5 Reasons You Should Read International Fiction

As a US citizen, the plethora of brilliant English fiction seems overwhelming. Even with ebooks coming into vogue, local book stores are brimming and bursting with new books. So why add the outside world to your reading list? Well, I can give you five reasons off the top of my head.

What Coding and Language Learning Have In Common

Back in the bygone days of Myspace I learned my first foreign language. Eager to express my "individual" pre-teen self, I scurried over to W3schools and learned enough CSS and HTML to code my own layouts. With the rise of Facebook, I gradually shifted platforms, leaving my coding experience behind until college.

As I am now brushing up on my coding skills - and learning a few new tricks, I've noticed it's much easier to figure out than when I was 13. But that has little to do with age, and more about language experience. If you know how to learn another language, you can learn to code, and vice-versa. 

Wort für Wort: Material Review

Cover of the 5th edition. 

After a month of ghosting through Amazon reviews, I purchased Hodder Education's advanced Wort für Wort, fifth edition, by Paul Stocker. Spoiled by free internet resources, I didn't see the point of buying another language book, and being tight on money, I was rather cautious.

A good textbook is a diamond in the rough - and I've experienced poorly packed ones before, often in the classroom. After a certain level, it's easier to pick up new vocabulary from news articles and youtube videos anyway, so why bother? What did I have to gain - especially from using an online store.

There was a lot, apparently.

How To Use Google Translate

Scrambling to finish our Spanish before class starts, scratching our head at a convoluted paragraph-sentence, or even double-checking those multilingual"I love you" posts on Tumblr - we've all been there, hoping that Google Translate (GT) will provide a quick solution.

And it does provide something, but I doubt you could call it a solution.

Google Translate is a tool, not a translator. And in order to learn your language with a machine translation, you have to understand how it works best.