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April 2009 |
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Living Language on the go |
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Are you too busy to sit down with a book and learn a new language? With Living Language on the go, that's no problem. Just pick up one of our all-audio courses and learn anytime, anywhere—on the way to work, while running errands, or even while working out at the gym! | |||
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Our Starting Out in ... series features short, simple lessons and is available in Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Italian, and Spanish. Our Drive Time programs are specifically designed for commutes and road trips and are available in French, German, Italian, Japanese, and Spanish. |
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I sometimes travel to Barcelona on business, and over the years I've managed to pick up enough Spanish to get by (awkwardly, at least) in most situations. My plan is simple: I string basic words together to express complex ideas, and hope that something other than gibberish comes out. On my most recent trip, I was lucky enough to be invited to a colleague's beach house for a few days at the end of my trip. Agustina, my colleague, speaks English, but her husband Pablo does not.
Do you have a language story that you'd like to share? Submit your experiences to us at livinglanguage@randomhouse.com. We'll pick our favorites and post them in this newsletter. 
Turn off the subtitles
I shouldn't have to bother reading subtitles in French films. I studied French for many years, and understand it at a fairly high comprehension level. Still, whenever the subtitles are on, I can't help but read them. Even if I try hard to focus on the film, my eyes wander to the bottom of the screen, where I catch the sometimes rapidly flashing script, if only to reassure myself that what I'm understanding is in fact what I'm supposed to be understanding.
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French culinary words and phrases They can be used to make a menu sound fancy, or just because a restaurant is, in fact, a fancy French restaurant. Either way, you're guaranteed to see French words on an English menu at least a few times in your life as a diner, if not many, many times. Here's what some of those French terms actually mean.
Also on the blog: 
A tiny bit of Farsi Did you know that the official language of Iran has two names: Farsi and Persian? The origin of the word Persia goes all the way back to an ancient region of Iran named Parsa. The ancient Greeks then took that name and called the area Persis. The word traveled through Europe and ended up in English as Persia, which was used to refer to the land as well as its people and language. |
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