I know Lithuanian. I have been learning some Latvian lately. If somebody asked me “Which one is easier: Lithuanian or Latvian?” I would now answer “Latvian”. Latvian is easier to learn for both English-speakers and speakers of other non-Baltic languages. Here’s why.

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A Renaissance person is somebody with a wide-range of interests, talents, skills and knowledge. Alternative terms are a polymath, a Renaissance man/woman or informally a jack of all trades. Let’s discuss what you should know to become one!
Here are the skills and subjects that I believe a Renaissance person should have or be knowledgable in:

Languages: I have once written a post discussing what languages you should know to travel the word freely. I would say you would have to know …

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One thing that I have learned by making courses for a lot of different languages was that I can learn them all (a bit). So can you.
When I was little, I thought I would speak several languages as a grown up. I never remember dreaming exactly about knowing a lot of them but I can remember that I was thinking I would later speak Lithuanian, English, German, Russian, French, Spanish… and that would be good to go. At that …

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“What lies behind it?” is one of the main questions that I constantly find myself asking when it comes to learning new things. I think everybody should be asking it too.
This boils down to a whole philosophy there but let’s apply it to languages and specifically to vocabulary learning. Whenever I learn new words, I always want to find out what exactly they mean. Take the Lithuanian word for thanks which is labas. You say it without thinking about it …

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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 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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The idea is that you be able to communicate with as many people in as many different places as possible knowing as few languages as possible. If in some country you can dispense with knowing the language and there is not much to see in that country (compared with the rest of the world), then the language is not needed.
This is just for fun and I didn’t do any research. My list of languages you should know to travel:

English – …

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What’s the point in learning foreign languages? Communication, sure. But usually if you try hard you can get by without that. Or you can get by with English. I kinda like languages is not about motivation. The “kinda like” part implies that you already have the necessary motivation. But I still want this to be about everything… so I’m going to talk about some less obvious reasons for learning languages apart from communication.
Do languages represent a different way of …

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