Can I have a definition?

Learning languages is hard, especially if you're not getting the whole immersion experience. I feel your pain for those of us who have spent hours in a classroom trying desperately to understand what the teacher is saying in French or Spanish . Some lucky people have caught the language-learning bug, whether it be through traveling, Duolingo, or even growing up in a multilingual household, and I love that for them. As a former college student with a linguistics minor, I loved how linguistics as…

Words are wild

TikTokers gonna TikTok

As someone who took at least five linguistics classes in college, you might call me a language expert. And as such, it's my duty to share a few undeniable truths about language learning that many people do not know. Did you know that if you're a native speaker of a language, congratulations, you are an expert in that language? It doesn't matter if you can't explain the exact reason for conjugations or word order. If you've spoken a language since birth, you will automatically know when somethin…

Don't lose that streak

Language acquisition is not known to be quickly accomplishable or straightforward. Most of us spend four years in a high school classroom fruitlessly trying to learn French, Spanish, or German, to completely forget everything we've learned in the weeks after graduating. I even took three semesters of Russian language courses in college, which may or may not have been because my favorite comedian at the time was a fluent Russian-speaking drag queen. For monolingual divas like me, foreign languag…

They're descriptive, alright

Maybe they're useful