One of the great things about learning a new language is that you gain access to a whole new range of words that don’t exist in your mother-tongue, boiling certain concepts down to an essence. German is infamous for having a lot of words which are untranslatable, or at least difficult to translate, such as Schadenfreude, Zeitgeist, Wanderlust and other popular…
Why You’ll Never Get The German Sense of Humor Unless You Learn the Language
Have you ever heard the saying that Germans have no sense of humor? Well, it’s a fairly widespread belief. In a 2007 study more than 30,000 people in 15 countries were asked to rank the world’s countries with the worst sense of humor. Guess which country earned the title of “Unfunniest Nation”? Yeah, you guessed it … But…
What’s The Best Software For Writing Ebooks? – A Brief Introduction
Once you’ve made the decision to write your first ebook and self-publish it or just finally release that epic fantasy tome catching dust in your drawer, the inevitable question arises: what’s the best software for this? How much should you spend? Is there something open-source, perhaps? Can you just use good ol’ Word? Since I’ve been asked this…
What Ambitious Parents Can Teach You About Freelancing
When I first started with Fluent Language Tuition, I had no idea where the whole experiment was going to go. I was so hesitant to consider this a real business that I tried to hide my name from the website, the flyers and all business cards. My brand was not a consideration in those days,…
How To Watch German TV Online In Your Browser Or Mobile Device
Learning German with apps and self-study textbooks is a great way to start, but after a while translating isolated sentences and stuffing your brain with flashcards and grammatical explanations will not be enough anymore. Whether you start looking at German children’s books, easily written short stories or German novels, eventually you’ll have to expose yourself to more…
Never Get Lost In Our German Learning Dungeons Again With These New Maps
Recently, I’ve heard from some readers that they were getting lost in the mazes of Genowrin and Shanima. For those who don’t know these books, they are part of an interactive German learning adventure, where the reader has to choose one’s path through the story by jumping in between pages, selecting dialogue options and navigating through forests, dungeons…
7 Strange German Superstitions And Slightly Crazy Cultural Beliefs
A Badly Timed “Happy Birthday” in Germany Brings Bad Luck No Eye-Contact While Clinking Glasses = 7 Years Of Bad Lovemaking Lighting Your Cigarette With a Candle Causes a Sailor to Die Crossing Your Fingers Means You’re Lying Cover Your Mouth While Yawning, Lest Demons Enter Your Soul Leaving Without Goodbye Is Something That Bad…
7 German TV Series To Make You Laugh And Learn The Language In No Time
Tired of struggling with irregular verbs and breaking your head over declension rules? Why not put your textbook aside for a while and watch some German TV series? Even if you don’t understand everything at first, you’ll be surprised how much you can glean just from body-language, mimicry and context. In this post, I’d like to…
3 Ways to Use Smartphones To Learn Foreign Languages By Reading Books
There are many ways in which smartphones have come to encroach on our ability to enjoy some quiet time with a good book or even replaced the pulp in our life all together. The sense of immediate gratification — or should I say procrastination — and the constant stream of notifications can make periods of uninterrupted…
Add a German-English Dictionary To Your Android Kindle App
After writing a tutorial on how to enable a German-English dictionary on the Kindle app for iPad and iPhone, today I’d like to share with you how to enable the same functionality on your Android Kindle app. On your iPhone or iPad Kindle app, you can just purchase a dictionary from the Kindle store and…