Do you think having a perfect accent is possible?
For all practical purposes, I don’t really think so anymore unless a) the sounds in your native language happen to coincide with those in the language you’ve learnt or b) you’ve learnt the new language since childhood.
Let’s take the language that is the most learnt in the world: English. I, for one, haven’t met anybody speak absolutely without an accent.  Seriously. I have met a lot of people with I could say …

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People always think their native language is the hardest in the world.
It’s not true.
Well, obviously, it is true for some nation which truly has the most difficult language of the world.  On the other hand, “difficulty” of a language is like “movement” of an object in Physics: it only makes sense relative to some frame of reference.
In any case, I’ve always heard it from people that their language is the most difficult. For example:

Norwegians told me that Norwegian is extremely …

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I want to talk a bit about making the lingua franca, the international or the bridge language of the world. I don’t want to give you a summary that you can find everywhere else, instead I want to share my idea with you. Having that in mind, you still need some context first.
The Lingua Franca
My Oxford American Dictionary gives the definition of lingua franca as:
a language that is adopted as a common language between speakers whose native languages are different.
The …

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I am not sure about you but one of my main motivations for learning languages is travel. While it’s fine to use the language online or have a pen-friend (I’ve never really had one), what’s the use of knowing a language if you never actually speak it?
Speaking a language in its country is pretty awesome, though. I have tried speaking the language  (in probably that order in time)  in Germany (I speak poor German), France, Italy (Italian not too good either), Portugal, …

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Here are five languages that I have found out about and that have some interesting things about them:

Riau Indonesian – this language has an extremely simple grammar that is considered to be one of the simplest in the world by linguists. The language has been used as a universal language between non-native speakers and that might be the reason . The famous example is “ayam makan” (literally: chicken eat) which can mean “I eat chicken”, “chicken eats”, “I ate …

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I was doing a course on linguistics by the Teaching Company and I realized how much these courses have really given me and continue to give me so I decided to make a blogpost about it.
Learning languages is just one thing. What we can do and, I believe, what we should do, is to learn everything: physics, philosophy, biology, astronomy, you name it. There is so much information and so much interesting things to learn and there is something about …

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Since I became interested in making this site and this blog, I have looked at what quite a lot of other bloggers are doing. I have grown to like some of the blogs and I have subscribed to quite a few of them. I thought I would list some of the blogs I am subscribed to and provide short descriptions of them.
I will not list all of the blogs on my list now because that would be too large of …

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This is just a test blog post which is still to be edited. Eventually this has to be incorporated in the labs. I would greatly appreciate if you helped me improve this list and left comments here or preferably in a topic I decicated for this on the forums. There is a dense printer-friendly version of this here. Thanks!
The whole philosophy of I Kinda Like Languages is based on making courses which enable people to use the language in speaking …

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Ziad Fazah is supposedly the worlds greatest living polyglot who can converse in 58 languages. That’s the story I had heard. Personally, I have never met Ziad but I heard he wrote books about languages and he spoke to some people in different languages. That was what I used to know.
That was until I saw this video (in Spanish):

Summary of the video: he gets asked a bunch of questions in a bunch of languages and he doesn’t answer any while …

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This is a great moment because I have been waiting to write this for the last 3 months or so. Probably more. Also because I did not know whether I would make it. I believe I know enough Portuguese now to say that I have made it so that’s why I’m writing this now. I have managed to learn Portuguese in 5 months and I am going to tell you how I did it here.
Some background
First of all, I should …

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