There comes a time when you must bid farewell to your adopted country and the time for me is nigh; in less than a week I shall be back in England’s green and pleasant land.

The stereotypes of Germans are particularly unforgiving: Lederhosen wearing, beer guzzling, sausage eating men, Blonde ladies with ample bosoms wearing Dirndls (traditional dress), completely humourless, fastidious, punctual, excessively law abiding….

Living in another country for a few months you seem to pick up the habits of the locals, whether it be eating the food, picking up various words and peppering your vocabulary in your own language with them or following the local way of doing things.

Don’t you just love idioms? They generally make no sense whatsoever, particularly in a foreign language. Anyone learning English, for example, would be particularly stumped by ‘It’s raining Cats and Dogs’ – I mean, what have cats and dogs got to do with rain?! To make your lives easier and to give you a little [...]

Getting to grips with the language barrier…

As Frank Sinatra once sang, ‘Love and Marriage go together like a Horse and Carriage.’ Well, not so any more it would seem. Marriage apparently is dead; an institution of a bygone Era and romance has died along with it. So many couples divorcing those lucky people that are ‘in love’ don’t see any sense [...]

What would be the one word you associate with Germany? Well, mine is Wurst (sausage), followed a close second by beer.

You would expect English to be the top of the ‘foreign languages taught in schools’ list, wouldn’t you? After all, it is the ‘global language.’ But is that really the case? Well, here at Lexiophiles we have put our thinking caps on and thought about the top languages taught in our native countries. Of course, [...]

License Plates (number plates in British English) are instantly recognizable as being from one country or another. You can always tell you are in a foreign country just by looking at the license plates on cars. Likewise, if you see a car from you own country while on holiday you immediately know you are not [...]

Why the Brits like to be different…