I love learning languages, but I’ve noticed I only really learn one when there’s a reason to. A recipe to follow, a game to play, people to talk to.
Plenty of people already work this way. They learn Spanish because they dance salsa, Japanese because they train kendo, Portuguese because they got into capoeira, French because they cook. The words stick because you need them right there, in the middle of something you care about.
I grew up with two languages, so I’ve been wandering between cultures for as long as I can remember. One thing that taught me early: you can know every word and still miss what people mean. You get a language by spending time inside the culture that speaks it.
Where the sessions in Nice come from
Language by Doing started as me looking for exactly that kind of session and not finding many. So I’m setting them up in Nice: a small group, one afternoon, one thing to do, and French as the language in the room. The first ones are still in the works.
Why collect idioms that rain ropes?
While the sessions get going, there are the idioms. They’re the closest thing to culture in a single sentence. English rains cats and dogs, French rains ropes, German rains string, and in Japanese the rain comes down like someone tipped over a bucket. You’d never guess any of them from the words alone, and that’s what makes them fun.