2015: The Best Of The Blog

2015 has been an interesting year, so we thought we'd end it by taking a look at our ten most popular posts from 2015, as well as the ten most popular posts we shared from around the web. Today we'll just be focusing on our own blog. Without further ado, here we go:

Top 10 Blog Posts

10: Breakfast, Brunch, and Brinner: A Guide to English Meals (July 3rd)

It seems that English-speaking nations love their food and have a multitude of interesting words for the meals throughout the day. We had a look at them back in July and it proved popular. You can read the full post here.

9: Localizing The Aisle: The Power of "Foreign Branding" (March 11th)

Making products sound foreign can make them more appealing. In March we discussed how languages were employed in marketing to sell products. You can read the full post here.

8: Why Translation is a Fascinating Career (August 28th)

In August we sang the praises of our chosen careers, and it looked like many of our readers agreed with us. You can read the full post here.

7: A Destruction of Cats: Collective Nouns of the Animal Kingdom (May 15th)

The intriguing collective nouns for animals from the English language proved very popular back in May and throughout the year. You can read the full post here.

6: Why There's No Such Thing as "Untranslatable" (April 22nd)

The internet is full of articles of the best "untranslatable" words from languages around the world. As professional translators, we think people need to rethink their use of this term. We explained why in April. You can read the full post here.

5: Romance Languages: From Aragonese to Zarphatic (May 1st)

It seems our readers love a bit of Romance languages. Our post from May covering one of the world's most important language families was one of the most popular of the year. You can read the full post here.

4: How French Gave English its Sophisticated Words (February 4th)

Towards the start of the year we covered the reasons behind many of English's most prestigious words being ultimately from the French language. You can read the full post here.

3: Why It's Hard to be a Translator and a Language Lover (May 29th)

In May we discussed the difficulties we were encountering as promoters of languages, learning languages, and translators, and wondered whether or not it was sustainable to encourage everyone to learn foreign languages even if it could result in us losing out on work. You can read the full post here.

2: Language Learning: Cognates and False Friends (July 24th)

Our second most popular post of the year came back in July when we discussed "false friends", words in a foreign language that look similar to those in your own, but can carry very different meanings. You can read the full post here.

1: Speech Tempo: What is the World's Fastest Language? (April 8)

Everybody's had that one complaint about people speaking too quickly when they're learning a foreign language. Back in April, we looked at a study that sought to work out if some languages are spoken more quickly than others. You can read the full post here.

The Lingua File's 1st Birthday

Happy Birthday to us!

Today is our first birthday and for a year we've been blogging daily on languages, linguistics, and culture.

While we do absolutely love doing this, life sometimes gets in the way and, as a result, posts will no longer be daily, but rather on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.

We'll also be beginning to publish our guest contributions, so if you'd like to contribute, send us an email to info@thelinguafile.com or check out the info on contributing.

We'll still continue to post more regular content on our Facebook page, on Twitter, on Google+, and on Pinterest, so don't worry too much about the frequency of our posts.

Due to these changes we won't have a post for you tomorrow, but we will do on Friday! Thanks for being with us over this last year!

Why Don't Guys Study Languages?

Why are language classes dominated by women? Normally the arguments consist of languages being a girly subject in school, that women are better suited to learn languages or that women simply like a good chat. The low number of males opting to study languages in schools and universities is worrying.

In most foreign language classes across the world there tend to be more girls than boys. If that isn't a huge incentive for guys to take up a foreign language we're not sure what is. Without trying to be crude, if lads can't encourage themselves to learn languages for the usual reasons: personal growth, employability, travelling, etc., then they should coerce themselves with the fact that if they want to meet a load of women, studying foreign languages is definitely a great way to do it.

The one on the right is for girls, apparently...

This year, the Shanghai International Studies University opted to admit men with lower grades in order to encourage more men to study. Even though the men probably aren't as smart as the women (let's be honest - when it comes to foreign languages they rarely are), we bet they're having a great time throughout their... uhm... let's just say studies.

Though we've said that men will likely meet more ladies in their studies, we haven't mentioned the increased pulling potential just by speaking another language. There are around 365 million native English speakers, and we can assume half of them are women. If you learn Spanish, which has around 387 million native speakers, you have potentially doubled the amount of women you can strike out with. It's too complicated to work out how many of those speakers are underage - just don't go there, and how many of them are hideously ugly - don't go there either!

All we're saying is, men should learn more languages. It not for themselves, then for their junk.

Blogging About Languages

What to do? What to do?

The first post will always be the most difficult. Before embarking on a journey you have to know where you're going... if you don't you're a fool.

I hope to put everything (and I mean everything) I can about languages into this blog. They're fantastically fascinating things, I'll briefly tell you a few reasons why...

Language and history are intertwined. There's a reason most of the English words for food are of French origin. Why do I write in English and not Latin?

Language reflects culture. Why do Eskimos have so many words for snow? They don't, but you understand the point I'm trying to make...

Language is science. How do you define something without words? Well... with pictures obviously... but words do help.

There's so many more reasons but I said I'd be brief.

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