Language Learning & Music

Do polyglots just talk about language learning? If we did, we'd probably bore each other very quickly! I had the pleasure of meeting Richard Simcott and Luca Lampariello in Poznań, Poland earlier this month. We share...

Sometimes when I speak about the pedagogical and healing powers of music, it feels like I am talking to a wall as few teachers, doctors and newsmakers take music seriously. Thankfully, National Public Radio (NPR)...

I am curious about how deaf people in the US communicate. Anywhere from 37 to 140 out of every 1,000 people in the United States have some kind of hearing loss. Either you or someone you know needs or will need assistive hearing devices.

There's a big difference between a learned and a lived language. It took a carrot to make that difference abundantly clear to me. In California, I sometimes speak Portuguese in the weekly pagode group I...

Just because somebody speaks two languages, he/she is not a natural, automatic interpreter and translator. A multilingual person can’t translate anything anybody wants, and can’t do simultaneous interpretation. I have received many requests and demands to translate and interpret on the spot from monolingual people and from multilinguals who aren’t used to being in situations where they have to interpret or translate. The idea that just because somebody is bilingual that they should make a career as a translator and an interpreter or do it for friends and family as favors is absolutely faulty.

Sheryl Sandberg, cover of Time Magazine The TIME Magazine "Confidence Woman" cover story on Sheryl Sandberg, the Chief Operating Officer of Facebook, and her new book, Lean In, about women, success and careers made me...

We've probably heard of people improving their conversation skills in a language over a meal. I'm reversing the trend. Portuguese vocabulary goes up and the inches melt away. (Let me be ambitious and count in...

In this lesson, Luciana Lage (of Street Smart Brazil) and I use the song Toda Sexta Feira to teach the days of the week in Portuguese, how to use the words todo/toda, and pronounce...

For a limited time, until December 31, 2014, Saved by Language is on pre-sale. You can buy it here. The DVD comes with English, Ladino, Spanish and Bosnian subtitles. Choose from PAL and NTSC formats.

David Mansaray and Claude Cartaginese are doing a The Polyglot Project Podcast with interviews of language learners. It was an honor to talk to them about how I learned languages. I clarified how I...