Whenever I travel abroad I always do my best to act like a local, including speaking the local language whenever I can. In some countries that works great, in others, I can't really avoid being a bumbling mess.

The best part of a textbook is the little cartoons they sprinkle throughout, to show that learning is fun: The silly illustrations in a primary school textbook, the New Yorker-style gags in a more adult text, or the angels and mammoths that play around in The Way Things Work. Malachi Ray Rempen’s Itchy Feet, a webcomic about travel, is like the cartoons-only version of those books.

Scrabble players can now play the word "OK," according to the latest update to the Scrabble dictionary released on Monday.
Experts are saying they new addition could change how Scrabble is played and lead to entirely new strategies.

One of my biggest frustrations with reading in one of the few foreign languages I’ve dabbled in is how long it takes to look up all the words I don’t know (which, admittedly, is a lot of them). It’s disruptive, and I’m likely to quit before I get all the way through an article or chapter or page.

Everyone's familiar with déjà vu - everyone would have experienced it at some stage in your life. It's a disconcerting flash of recognition of something you know you've never seen before, yet still feels all too familiar. Less people know about this term's sister, jamais vu: but it's a great descriptor for another weird mind trick that's just as trippy to experience.

English is a funny old language. There's a distinct lack of consistency between sounds, particularly when you look at words as they're written down. This can trip up anyone so what would happen if we approached English as a phonetically consistent language?

Decimated has historically meant to remove one tenth of something reflecting the Roman punishment of killing one in ten soldiers in under-performing legions. Today it is often used to describe something being significantly damaged or destroyed. Which usage is correct? Well, both.

Dictionary.com has updated its list of commonly mispronounced English words. We've included them below; along with links to the proper pronunciations.

When you're trying to learn a foreign language, there's no better way than being immersed in it. Language immersion, after all, is how most of us learned our first language as kids. When everything around you is written in a particular language, you're probably going to work to figure things out.

Words are pronounced however people pronounce them, and to insist otherwise is to fight a losing battle. This is why “giff” and “jiff” are equally valid. But for those who care, according to a new Nintendo 3DS game, NES (the classic Nintendo Entertainment System) is pronounced “ness”.

Before my daughter learned to speak she learned to sign, and the first sign she mastered was “more”. More meant more — as in, “Give me more milk before I scream-cry in 5-4-3-2-1...” — but for her, it also meant “again”. Sing that song again. Push the toy cash register button again. Make that funny sound with your armpit again, again, again.

Even though information about other countries is available with a just few clicks online, the best way to truly understand a different culture is through mastering its language.

Learning a foreign tongue is especially useful if you’re traveling and want a fully immersive experience, but finding the time to take a language class can be tough.

That's where Mondly and its AI-powered curriculum come into play.

Google Translate is an app that's been critical to my success when travelling in other countries. When you don't speak the language (or don't speak the language well) somewhere you're travelling, being able to quickly look something up, or speak into the phone to create a translation you can use to chat with that guy on the street can be a lifesaver.

Whether you want to chat with the locals on your next holiday or stave off dementia later in life, being bilingual is unquestionably handy. If you're just getting started on learning a new language, knowing where to begin can be a daunting prospect.

Sure, you can just go immerse yourself by living in another country for a while, or use services such as Duolingo or Rosetta Stone. You can also set up your favourite devices, websites and services to help you get up to speed with a new language. Here's how.

"The important thing to know about spelling is that it's not just rote memorization," says Ananya Vinay, champion of the 2017 Scripps US National Spelling Bee, who will ceremonially open this year's bee next week. While Vinay uses flashcards to study specific words, she says the real trick is learning where different words come from.

There's an age-old myth that says full-grown adults can't become fluent in a second language. And lately, the media has been pointing to a new study that seems to suggest as much, saying that the fluency age cutoff is around 18. But that's just not true.

"You can make nearly any object into a good insult if you put 'you absolute' in front of it," says a popular Tumblr post, which has bloomed into a thread about a specific linguistic phenomenon.

New Zealand and Australia are both English-speaking countries. However, New Zealanders have a long list of slang terms and colourful expressions that set their dialect apart from Australian English. Here are 23 Kiwi words that tend to confuse Aussies.

Of all the tricky grammar topics, who versus whom ranks right up there: get it wrong, and you risk looking like a rube. Get it right and you risk looking pretentious. Get it wrong in a different way and you risk looking like a pretentious rube. So we at Lifehacker, who want to be both right and non-pretentious (but only sometimes succeed), thought we'd do a little research and break down the whole who/whom thing once and for all.