Bilingual schools can be great for helping children become bilingual, but the best way to fully get there is through complete immersion over a long period of time. This is part of a complete episode.
Polyglots sometimes experience faulty language selection, accidentally reaching for words from a language different from the one they’re speaking. Listener Phoebe Liu of Seattle grew up speaking Chinese, then learned English, and studied...
Amanda Kruel from Knoxville, Tennessee, wrote to say that ten years after learning French, she was studying German and her mind would jump from German to French, instead of English, when she was at a loss for a word. This is known as faulty language...
If you master a second language by the age of ten, native speakers won’t recognize that it’s not your first. Even so, things like idioms or prepositions can often trip up even the most skilled second-language speakers, if their second...
Martha reviews the new book, Dreaming in Hindi by Katherine Russell Rich, a memoir about setting out to learn a second language in mid-life. Rich spent a year in India to learn Hindi, and became so fascinated with the process that she went on to...
Grant tells the story of Eliezer Ben Yehuda, who revived the use of Hebrew outside of religious contexts. In 1850, no one spoke Hebrew as an everyday household language; now it’s spoken by more than 5 million people. This is part of a complete...