Happy New Year to all.


We have added a significant amount of teaching resource in the Midlands. Please see our "Capabilities..." page for details.

We have added the following taster courses:

We have great pleasure in announcing the addition of teaching resource in the Oxford area, for Russian and English as a Foreign language. Russian is also available for online tuition. We are continuing to grow.

We now have the offer of 3-hour taster sessions in French and Spanish. This is offered face-to-face in the Midlands region, and online globally. These are available at £ 59.99 per course. Please contact us to arrange.

Unfortunately we now no longer offer Urdu. Many apologies to any clients wishing to learn this language.

We are pleased to announce the addition of further teaching resources in the Leamington Spa and Warwick area, covering Spanish - both Business and General - with a native speaker.

Congratulations to all of our GCSE students. Excellent results. For those that are not coming back to us, we wish you every success in your lives and careers. For those that are returning for extra tuition, welcome back !!

We now offer tailored courses in Business French and Spanish, in Birmingham and the surrounding area. Please get in touch for details, and we can arrange an appointment at your site.

We now have additional teaching resource in Greater Manchester, for German and French. We are now looking forward, where we have a presence, to enquiries for GCSE and A-Level tuition.

Additional French and German teachers recruited in the Warwick/Leamington Spa area.

We now offer intensive German language courses, in a beautiful location in Germany, where you will also experience the "real" Germany. Please see the "Teaching Capabilities by Areas" link for details.

Our language service is growing very well. A big thank you to all of our teachers - I receive positive feedback for all of them. A massive thank you also to all of our Clients - without you we wouldn't need the teachers.  We have been going for more than a year now, and are going in the right direction.

Argentina is taken from the Latin "argentum" - remember the French for money is "argent" so there is a big link there. It is also derived from the old Greek "argentinos" which means "silvery".

Worldwide, about 136 million people speak French as a first language, about 190 million as a second language, and 200 million as an acquired foreign language.

I know it's been a few days since I last posted on here. Indigenous languages of the Americas are called Amerindian languages. There were thousands of these spoken before the influence of the Europeans started in the 11th century.

A topical one today - think of the similarity in meaning of "elect" and "select", then the difference in functions of the words (the way they are used).

I am going to waffle a little today. 2 words that sound the same but have different meanings and spellings: "ceiling" and "sealing". And also there are different meanings for the word "seal". I wonder what the origins are......

There are several hundred individual mother tongues in India. A 1961 census reported 1,652. Officially the first language is Hindi, while English is second.

English is known to be a difficult language to learn as a second language, as it has many irregularities. However, think about how easy our verbs are in one way, compared to other languages. For example, in the present tense we have 2 verb forms for "to go" "I/you/we/they go", "he/she/it goes". In French you have "je vais, tu vas, il/elle/on va, nous allons, vous allez, ils/elles vont" - that makes 6 different forms.

Can you imagine a new(ish) foreign learner of the English language, who knows the meaning of the word "board" (through classwork). They are talking to a native speaker, and that person says he/she is "bored". Would you be surprised if the foreign learner looked quizzically at his/her companion ? By the way, in French "bored" is "ennuyé" but be careful to pronounce it correctly as "ennuyeux" means "boring".

I wrote a few days ago about the development of the English alphabet, and the addition of the letter "j" as a result of the introduction of French words into the English language. Despite this, we do not pronounce it the same as in French. If you consider the 2 alphabets, and how we read through them, the French "j" and "g" both have a soft consonant sound ("zh"), and then "j" "ee" and "g" "ay". This is the opposite of English which has a harder consonant and the "g" is followed by "ee". French : "jambon" and "fromage" (ham and cheese) - the "j" and the "g" are both pronounced the same. English: "imagine" and "jet" - "j" and "g" both pronounced the same but harder. So whereas we have introduced the letter "j" due to French, I need to think of some French words in our language where we pronounce a soft "j". Leave that with me !!

In English we have the verb "to want to". This is followed by a verb. In French, Spanish, German and Italian (the foreign languages with which I am most familiar) we retain the verb "to want", but use the infinitive of the verb form. For example: "I want to watch television"; Eng. I want to--watch--television; Fr. Sp. It. Grm. I want--to watch--television. Somewhere along the evolution line of the English language, we formed the verb "to want to" plus verb, whilst these other languages still say "to want".

One for Mondays. The word "work" is a good one. French "travailler" and Spanish "trabajar" are very similar. German "arbeiten" but they do have the word "werk" in their dictionary which shows the Saxon roots of the English. Italian "lavorare" is very similar to the Latin, and that is where we get the word "labour" from.

The word "station" is interesting. We use it for eg. train/bus station. In French they say "gare" for that context. The word "stationner" means "to park" in French, so there is some similarity in meaning. They also say "station service" for petrol station, so that is a little more like the English.

Is a flower-bed where flowers go to sleep ?

I like the word "cupboard" - a board of cups !!!!

An indication of the German influence on the English language : "water" = "Wasser" in German. Spanish and Italian follow the Latin: "agua" and "aqua" respectively. French is "eau" which leans towards the Latin also.

One of my favourite English words is "carpet". To a foreign learner, trying to identify the meaning of the word, he or she would logically be trying to relate the word "car" with the word "pet". Just proves how useful dictionaries are !!

Everybody has their own individual group of words and phrases. This develops over our lives, and is influenced by where we live, our families, the people that we talk with... the list goes on. The technical word for this individual "language" is the "idiolect". Everybody has one, and everyone's is unique.

The letter "w" entered the English alphabet by the year 1600 (between 1300 and 1600 we used "uu" instead.

In French, the pronunciation of the word "green" (vert) is the same as those for "glass" (verre) and "worm" (vers).

In Spanish there are two verbs for "to be": - "ser" and "estar".

The word "table" originates from the Latin "tabula", meaning "board, plank or table" but originally meaning "small flat slab or piece".The actual word "table" was first seen in the West Germanic languages of the 11th Century (including English) - it meant "board, plank, writing table or picture". The sense of "table" in the form we know it today dates from around 1300 in the Latin "mensa", which is very similar to the Spanish "mesa". 

There are many "false friends" in French, for example the word for "coach" is "car".

In French, the same word is used for "language" and "tongue". The word is "langue", and this explains a little the saying "to speak in many tongues".

The letter "J" was introduced into the English language in the 1630's, in words borrowed from French. Of course, as language has evolved our "J" is pronounced harder than the French.

Ways of pronouncing plurals differ across languages, and can cause difficulties when learning a new language. For example, when French people speak English they often do not pronounce the "-s" at the end of the word. My theory for this is that, although the French use "-s" at the end of the majority of their plurals, they do not pronounce it. Some examples: Eng - houses, Fr - maisons; Eng - cars, Fr - voitures. To my knowledge, English speakers do not have the same problem (in reverse) when learning French, except for new learners. 

The English alphabet, to cut a very long story short, originated in its current from around 1000 AD. It is a mixture of German runes and Latin brought by Christian missionaries. The letters J, U and W were not in the alphabet. Three German runes represented different sounds in the language. The alphabet in its current 26-letter form dates from 1820 at the latest. Maybe I'll give you detail about the entry of J, U and W in the near future.

Here's a French one for you: "je suis" can mean "I am" or "I follow". "J'essuie" means "I wipe dry a wet object". 

Every language has its little intricacies, but English has many of them. For example, imagine if you were learning the word "light". How many different meanings are there for this word, meanings that are nothing like each other ? Things are complicated further by the word "alight". Listeners hear a word or passage of speech, and need to apply the correct meaning to it. We do it naturally when we learn our first language, but second language learners look for a word in their own mother tongue that they can associate it to. In some cases there is no direct equivalent - even more fun !!!!

Why do we have the expression in English: "To raise a toast to someone", when toast is grilled bread ? If anyone can answer that please can you do so via the Forum.

Let's play some word games now !! My mind works in funny ways sometimes, and I think about some very obscure things. You will see what I mean over the next few days/weeks.

The smallest form of the English language is called a morpheme.

I find it interesting to look at the relationships of words in different languages.

A little bit of a departure from our usual today, but we are keeping with the Easter theme.

There are a number of theories for the origin of the word Easter.

Scandinavian languages are otherwise known as North Germanic languages or Nordic languages, and around 20 million people in Nordic countries have a Scandinavian language as their mother tongue. They are split into East Scandinavian languages (Danish and Swedish) and West Scandinavian languages (Norwegian, Faroese and Icelandic).

"Safari" is a Swahili word. It originates from the Arabic word "safar", which means "to make a journey".

The modern Turkish alphabet was created by Kemal Ataturk in 1928.

The Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Languages states that there are between 3000 and 10,000 "living" languages in the world. Other sources claim a total of 20,000 languages. So we could perhaps say there is no right answer. The fact is that  the number is always changing, and by definition would you classify a language spoken in the Brazilian rainforest as a language or a dialect of Portuguese ?

The international distress call "Mayday", originates from the French expression "M'aidez" ("Help me").

Linguists generally agree that there are 44 sounds in the English language. These sounds are called phonemes. The most common sound is called the schwa, which accounts for 10-12% of the sounds of the language; for example: about, Japan, typical. Try pronouncing these words and see how you pronounce the highlighted vowels. This is the schwa.

The Russian language is the most widely spoken native language in Europe (164 million people use Russian as their first language). It is a variant of the Cyrillic alphabet - tradition holds that this alphabet was developed by two Greek brothers. One of the brothers was known as Saint Cyril, and his students in the Bulgarian Empire developed Cyrillic from Greek in the 890's AD.

The 5 most-spoken languages in the world, relating to the speaker's first language, are:

Every day I will add either a short statement or anecdote relating to language.