Byron in Armenia – or why learning a foreign language does not have to mean being a language nerd
I remember I used to be very impressed when people told me they learned Hebrew or Chinese. I thought if they learned something so difficult and “unusual”
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ألمانيا ليست جنة
تمت ترجمة هذه المقالة تلقائيًا. يرجى الاعتذار لنا عن أي خطأ في ألمانيا ، لا يبدو أي شخص قلقًا بشأن مشكلة الهجرة. يُعتبر التعبير عن أدنى قدر من القلق بشأن إمكانية دمج العديد من الشباب من ثقافة مختلفة تمامًا علامة على التخلف الذي لا لبس فيه ، وأوجه القصور العقلي الخطيرة المحتملة والميل السياسي الخطير […]
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Why I, a life-long Democrat, will vote for Donald Trump
This is a guest contribution for East&West by one of our American readers. I have always been a man of the left. I have a solid working class background, so since I was young, going with the party of the people against the party of the rich
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5 советов как выучить иностранный язык
Есть немного интеллектуальных удовольствий, сравнимых c чтением на иностранном языке и осознанием того, что вы понимаете гораздо больше, чем ожидали.
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How to write about Russia
Some say being a journalist in Russia is an infernal job. You are lucky if you escape alive. Indeed, Russia may well be one of the most difficult places on earth
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10 reasons why YOU SHOULD study Russian
Our last piece “10 damn good reasons why you should NOT study French”, judging from the reactions online, was not well received. The PC thought police, which 24/7 patrols the dangerous dark corners of the net
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10 damn good reasons NOT to study French
After the incredible popularity (for about 17 minutes everybody on the internet seemed to be talking just about this) that our recent piece “8 reasons NOT to study German” gave us, we decided to double down on it.
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The Beauty and the Beast: Russian-Polish false friends
Russian and Polish, both Slavic languages, share a lot of vocabulary and they are indeed pretty similar, althought they are not really mutually intelligible. There are some words that are particularly tricky, however.
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Does the future of language learning belong to language apps?
Suddenly it looked like nobody was studying anymore languages the way old bores like me used to. No more books, no more writing, no more real classes,
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Social networks have made us more antisocial
When Facebook started some ten years ago, I acted like one of these old dinosaurs who always look at a new technology with a mixture of skepticism and haughtiness.
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8 reasons why you should NOT study German
Many years ago, for some reason I started to fancy studying some Finnish. Before I had gone further than the everyday greetings, I met a Finnish young woman and with the typical Nordic straight talk, she just said: “Nobody should study Finnish”. Fine
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The Swedish ideal of society is a dreadful and inhumane dystopian future
Sweden is nothing less than the most progressive country on earth, again and again appearing close to the top in the list of the most developed countries in the world, and the people in Sweden are apparently were well aware of (and make no mysteries about) it. But what does this being “progressive” mean? At […]
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Polonia resurrecta – a new Intermarium for Poland?
For some people in Eastern Europe, the old American Dream now is a Polish Dream. Undoubtedly, Poland has gone a long way from 1989. Its economy increased by a factor of six since it freed itself from the Soviet domination and it was the only major country in Europe to avoid a recession in 2008-09. […]
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The tyranny of coolness – or not? Book review: 111 reasons to hate Berlin
Everybody loves Berlin. Especially if you are a cool person you just have to love Berlin, it is young, dynamic, creative, sexy, well, you know the list. Yes, everybody loves Berlin, except Kristjan Knall. Kristjan Knall does not love Berlin, in particular he does not love the Berliners, in particular the hipsters (this subspecies of […]
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Two years of war propaganda have made Ukraine and Russia enemies for generations to come
“The biggest problem of Ukraine”, told me a man travelling with me in a train from Kiev to Lviv, “is that we have a very bad neighbour”. It did not come as a surprise to me, as the man was from Lviv, the cultural capital of the Ukrainian national awakening that started in the second […]
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Sometimes history is just another story
“Only times will tell”, the saying goes, and people always repeat that to truly understand the meaning of an event you need the perspective of history. This argument has a point, because having the opportunity to gather and consult a large amount of historical sources on a subject is a privilege that the people “experiencing history” […]
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The Left has become an intolerant and disorientated elite party
This is a guest contribution by the leader of an emerging political party created around the ideal of direct democracy. You can visit the Facebook page of the New Parliament Party clicking here. A new era in British politics has been ushered in after the leave campaign victory. The referendum result was followed swiftly by the resignation or […]
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Why Germany is not a multicultural paradise
In Germany nobody seems to be concerned about the problem of immigration anymore. Expressing the slightest worry about the possibility of integration of many young men from a very different culture is regarded as a sign of unequivocal backwardness, possible grave mental deficiencies and dangerous and intolerable political leanings. Not even the sexual assualts of Cologne on New […]
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Why Belarus is actually Lithuania, Ukraine is actually Russia and Russia is actually Mongolia
Some weeks ago the Ukrainian parliament, the Rada, reviewed a legislation proposal to officially change Russia’s name. Contemporary Russia is not, in this view, the historically legitimate heir of the ancient Kievan Rus which is considered to be the first Russian and Eastern European state from where Ukraine, Russia and Belarus draw their historical origins.
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Can you measure a language?
A couple of days ago a friend of mine who lives in Germany (for now) asked me how long it took me to progress from level B1 to level B2 when I was learning German (my friend is a computer programmer and has an analytical mindset, so he likes to quantify everything). The question, apparently […]
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