language, from the time we’re born, until we start going to school, and beyond. All parents have their failings (some more than others), but passing their language on to the...

Why some Taiwanese cannot speak the Taiwanese language?

Most of my foreign friends who have stayed in Taiwan for a while have noticed Taiwanese speak Mandarin Chinese mostly in their daily life and barely speak the Taiwanese language. They found out even some Taiwanese cannot speak the Taiwanese language, which might be a bit weird to them. It is ideal t...

What is the oldest language in the world?

Months ago, Gaston Dorren, author of the blog Language Writer and the book Lingo (which I highly recommend!), told us how he got into a Twitter discussion between two Irishmen: a Unionist and a Republican… The Unionist said that the Irish language was an invention of ...

I Had to Give a Speech in my Second Language

It was nerve-wracking — but I learned a lot about myself and other cultures in the process. Photo by Filip Gielda on Unsplash Not a paying Medium member? Read for free by clicking here! Little known fact that’s pertinent to the story — my companion ...

Reflections on the Spanish Language and My Learning Journey

It’s fascinating how much we change as we get older. Things that we took for granted when we were teenagers and young adults, we now treasure and look for ways to expand our knowledge of what we once disliked. One of those things was the Spanish language — not the language per se beca...

Unlock 80% of the World with Just 3 Languages

Language skills are one of the most useful tools for travelers. Knowing the local language allows you to truly immerse yourself in a culture, connect with locals, and gain insights you’d never get as an outsider. While English is widely spoken around the world, it will only get you so far. To ...

Spanish Words That Start With W

Spanish is a beautiful and expressive language that is spoken by millions of people around the world. One of the unique features of Spanish is the vast array of words that exist in the language. From common everyday words to rare and obscure terms, there is no shortage of vocabulary to explore in...