As I’ve tried to stick to a regular schedule for my blog posts over the years, one problem has come up again and again: my language learning interests come and go faster than my planning can keep up. That’s particularly true for languages that I’ve put in the “dabbling” bucket…

About a decade after Marco Polo set out on his journey along the Silk Road to China in the late 13th century, a monk from Beijing (then known as Khanbaliq or Dadu/大都) was heading off in the opposite direction. His name was Rabban Bar Sauma, and basically you should read…

Editor’s note: First of all, I am my own editor lol. 😝 But also, after reviewing what I’ve written in this post… I’m not sure it’s entirely true. There’s a bit of an “unreliable narrator” problem when I try to reflect on my own language-learning process, I guess, and some…

Welp, it looks like my 2021 New Year’s Resolution to restart this blog barely lasted two months before falling by the wayside 😅 but hey, at least I have plenty of excuses: I got busy at work my target of one-post-per-week quickly outpaced the rate at which I could come…

Alright, I started 2021 with the intention of updating this blog more regularly, and I did manage to write three posts in January, but then, well, I got busy and couldn’t think of blog-length things to write about for a while. If you follow me on social media though, you’ll…

If you have any familiarity with the various questionable activities the North Korean government has been involved in over the decades, you might have heard about the country’s penchant for kidnapping foreign citizens — including a South Korean movie director, Shin Sang-ok. I’d heard about North Korea’s abduction of a…

A few months ago, after the end of last years online Polyglot Conference, I was invited to apply for membership in a group called the International Association of Hyperpolyglots, or HYPIA for short. …

Ever since I taught myself Serbo-Croatian back in 2012, I’ve figured I’d eventually like to learn Albanian at some point too —in part to better understand the “other side” of one of the bigger unresolved political issues of post-Cold War Europe, and also to learn another language that’s representative of…

On top of the hundreds of hours of Netflix in a dozen languages I watched last year, I also recently watched four full seasons of one show that isn’t available on the platform: the Italian crime drama Gomorrah. The show is based on the 2005 non-fiction investigative book of the…