Volunteer Language Course Reviewers Wanted

Are you learning or would you like to learn French, German, Italian, Spanish, Greek, Arabic, Dutch, Japanese, Mandarin Chinese, Polish, Portuguese or Russian?  We are looking for volunteers to review beginner, intermediate & advanced self-study language courses for us. Read more

Think Language Audio Magazines – UPDATE

Update – 30 September 2011

Great news!  The Think Language websites for Think French, Think Italian & Think Spanish are now back up & running after moving to a new hosting server.  Business as usual again & we can all continue to enjoy getting the French, Italian & Spanish language advantage with Think Languages! Read more

Language barriers led to red & yellow cards in football

I’ve just been watching the Denmark v England international football match and the coverage on TV mentioned that red and yellow cards were introduced in football to overcome language barriers.

Apparently the idea was invented by British referee Ken Aston during the 1966 FIFA World Cup, after a game between Argentina and England at Wembley Stadium when cautions were not understood.   Read more

Turning Japanese with Justin Lee Collins – Episode 1

The first episode of ‘Turning Japanese’ on the UK’s Channel 5 screened on 27 January 2011 features Justin Lee Collins taking a ‘hilarious’ and somewhat alternative look at Japanese life and culture. Read more

Will We Listen to French Musique Pop?

A French language radio station which will largely play Gallic pop music has launched in the UK.  For the past 50 years, French music and Europop has not been seen as cool by the British, but it has started to reinvent itself and 80 per cent of the new radio station French Radio London’s music will be by French artists or in French. Read more

Champs-Elysées Audiomagazines Cease Trading

A couple of avid Champs-Elysées audiomagazine subscribers emailed us recently saying that they hadn’t received their latest magazine.

We were obviously concerned about this, but hadn’t known anything about it.  We searched the web to find that most of their websites had been taken down and no-one was answering their phones.   Read more

Election Manifestos go Multilingual

While trying to decide which way to vote in the UK General Election on 6 May 2010, I decided to browse through all the election manifestos of the major political parties.  I was pleased to discover on the Green Party website that they have their Mini Manifesto in Arabic and Bengali.   Read more

Deaf Voters ‘Unheard’ By Politicians

An estimated 90,000 deaf people in the UK rely on British Sign Language (BSL) to communicate – but only one political party has ever used it in its election broadcasts.

Tessa Padden, a television presenter and BSL translator currently involved with the BSL:UPTAKE project at Heriot-Watt University,believes this leaves many deaf people excluded from the democratic process.

Read more about British Sign Language and the election>>

Aliens go multilingual in Doctor Who

The new series of the epic Doctor Who hit the UK’s TV screens last night … Geronimo! and the Tardis hit Earth to find the Eleventh Doctor (Matt Smith) and his assistant Amy Pond (Karen Gillan) …

Scaringly the Doctor finds that Prisoner Zero can broadcast its messages through a live feed to all the people on Earth – in all their native languages. Read more

Millionth English Word Declared

A US web monitoring firm has declared the millionth English word to be Web 2.0, a term used to describe the latest generation of web products and services.  Other recent additions include Jai ho and slumdog, obviously from the film Slumdog Millionaire.

Global Language Monitor (GLM) searches the internet for newly coined terms, and once a word or phrase has been used 25,000 times, it recognises it.

Read more about how English words are monitored and recognised on the web>>

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