(ESL learners – click on the bolded words to see explanations and notes. Try the exercise at the bottom after! 🙂 ) What is it that you first think of when you read the term “nothingness”? Paradoxically, nobody actually thinks of nothingness — no matter what we imagine, we imagine something — this notion in itself is in…
Is there a “right way” to deal with negative feelings?
(ESL learners – click on the bolded words to see explanations and notes. Try the exercise at the bottom after! 🙂 ) Feelings: those pesky little things that populate our mental landscapes and sometimes get in the way of our everyday lives. They can infiltrate you at any moment. While eating breakfast. While standing in line at the…
How to Become Better at Anything
(ESL learners – click on the bolded words to see explanations and notes. Try the exercise at the bottom after! 🙂 ) There are a great many things that humans strive for, but they can probably all be summarized under a single common heading: development. The unrelenting desire to improve—to be better, stronger, richer, happier—is the propeller…
Life Is Not An All-You-Can-Eat Buffet… Stop Treating It Like One
(ESL learners – click on the bolded words to see explanations and notes. Try the exercise at the bottom after! 🙂 ) When you start getting really into self-development content, something very interesting starts to happen. You start to hear the same message everywhere. Across different podcasts, books, articles, posts… even if they’re from wildly different fields….
The One Key To Learning A Language
(ESL learners – click on the bolded words to see explanations and notes. Try the exercise at the bottom after! 🙂 ) One of the most common questions my ESL students ask me is this: “I want to improve my English… how should I go about it? Should I watch movies? Read books? Buy a grammar guide? What…
What Traveling Really Means
(ESL learners – click on the bolded words to see explanations and notes. Try the exercise at the bottom after! 🙂 ) Hello, first signs of winter! I sat down this evening and logged on to this blog for the first time in nearly four months. I didn’t mean to be gone for so long, or to…
How Writing Can Heal Your Heart
(ESL learners – click on the bolded words to see explanations and notes. Try the exercise at the bottom after! 🙂 ) I’m not a professional writer. I write this blog for fun, in my free time, and I don’t expect to get any return from it other than the fulfillment of helping ESL learners and fellow…
The Agonies Of A Translator
(ESL learners – click on the bolded words to see explanations and notes. Try the exercise at the bottom after! 🙂 ) How much time can you spend agonizing over two words? The answer may both surprise and amuse you. If you are or know a translator, you will know that this time can go up to…
You Have To Start To Be Great
(ESL learners – click on the bolded words to see explanations and notes. Try the exercise at the bottom after! 🙂 ) A few days ago, I was in a car, driving back from Milan to Genova after spending 6 days in New York. I was terribly jet-lagged (my brain thought it was 6 in the morning),…
What Being A Digital Nomad Really Means
(ESL learners – click on the bolded words to see explanations and notes. Try the exercise at the bottom after! 🙂 ) Picture this. You’re sitting in a coffee shop. You’re sipping your coffee, staring absent-mindedly out the window and mulling over some decision or problem that certainly won’t matter one month from now. You glance down…
LINGUISTIC MUSINGS 