Date Archives: 2014/11

Native speakers of any language will judge the “difficulty” of another language by how much it differs from their own. For example, the Foreign Service Institute (FSI) of the U.S. Department of State lists five categories of increasing time taken for native English speakers to acquire “General Profe …

Thousands of primary school pupils in the United Kingdom have been learning about the region’s pearling industry, the oil boom and the culture of coffee in the Arabian Gulf thanks to the efforts of a British couple. Clive Holes, a dialectologist, and his wife, Deidre, have translated examples of the …