Language Consultant, Intercultural Communication Trainer and Language Expert at Ute's International Lounge.
This is an amazing animation from the Amsterdam City Archives showing the growth of Amsterdam during the Golden Age from 1600 until 1700. It’s the time when the Grachtengordel – the canal belt – was formed. Watch how the city took its actual shape. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IvsHvfs3G1M]
In most of the books and articles about TCKs I miss the comparative approach between globally living TCKs and continental living TCKs. Most of the studies focus on children who spend a significant part of their developmental years outside their parents’ culture, i.e. overseas, mainly on different continents. […]
Today is a day where we all those who are “involved in multilingualism, whether personally or professionally, should stop and consider where they can make a difference”, like Eowyn Crisfield suggests in her post about International Mother Language Day today. When I decided to write a post about […]
I’m very glad and thankful that Ken from WriteOutLoud and KenThinksOutLoud did agree on writing this post and sharing his very precious experiences with the VAK learning style model here. *** Recently, on this blog, Ute wrote about three learning styles when learning a new language. These styles […]
We all know this situation: we understand a language but are not able (yet) to communicate in it. This passive knowledge of the language, which involves already many levels (phonology, morphology, syntax, vocabulary etc.) is very helpful and sometimes even crucial when we want to learn and acquire […]
Everyone has a very personal way to learn a language. Some of us just learn by repeating what they hear, others need to learn the structure, the grammar in order to consolidate the new language. Every new word that we hear does make a long way to land […]
When talking about Switzerland, people usually think about mountains, chocolate, cheese and watches. In the 16 years I’ve lived in Switzerland I have adopted several habits, but one in particular seemed quite impressive to me. It’s the swiss perception of time, the swiss punctuality. When I moved to […]
Learing a new language is always very exciting. Especially when the new language we’re learning is similar to one we already know. These similarities can be at different levels (phonetical, lexical, syntactical etc.). The Dutch language belongs to the westgerman branch of the indoeuropean languages and is actually […]
