Polish up your Polish!

Actually for most of us, when it comes to learning Polish, it may not be so much a question of ‘polishing up’ – more a case of starting from scratch. You may find it surprising, but there are real advantages to learning this difficult but rewarding language. For...

Understanding French menus

There’s a rather good French restaurant in London called Brasserie Zédel – if you’ve never been it’s worth popping in for a quick look at the restaurant which is in the basement. Brasserie Zédel was once part of the Regent Palace Hotel, built by T. Lyons & Co....

Japanese teacher, Gillian Hill

How did you start to learn Japanese? I’m a native English speaker but lived in Japan for a few years in my twenties. I was sent to a small village in the mountains where no one had ever even seen a foreign person in the flesh and certainly didn’t speak any English. I...

Positive thinking and language learning

Recent research shows that positive thinking helps students solve maths problems. Researchers whose results were published in Psychological Science suggested “looking at students’ beliefs about a subject and their self-perceived abilities to provide another inroad to...