Language Learning & Music

Last week, for International Women’s Day, I wrote a blog post, How we all benefit when women are multilingual about the scarcity of female language bloggers and You Tube polyglots on the Fluent in...

Is America Experiencing a Creativity Bust? This is a great article from Newsweek about how too much standardization and rote memorization in school is bringing down our ability to think creatively. Foreign languages classes are often...

Language and Music. Language is Music. Music helps you learn language. It's so simple. Yet sometimes it feels like I am talking to the wall when I tell people how lyrical songs can help people...

I just published La lingua è musica, the ebook version of my book on learning languages using music, TV, radio, etc, in Italian. Free during Covid-19 pandemic I am offering the book for free during the...

Fortunately, a scant few of us will ever be in a life or death situation requiring foreign language knowledge. However, Canetti’s example is not the only example of how a multilingual person in the Balkans used a language to save a life. I’m co-producing the documentary, Saved by Language, with Bryan Kirschen about how Moris Albahari saved his life in the Holocaust by speaking in Ladino (Judeo-Spanish) to an Italian Colonel and a US pilot.

Claude Cartigenese of the "Polyglot Project" compiled a huge 600 page document with stories from many language learners around the world who explain how they became polyglots. Some of the linguists in the book...

Studying grammar is a good way to get one’s mind off of the Covid-19 pandemic. Susanna, do you seriously have nothing better to do? There are more entertaining things to do like watch movies on Netflix...

  What makes the 20 most spoken languages tick? I greatly enjoyed the book Babel: Around the World in 20 Languages. Gaston Dorren explains the histories of the 20 most spoken languages in the world, with...

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...

Having just read this article written by Nikita Khrushchev's great grand-daughter about how one of the Russian spies couldn't hide his Russian accent makes me both laugh and wonder why the Russian government spent...