Language Learning — Guides, Tools & Quizzes

Most language learning apps tell you to listen more.More audio, more dialogues, more native content. But listening only helps if it trains the skill you actually need. Understanding sentences you’ve…

If you’re taking your first steps in German and are wondering where you should start, you’ve come to the right place. I am a student of English philology with German,…

Why do children learn foreign languages with such ease, while many adults have great difficulty doing so? The answer may surprise you as much as it surprised me. It’s no…

When was the last time you felt that something came to you with such great difficulty, you almost had to force yourself to do it? And then, after much struggle,…

Distance learning means studying a language while separated from your teacher in space, and often in time. This is its history — from 19th-century correspondence courses through radio, TV and MOOCs to today's apps and tandem exchange — and what the research says actually makes it work.

Discourse analysis studies language above the sentence: Harris' 1952 coinage, Halliday and Hasan's cohesion and coherence, conversation analysis with turn-taking and adjacency pairs, genre and register, discourse competence in Canale's model — and why discourse markers and the machinery of real talk belong in a language learner's curriculum.

A dictionary is a reference work that records the words of a language with their meaning, spelling, pronunciation and use. The main types (monolingual, bilingual, learner's, collocation dictionaries and thesauruses), the history from Cawdrey and Johnson (1755) through the Oxford English Dictionary to the corpus revolution, print versus online, and how each kind helps you learn a language.

Didactique des langues is the French discipline that studies the teaching and learning of languages — broader than a set of methods. Its distinctive concepts (didactic transposition, the didactic contract), its key figures (Galisson, Puren, Coste, the CREDIF), and how it differs from Anglophone applied linguistics.

If you look at the language learning space today, it seems more advanced than ever. There are hundreds of language learning apps, each promising faster results, smarter algorithms, and more…

Most students comparing apps in 2026 are not beginners in the literal sense. They’ve usually tried at least one language learning app already—often Duolingo—and are now asking a more precise…

Learning Greek is a very different challenge from learning Spanish, French, or even German. Modern Greek has rich verb morphology, case endings, agreement rules, and a non-Latin alphabet — all…

If you search for a language learning app to learn Czech, you’ll quickly notice a pattern:most apps promise fast progress — but many learners still feel stuck, restarting, or plateauing…

Do you have to live in Germany to learn to speak like a real German? Of course it’s a great way, but you don’t have to go to such drastic…

We use the Konjunktiv I for dependent speech to distance ourselves from another person’s speech and to emphasize that we are only conveying their words, not our own opinion. Konjunktiv…

I must admit that when I first learned what cases are in German, I was a bit discouraged about learning them. They seemed too confusing and incomprehensible to me. Unfortunately,…

Once, while in Germany, I invited a boy whom I liked very much for coffee. As we approached the table I wanted to suggest to him that he make himself…

Irregularity in verbs was originally the norm. This means that verb forms were ‘regular’ when they were irregular. This is how languages evolved – largely through random processes, acting in…

Regular verbs are the majority of the verbs in Dutch. The follow conjugation patterns and rules.  To conjugate them, we first have to find the stem in the verb and…

If you’re one of the brave souls trying your luck at learning a new language, first things first: pat yourself on the back. Learning a new language isn’t easy. Especially…

Understanding the Dutch language, and specifically Dutch slang, will benefit the eager beginner language learner. Learning Dutch swear words and insults is a fun way to get acquainted with the…