Languages

Knowing different languages helped him in later life

As I have mentioned before, my father learnt Latvian, English, German and French at high school and also knew a smattering of Russian. As a Baltic-German who did his schooling in Latvia, it is not a great leap to presume he spoke German at home and Latvian within the wider

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A Rounded Education; languages, humanities and the universe

If I were ever granted three wishes, my first would be to understand every language in the world because I would then be able to comprehend all of the family history documents I have inherited. Not that I would need to know more than German, Russian, French and Latvian, but

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Looking through more than one window

There is a Chinese proverb about learning languages which goes: “To learn a language is to have one more window from which to look at the world”. For a few years now I have been learning German. Although I stopped formal lessons some time ago, I have a couple of

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The Traps of Translation

When I closed the door for the last time to my father’s house, I took with me boxes of documents, certificates, letters and bits of paper with scribbles on them. Most of these were either in German or Russian. I can order a coffee in German. I can count to

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