Special “foreigner treatment”: please no! I’m a heritage speaker.

Usually, I don’t want to attract attention to my not being a local by asking for special treatment when I am in a Russian speaking country. Because as soon as I tell...
Lemonade pitcher with lemons

Making lemonade from lemons, turning the burden of being a polyglot into a skill...

I wrote a blog post for my Polyglot Project Podcast interview about why I believe it's imperative for people to learn foreign languages. It's based on my family's history leaving the former USSR. Here it...
People communicate online in different languages communication concept

Why It’s Smart to Be Bilingual: The brain’s real super-food may be learning new...

A recent article in Newsweek, Why it's smart to be bilingual, shows some positive and negative elements of multilingualism. I didn't know that those who know more than one language may have a reduced vocabulary...
learning a foreign languagevideo

Farenheit 451 (remake): no more multilingualism

As a bibliophile and great admirer of the dystopian novel Farenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury and the original 1966 film adaptation, I was surprised at how much I liked the 2018 film remake that...
Turkish festival

Multilingual ≠ not a racist or a terrorist

I'd like to think that those who are multilingual are less likely to become racists and revert to deadly extremism because communicating with people in other languages opens one’s mind and introduces one to...
Obama and Medvedev Russian (matroshkis) stacking dolls

Spaceman: Being in between languages

When I lived in Argentina, a Spaniard told me about a friend of his whose parents were from Spain but grew up in Portugal. When the Spanish man visited Spain from Portugal, he couldn’t...
Russian heritage speaker

Multilingualism: Being a Russian heritage speaker in the former USSR

  Professor François Grosjean, the Emeritus Professor of psycholinguistics at Neuchâtel University, Switzerland is a specialist in bilingualism, multilingualism and heritage language speakers. Last week, he wrote a blog piece, Portraying Heritage Language Speakers: Heritage...

Multilingual California beaten by Rhode Island, offering trilingual school

I live in Silicon Valley where Mandarin Chinese is widely spoken by the large Taiwanese and mainland Chinese community in the area. However, the schools in Cupertino only offer Mandarin immersion programs from Kindergarten...
Multiple personalities with different languages

Mutlilingual identity: diversity of languages and ways of being

Scientific American magazine published an article about how speaking various languages can alter the personality of the speaker: Polyglots Might Have Multiple Personalities People take on different character traits depending on which language they are using This...

Hiding behind a multilingual mask

Being surrounded by various languages at the UN and then being forced to speak Portuguese, I had to think about what to do with my language knowledge and stop hiding.  United Nations, “It’s your world”...
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