An Introduction to Stack Exchange for Language Learning



Stack Exchange for the Language Student




Currently Stack Exchange has the following language sites:


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Getting Acquainted with Stack Exchange





You Are the Community




What to Ask


  • Focus on questions with a single, correct answer


  • Avoid “general reference” questions.




Finding Answers










Other Languages

Language Learning: Support this proposal



Deep Fried Memory

This is your memory on trans fats. class=
This is your memory on trans fats.
If you haven’t heard that trans fats are bad for you, you probably live under a rock, and don’t have Internet access. But then I guess you wouldn’t be reading this blog…

But last week a new study about trans fats was published (first reported back in 2014) which suggests that consuming trans fats may directly harm your ability to learn a language!

How the study was done

Participants were presented 104 word flash cards. 22 of the words were duplicates, the other 82 were unique in the deck. Participants were asked to judge whether the word on each card was new, or had been previously seen. The number of correct answers is their score.

Hopefully, you can see how this simple memory test might be relevant to recognizing new vocabulary terms–or countless other daily activities!

When they tested people who ate different amounts of trans fats, ranging from absolutely no trans fat, up to 28 grams (1 ounce!) of trans fat per day, they found that for every 1 gram of trans fat consumed per day, participants scored an average of 0.76 points worse on the memory test.

The researchers did what they could to eliminate other possible explanations of the reduced memory performance, such as age and mood. As a result, they concluded that trans fats were the apparent culprit. The study shows this effect exists for men ages 20-45. The study authors believe the same to hold true for women, but there wasn’t enough information available on women to prove it. The study also doesn’t explain why older men weren’t affected, but one possibility is that dietary effects may show more clearly in younger adults.

Let me try to put that into perspective.

Half a letter grade

Imagine you show up to Spanish class and the teacher gives you a sheet of brand new vocabulary words, asks you to read the list, then immediately gives you a pop quiz over the new vocabulary.

If you’re an average student, according to the study, you’ll walk away with a solid B grade–a score of 85%.

If, on the other hand, you’re the type of person who eats one large order of fries every day, and an icing-covered cupcake at the convenience store for a snack (for a combined 7 grams of daily trans fat), you’re likely to lose more than half a letter grade, and walk away with only a C+–a score just below 80%!

It might be tempting to binge on some Sara Lee Muffins (3g trans fat each) after an embarrassing first date, but I suggest waiting for the Neuralizer to become a reality.
And this is just a recognition test! You aren’t even asked to define the vocabulary terms! If junk food can cause you not to recognize new words at this level, what can it do to your ability to remember definitions and your long-term recall? I guess we don’t know, but I don’t imagine it’s going to have a beneficial effect!

Now to be fair, not all fried foods, including French fries, are fried in trans fat. In fact, fewer and fewer are all the time, as the health problems associated with trans fats become more known. But many cakes you’ll buy at the store, especially those with icing, come packed with trans fats, as do many salad dressings and other processed foods.

Remember to check your nutrition labels!

The “Trans Fat” line item often “lies.” Look for “partially hydrogenated” vegetable oils instead!
Aside from the obvious “Trans fat” item on the nutrition label, you should also look for, and avoid, anything with partially-hydrogenated vegetable oils, as this is where most trans fats come from. It’s common to see food items labeled as “0g Trans Fat” but tout partially-hydrogenated vegetable oils (this is possible if the designated serving size is small enough that the trans fat per serving rounds down to 0 grams).

Top 1: The Essential Language Learning List



So without further ado, I present…

The Top 1 List


1. Keep a list



How your list will benefit you

Keeping a language list will give you two primary benefits:


Where to keep your list


  • 1. A notebook

    My French list, in a small pocket notebook.
    My French list, in a small pocket notebook.

  • 2. A web or mobile app

    My French list on my Android using Google Keep
    My French list on my Android using Google Keep

  • 3. Other Options




What to put on your list






So you have a list — Now what?



  1. Use a dictionary
  2. Use an online reference resource


  3. Ask your language mentor


  4. Online Communities


  5. Flashcards


Leave a comment below with your experience using a Language List.


New on the Menu: Pungent Shrimp!

Pungent Shellfish: Cuba's new specialty.
Pungent Shellfish: Cuba’s new specialty.

This was the menu for our “fancy” dinner on our honeymoon in Havana, Cuba in April. I rarely point out translation errors to restaurant staff, but this one was serious enough I decided to point it out. But they didn’t seem to care. Perhaps they didn’t grasp the meaning their bad translation was conveying.

Would you repost a meme fail?

Is the sentiment lost if the sentence doesn't make any sense?
Is the sentiment lost if the sentence doesn’t make any sense?

Would you repost a meme with an error like this one? Why or why not? Comment below.


You’ve probably heard the joke:

A person who speaks two languages is bilingual.
A person who speaks more than two languages is a polyglot.

Answer: An American.


Freshman year




For university.



Ice cream

Fallen ice cream: The reason I wanted to learn Spanish.
Fallen ice cream: The reason I wanted to learn Spanish.


I finally had motivation to learn Spanish.

My first attempt to learn Spanish




I was discouraged, and I gave up.

My second attempt to learn Spanish

Denny's was my language school.
Denny’s was my language school.



Language immersion in Mexico




Teaching myself




Now I’m teaching myself French.

What I’ve learned



Why there is no Portuguese word for “Sauerkraut”

Pardon my French

The phrase
The phrase “Pardon my French” is popular enough that it is common on T-shirts. Buy your own!
Last week my brother was telling me a story that took place at his work.  Somebody had, jokingly, insulted a coworker using a long string of profanity.

“What did you say?” the recipient had retorted, pretending to be offended.

“Oh nothing. That’s just the Portuguese word for ‘sauerkraut’.”

We’ve all made jokes like this.  The phrase “Pardon my French” has even entered the English vernacular, as a way to ostensibly disguise profanity.

There is no translation

“There probably isn’t even a word for sauerkraut in Portuguese,” was my response when my brother told me the story. It turns out I was wrong (sort of–more on that in a moment). The Portuguese word for sauerkraut is “chucrute“. But would you believe me that there isn’t an English word for sauerkraut?

“Wait a minute!” you may be thinking. “You just said (wrote) the English word for sauerkraut. it’s sauerkraut!”

And you’d be right. Sort of.

“Sauerkraut” is actually what we call a loanword. Loanwords are incredibly common in many languages. In English they are especially common for names of foreign food items–such as “taco,” “spaghetti,” “sushi,” and, of course, “sauerkraut.”

If you’re thinking “Okay, so sauerkraut is a loanword from German. So what? Now it’s an English word, too!” you’d also be right. Sort of.

Jar of Chucrute / Sauerkraut sold by Hemmer in Brazil.
Jar of Chucrute / Sauerkraut sold by Hemmer in Brazil.
Remember how a moment ago I said I was “sort of wrong” about Portuguese having a word for sauerkraut? Well, Portuguese has the word “chucrute” which means the same thing as sauerkraut in German (and English). But it’s not really a Portuguese word, either. It’s also a loanword. This time from French. “choucroute” is the French word for “A dish made by fermenting finely chopped cabbage”.

But wait! It’s not really a French word, either! The French borrowed the word from the Alsatian dialect of German, which in turn got the word from German ‘sauerkraut’.

A cabbage by any other name

You might think that of the languages thus far discussed, English, Portuguese, French, Alsatain and German, only English directly borrowed the word from another language. The others each made slight changes to the word along the way. In reality, English made some changes, too, which is clear if you compare the English pronunciation with the German pronunciation. And in fact, almost every loan word changes at least a little when it moves from one language to another. Ask a native Mexican to say “taco” and it will sound slightly different than when a native English speaker does it.

  • American English “sauerkraut”
  • German “Sauerkraut”

“Loanword” is not a black-and-white concept. There is an entire spectrum of loanword classifications. The “strictest” form of a loan word is a classified as a “foreign word”–where we use a foreign word directly, without integrating it into the language–like “sauerkraut”.

When Alsatian turned “Sauerkraut” into “Sürkrüt” “French turned “Sürkrüt” into “choucroute”, and Portuguese turned “choucroute” into “chucrute,” these were all examples of a slightly more liberal “loan word” processes.

Language Boundaries

So what’s the point of all of this?

A typical view of languages, at least from a mono-lingual American viewpoint, is somewhat analogous to a map.

A typical view of languages, with distinct borders between them.

We tend to compartmentalize languages. “Dog” is English. “Gato” is Spanish. “Je t’aime” is French. “空” is Japanese.

I prefer to take a different view. And I encourage you to change your thinking and join me.

The Fluidity of Language

As we have seen above, with a brief study of everyone’s favorite fermented cabbage dish (no offense, kimchi lovers!), languages are intertwined. Almost all of English vocabulary comes from other languages–roughly 45% from French. That is to say, there are very few truly “English” words–words of actual English origin. What we call the “English language” is constantly changing. It’s always being influenced by other languages–and in turn it is influencing other languages.

I think rather than compartmentalizing language, as we do national boundaries on a map, it’s much more accurate and useful, to think of languages as flowing together.

Language flows like paint swirls. Where one language ends and another begins is often impossible to determine.

Thinking of languages with defined boundaries is harmful to learning about new languages. It creates a “here” and “there” mentality. “I’m here. I speak English. Spanish is over there. It’s far away. It’s difficult.”

Once you make that mental shift to seeing all languages as related, it makes your world both larger and smaller simultaneously. It makes the world larger in the sense that you realize you can never learn all of our “own” language. English is a huge language. And it changes every day (and that’s not just rhetoric! It is constantly changing in real, observable ways!).

It also makes the world smaller by realizing that other languages are not so distant. Spanish isn’t “another language”. It’s more like “another shade” of language. You already know a lot of Spanish without realizing it (burrito, café, insubordinación). You also know a lot of French (café, fiancée, proposition), German (sauerkraut, gesundheit, fest), Italian (a cappella, finale, riviera), and Japanese (豆腐 (tofu), 醤油 (soy), 禅 (zen)). Don’t be afraid to learn more.

Passionate about Language

It is this mindset that lead me to subtitle this blog “Passionate about Language” rather than “Passionate about Languages.” While it’s convenient to talk about languages as distinct entities, as a student of language, I believe it’s much more appropriate to think about language as a single art form.

Glossophile? Glossa-what?

Editor’s note: This article is also available in Spanish.
Nota del editor: Este artícolo también está disponible en español.
¿Glosófilo? ¿Gloso-qué?

As I was thinking about launching this blog, I knew I would need to come up with name.  I wanted something short. Something memorable.  Something meaningful.  I spent several days brainstorming with my wife and some friends, and we had come up with a few ideas.  But nothing felt  quite right.

SapiosexualThen a few days ago, while I was working, the word “sapiosexual” came to mind.  It’s a relatively new word, a neologism, apparently “invented” in 1998. And for most language purists, it’s poorly formulated, and not especially meaningful. But the touted definition is:

sapiosexual noun
a person who is sexually attracted to intelligence in others

So this word got me thinking down the path of forming a word from ancient roots to convey the message I wanted.

Looking for a Latin name

If “sapiosexual” is a person who is attracted to intelligence, what word describes someone attracted to languages?  Using the Latin root for language, I’d have “linguasexual”, or the Latin root for speaking, I’d have “loquosexual”.  The first is clearly out because “lingua” also means tongue, and that would be the first meaning to come to mind when reading the word.  The second would also be confused, at least among American English speakers, with attraction for crazy people (thanks to the word “loco”, which we borrowed from Spanish).

And all of this ignores the fact that I’m not really interested in writing a sexual blog at all! (Never mind that most people, probably erroneously, don’t think “sapiosexual” is an overtly sexual term.)

Looking for a Greek name

So my next stop was Greek roots.  The Greek root φίλος (phílos), meaning “friend” or “beloved”, was my starting point.  We have many derivative terms in English. An audiophile is enthusiastic about high-fidelity sound reproduction. A Francophile has a strong affection for all things French. And of course I’m sure you can think of a few other -philias, many of which are not appropriate for work.

So one of -phile or -philia was to be my suffix. I still needed a prefix.  Greek for “language” (as well as “tongue”) is γλώσσα (glóssa). Its from this root where we get terms like “glossary”.

Narrowing it down: Glosso-

I began searching for words formed from these roots.  Glossophilia is an established word.

Glossophobia is the fear of speaking–specifically in public.

Xenoglossophobia is the fear of foreign languages (not a problem I face!).

With these precedents, I knew I was on to something.

Arriving at Glossophile

I simply had to replace the -phobia in glossophobia with my chosen suffixes, -philia and phile.  Of these two, Glossophilia is the more common as a word but it also sounds (to me, at least) more sexual than I prefer. And the domain name is already taken anyway.  So I settled on Glossophile.

I felt like “The Glossophile” had a better ring than simply “Glossophile.” Thus the name of the blog.

So borrowing from the definition of audiophile, I have accepted the following definition for glossophile, and thus the name of my blog:

glossophile noun
a person who is enthusiastic about language

I am a glossophile. I am enthusiastic about language. And this blog is about my enthusiasm about language. And not just foreign language, or I might have called it “The Xenoglossophile.” I’m enthusiastic about my native language, English, as well as the other languages I speak to varying degrees: Spanish, Portuguese, and French. I’m also enthusiastic about languages I don’t speak.

Mark Twain is one of America's favorite glossophiles.
One of America’s favorite glossophiles.

I hope you’re a glossophile, too. If you’re not enthusiastic about language, I hope you’ll stick around, and maybe some of my glossophilia can rub off on you. And don’t worry if you don’t speak more than one language. You can be enthusiastic about your own language, or about language in general. Many of the most famous glossophiles in history were mono-lingual!

Climb You!

Sube Usted / Climb You
This sign, found in the church atop the Pyramid of Cholula near Puebla, Mexico, was meant to indicate that visitors must take a few steps up to exit the room. But the subtle difference between “to climb” and “to go up” were clearly lost on this translator, not to mention word order!