This post first ran on September 26, 2012.My mother sent me an old letter recently. It was a handwritten note scrawled across two pages that she’d written to her sister more than 30 years ago. My family had just moved to West Germany, where my dad was stationed in the Air Force, and in the […]
Miscellaneous
May 9-13 This week, Richard set out to prove, unscientifically, that slow readers are slow language learners. When he failed, he realized his method was scientific after all — just not in the way he expected. Jennifer discovered she was just fine with being woken up in the wee hours by hysterical laughter, so long […]
Here comes dawn. The sky yawns and the sun flicks its lids above the horizon. But just before the lights come up on Virginia’s rolling hills, the sound of morning commences. Can we call it a song? That might be a stretch. There’s a certain musicality to it. You’re no doubt familiar with its silly refrain. […]
Last week I invited readers to participate in a little experiment. I’d had what I thought might be a big idea: a possible correlation between rate of reading speed and facility with learning foreign languages. My younger son and I are slow in both categories. My older son and my wife are quick in both categories. I […]
May 2 – 6, 2016 Guest Veronique Greenwood’s final post in her series about learning Chinese ends with triumph: she not only argues with a Chinese cab driver, she wins. Meanwhile the rest of the LWONers were inspired, got into the act, and voila! ecco! ¡mira! a whole Week of Learning Languages posts! Richard proposes […]
I learned a lot of languages in my teens and 20s. I say “learned,” but don’t expect fluency. You shouldn’t try to have a very complicated conversation with me in any of them today. But there have been points in my life when I had dear friends with whom I only spoke Japanese or Norwegian. […]
April 25-29, 2016 This week, Veronique Greenwood’s glancing knowledge of Mandarin becomes a daunting challenge, spurred on by some tentative communicative exchanges in China. Some argue that Shakespeare couldn’t have written some of his plays because the author of the plays knew too much. There’s another explanation: Perhaps he acted like a journalist. Helen bore […]
This post first ran on January 15, 2013. This morning I awoke to the kind of day that offers an easy excuse to skip the walk. The temperature gauge read -3F (-19C) when I crawled out of bed, and by the time I’d finished the tea and hot porridge my husband had prepared, it was still only […]
