Blog

As I mentioned last week, I plan to challenge myself and to start learning a new language (!). I’ll use the blog to update you on my improvements, what resources I use and how I plan my study. Group or 1-1 As a working mama, my free time is limited:...

Today, I’d like to see if we can improve our language skills via YouTube channels.  I hope to inspire you to use some free resources that are available online. I’ll first focus on the languages that I’m familiar with (Polish, Czech, French and Russian) or plan to learn (Portuguese). Yes,...

Cate Hamilton is a linguist, teacher, mum, entrepreneur and co-founder of the popular Babel Babies. Hello Cate, thank you for being our interview guest today. You’re a great advocate for learning languages. What’s your educational background? When was your passion for languages born? I learned French and German at school, and went to...

So you have been learning a new language for a while now and you are making a lot of progress, but you feel like something is missing.  You can practise reading and writing and listening… but where can you practise speaking?  This post looks at where you can practise speaking...

Although we have had some uncharacteristically warm weather recently, the season on its way in March is actually spring, and the observant among you will have noticed the spring flowers starting to poke their heads above the ground.  To celebrate this new beginning, this blog post looks at the word...

Welcome to my first blog post of 2019!  Before I start, I would like to wish you all Buon Anno / Bonne Année / Prospero Año Nuevo / ةديعس ةديدج ةنس / Fröhes Neues Jahr / Gelukkig Nieuwjaar / Szczęśliwego Nowego Roku / Feliz Ano Novo / Поздравляю с Новым...

In this blog post, we look at a useful way to help us remember vocabulary – putting words into groups.  We find out how to harness our brain’s natural tendency to understand the world through association (this object is green and has leaves – it must be a plant!) to...

We’ve all been there.  We are trying to speak a new language and sometimes we forget a word and try to make it up, or we misunderstand, or we just get a bit mixed up and say the wrong thing.  Language mistakes can be embarrassing, but they can be funny,...

When I moved to France, I thought I could speak French quite well – but, I soon realised that although I could hold a high-brow conversation about politics or recycling, I couldn’t have an informal conversation that would help me make friends!  One of the problems was that I hadn’t...

Natalia is one of BLS’s Russian language tutors, who moved to Russia last year to live there with her family for 6 months. I interviewed her to find out more about her experience of living abroad. The interview is available on YouTube. We had great fun recording it (or actually...