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Test your Italian vocabulary with this new matching exercise containing an additional thirty words. Match each Italian word on the left with its English equivalent on the right. As always, watch out for false friends. Italian has much in common with other Romance languages, most notably French and Spanish. If you are familiar with either…

This week we’re going to look at five tricky Italian words with multiple meanings. These are words whose meanings change depending on the context and/or grammatical role in which they used. Note that his list does not include nouns whose meanings change based on gender.   If you need more help with tricky words or…

This week we’re going to revisit my personal favorite false friends from French, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish. These false friends have stuck with me because the potential misunderstandings they could create are either especially serious or particularly amusing. They also serve as good reminders of why you should never assume that a word in another…

In this lesson, we’re going to look at ten more commonly-used Japanese idiomatic expressions. Knowing basic idioms can increase your understanding of any language, not to mention your degree of acceptance by native speakers. For each Japanese idiom, we’ve provided a literal translation and (where applicable) the figurative meaning and a modern American English equivalent.…

In this lesson, we’re going to examine the meanings behind ten more Spanish idioms. Knowing basic idiomatic expressions can increase your understanding of any language, not to mention your degree of acceptance by native speakers. With that in mind, we’ve included the literal meaning, the figurative meaning, and an equivalent English expression for each Spanish…

Test your Chinese vocabulary with this new matching exercise containing an additional twenty-six core Chinese words. Match each Chinese word on the left with its English equivalent on the right. We’ve included Pinyin romanizations for each of the Chinese words in case you need them. However, we recommend looking at the Pinyin only if you’re…

  As we’ve talked about in the past, Japanese-English false friends are largely the result of how the Japanese language assimilates foreign words. A word with no native Japanese equivalent is adapted into a form that Japanese speakers can write and pronounce via the Katakana alphabet. These “loanwords,” in turn, can take on different meanings…