Phyl's Blog

You know when you come across someone foreign on Youtube who claims they can teach you to speak with a 'British accent', that you...

Anna has been amusing us linguistically recently. She has taken to inventing her own very expressive verbs. It started on Xmas day when her ...

I have an issue with the terminology being used all over the media now. Twice this morning I have heard the cold 'snap' mentioned -...

Last weekend the weather was so dire, we hardly set foot outside. To distract the kids I got Léon and Lots to make biscuits together. They u...

  Walk along the river Clyde Originally uploaded by PhylB Anna has quite a few pinafores. This is a nice, cosy option before we need to dra...

Readers of my blog will have heard me rant more than once about the standard of language teachers we use in our primary schools. Today Charl...

Pen Lids Close-Up Originally uploaded by incurable_hippie Now here's an interesting thing for those who speak Danish. A few weeks ago Th...

Thomas sent me a link to this the other day but I found it a bit too depressing to blog immediately. I think I first wanted to get it straig...

Watching how babies acquire language is a fascinating thing. Obviously, given my taste in men, I will never know the boring, normal, monolin...

Bahdubaday seems to be the word Anna has decided to use to mean TV (of course?!) Granted, it doesn't sound much like TV or telly but we...

I've never found the big age gap between Marcel and the two little ones (8 & 10 years respectively) a particular problem. He loves ...

bigfin reef squid (アオリイカ) #829 Originally uploaded by Nemo's great uncle I have just listened to Thomas and Léon having a 5 minute long ...

Léon's had a morning filled with bilingual dilemmas. I was being a bit lazy so instead of reading an English or French book to Anna and ...

I know I am a language nerd who lives with a language nerd but is it just us who are weird or is Norton particularly linguistically challeng...

Eurovision Party 2008 - Scoreboard Originally uploaded by johnthurm I am sitting here watching Eurovision with Thomas - it's practically...

Léon has reached that action figure age where he talks all day long to plastic dinosaurs and the likes and they speak back to him. If he as...

I thought when I gave my kids the names Charlotte and Léon -Olivier that those two names were dissimilar enough not to cause any confusion....

  Thomas and I Originally uploaded by PhylB All week we've been trying, fairly unsuccessfully, to explain to Pudge that we are getting ...

Spiekermann House Numbers Originally uploaded by Stewf I am not the worst language learner in the world, even if I say so myself. I started ...

Charlotte is a very down to earth practical child. We were out shopping the other day and we passed Starbucks. I think they should change t...