The language round-up: best language blogs in February

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Here’s a round-up of my favourite seven language blog posts from February. If you’ve got any other suggestions, feel free to share them in the comments below!

Newspaper

Photo: @Doug88888

Five bizarre false friends in Polish and Russian

In his recent post, Alex Rawlings talks about the close similarity between Polish and Russian, which can sometimes be very misleading. Alex discusses five truly bizarre false friends – take a look and see if you know them!

Best language blogs - false friends

Photo: Kurtis Garbutt

How to stop people talking to you in English

I went to Spain last year and what made me the most excited about my trip was checking how far my self-taught Spanish would take me. It didn’t take me very far – I was spoken to in English every time I said something in Spanish. When I made it clear I didn’t want to speak English, they spoke to me in French (?).

In this blog post, Olly Richards collated some very useful advice from top language bloggers and polyglots on how to ensure that people don’t speak English to you when that’s not what you want. Which one is your favourite tip?

Eavesdropping in German

Ron Gullekson from the Language Surfer addresses a similar question to Olly in the post above, and recalls a real-life situation involving some not-so-nice German words!

The 20 funniest French expressions

Are you worried your French is not idiomatic enough? Morgane Croissant lists the 20 funniest expressions and explains how to use them. I’m looking forward to using them myself (apart from the naughty ones)!

Best language blogs French

Photo: MTSOfan

10 steps to overcome your fear of speaking in a foreign language

Are you learning a language and feeling you’re doing well at reading and listening but you want to be more confident when speaking it as well? In his recent blog post, Alex Hammond tells you how to do just that. What’s your biggest fear when it comes to speaking in a foreign language?

4 tips for improving your pronunciation

Wiktor Kostrzewski of the 16kinds blog tells us to exaggerate our accent and shares three other tips on how to sound more like a native. Very useful!

Quiz: which foreign language should you learn?

Are you stuck trying to think which language to learn next? Take this quiz. I got French, which sounds right because I already speak it and it was the second foreign language I learned, after English. I’m learning Swedish at the moment, but I might take the quiz again once I’ve finished my 21-day language challenge!