New Year is a major holiday in some culture. Here is a list of different ways to celebrate this holiday in different languages. See this Duolingo blog entry for more information about the new year toast in different languages and cultures (https://blog.duolingo.com/happy-new-year-translations/). سنة جديدة سعيدة (Arabic) Godt nytår (Danish) Gelukkig Nieuwjaar (Dutch) Happy New Year (English) Bonne Année (French) Frohes Neues Jahr (German) नववर्ष की शुभकामना (Hindi) Buon anno (Italian) あけましておめでとう (Japanese) 새해 복 많이 받으세요 (Korean) 新年快乐 (Mandarin) Szczęśliwego Nowego Roku (Polish) Feliz Ano Novo (Portuguese) С новым годом (Russian) ¡Feliz Año Nuevo! (Spanish) Gott nytt år (Swedish) Mutlu ...

Rosetta Stone presents a snapshot of their Dynamic Immersion lesson in Mandarin Chinese, which consists of practice in vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation skills. This blog entry presents short introduction to the basic elements of their basic-level lesson, focusing on the following items. Pinyin (Chinese Phonetic Alphabet) Grammar Activities People Things Adjectives Numbers Phrases See https://blog.rosettastone.com/the-essentials-how-to-get-by-in-mandarin-chinese/ for more info.

Linguists often use the term "Romance language" to describe a group of languages such as Spanish, French, and Italian, but what does it really mean? Are they more romantic than English? You will find the answer in this Duolingo's blog post. Quote: "Spanish, French, Italian, and Portuguese might be the most familiar from the group, but there are many more -- even within Spain, France, Italy, and Portugal! Others include Asturian, spoken in the very north of Spain; Sicilian, spoken in Sicily; Occitan, spoken in France; and Ladino, also called Judeo-Spanish, which is spoken by some of the ...

Memrise, an online language learning app, summarizes their observation about language learning across the world in 2021. Quote: "Squid Game and the K-wave’s effect on language learning, Japanese, Yoruba and Finnish surge in popularity and ... people are studying later at night. Read more in this annual review of learning on Memrise."

This blog post by Mondly, an online language learning app, shows how to say "Merry Christmas" in different languages. Here is the list. Spanish: ¡Feliz Navidad! French: Joyeux Noël! German: Frohe Weihnachten! Italian: Buon Natale! Portuguese: Feliz Natal! Romanian: Crăciun Fericit! Russian: Счастливого Рождества! (Schastlivogo Rozhdestva!) Swedish: God Jul! Norwegian: God Jul! Danish: Glædelig Jul! Finnish: Hyvää Joulua! Icelandic: Gleðileg Jól! Polish: Wesołych Świąt! Dutch: Vrolijk Kerstfeest! Croatian: Sretan Božić! Czech: Veselé Vánoce! Read the blog entry to learn more about these expresssions above. Also, here are a few more expressions in Asian languages. Chinese (traditional): 聖誕快樂 Chinese (simplified): 圣诞快乐 Japanese: メリークリスマス Korean: 성탄을 축하드려요

Duolingo, the largest and fastest growing online language learning platform, has published its annual language learning report for 2021. Here is the summary of the report. In 2021, Asian languages—especially Japanese and Korean—attracted learners worldwide, building on the impressive growth observed in 2020. Japanese surpassed Italian globally to become the 5th most popular language to study, and it's the fastest-growing language in the U.S. and U.K. Korean—holding strong at the 7th most popular language to study around the world—is the fastest-growing language in Brazil, France, Germany, India, and Mexico, and it ranks as the second-fastest growing language in Japan! Chinese, which was the 10th most ...

This infograph of most commonly spoken languages in the U.S. (besides English & Spanish) shows very rich linguistic diversity of the United States. "There are over 7,000 different languages spoken around the world. While most of the U.S. population speaks either English or Spanish, many additional languages are spoken across the country too."

New York City has announced "Language Access for All," a new $4 million initiative to improve outreach and communication with multilingual families who need language access support. "The program will focus on multi-lingual “know your rights” campaigns, expanding communications outlets and tools to reach more families, building language access capacity of school staff and partnering with community-based organizations to provide multilingual family workshops and language support."

The Critical Language Scholarship (CLS) is a prestigious national study abroad scholarship, which covers all the cost for a summer study abroad in 2023 to selected countries (including Japan). The program requires some level knowledge of language that you are going to study abroad (for Japanese, it requires at least 2 years of studying). The deadline is on Sunday, November 27, 2022. See below or the CLS website (https://clscholarship.org) for more information. The introduction video to the CLS scholarship is available here and you can download the program flyer here About the Critical Language Scholarship The U.S. Department of State funds about 600 ...

Jeremy David Engels (Penn State) and Elaine Hsieh (University of Oklahoma) wrote how people of different languages and cultures express their gratitude. Quote "As communication scholars who study intercultural communication, we have studied how the many languages around the world have their own unique words and expressions for saying “thank you.” In turn, these expressions reveal very different assumptions about how human beings relate to one another and about the world we collectively inhabit."