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The rumours that I’m joining the Sun as a headline writer are (mercifully) untrue.

Thanks to my boss Liz, who made our first fascinating discovery of the New Year, courtesy of BBC Radio 2, while piloting the Robertson Languages bloggernaut into work the other day: you need a long tongue to speak Korean. No, really! Just ask Rhiannon Brooksbank-Jones, who was born with ankyloglossia (it’s OK, I didn’t know what that was either until I asked Google – it’s also known read more

What better place to finish our series of Christmas blogs than in Finland, and specifically in the city of Rovaniemi? Not only can it boast the northernmost McDonald’s in the world, but as the capital of Lapland, it also qualifies as the ‘official’ home of Father Christmas himself.

About 5 miles northeast of Rovaniemi is Santa Claus Village, built at precisely 66°32′ north because that’s precisely where the Arctic Circle is. Well, OK, it isn’t really. The Arctic Circle is technically defined as read more

If you have an iPhone or an iPad (or even an iPod Touch), you should definitely take a look at these two language-related apps.
Name It
Name It is a fun game which helps you to practise your vocabulary in one of 8 different languages. Help Kenny the chameleon to catch the flies. Tap the correct word to match the photo. With each correct answer, Kenny gets closer to the flies to gain an extra life or bonus points. But hurry, read more

I have a man-crush on my uncle. In his native Brooklyn, people LOVE him, he is one of those people blessed with a magnetic personality. While I was trying to analyse what made him so likeable, I noticed that (among other things) he made sure he spoke Russian to Russians, Chinese to the Chinese, German to the Germans, English to Americans, and Italian… well, you get the gist.

In my Uni days, when I was a waiter, If a customer made read more