Canberra has been good to me. I love my job, my team, my housemates and my house, and on Australia Day I climbed a mountain.

In fact, I climbed Mount Kosciuszko, the highest mountain in Australia. :D

My climbing companion and I decided that taking the chairlift most of the way was cheating, so a 20km hike it was. And what a beautiful hike!

The scenery ( Read more... )

For any and all gaming and language nerds out there:

( Read more... )

Just in case people haven't seen this yet: CSIRO by the Sydney Uni Science Review.

Click to view

I've not had to use the word "hermaphrodite" as anything but an adjective in French before. Consequently, I'd never thought to look up the word's gender.

Turns out it's masculine. (Should've guessed.)

The blogosphere is alive with news of Muammar Gaddafi's long-winded, rambling, 90-minute-plus address to the UN. Susan of The View from LL2 (yep, that's right, I'm plugging my friend's law blog, what're you gonna do about it?), among others, points out that Gaddafi wasn't alone in flaunting the time limit of 15 minutes, even if his excess was the ( Read more... )

In my last post, I promised to write about some great things in French and Spanish. I'm sure there are things that speakers of these languages find fantastic about English, but being a native speaker I don't notice them as much. In any case, here are some of my favourite things that appear in French and Spanish:

Oui/Non/Si
French speakers are lucky ( Read more... )

Went to the Vintage Fair yesterday and acquired two pretty dresses. I think I'll wear one of them to work on Monday! (Also, vintage sizing = hilarious. Either centimetres have changed, or one of my dresses thinks it's smaller than it actually is.) On the way home, I spotted one of my students riding in a bike-led rickshaw, music blaring. Or, more ( Read more... )

Something that has piqued my interest lately is the word "wesh", which was turning up in comments on some of my French friends' photos. After a dredge of the memory and a check of online slang dictionaries, it became apparent that "wesh" was the word I knew as "ouèche" when I was living in France. Same pronunciation, different spelling.

So why the ( Read more... )

I was checking in with the French news, as I often do, and found an unexpected turn of phrase. In English, news reports on 'hot zones' often report on the explosion of IEDs, Improvised Explosive Devices. In French, the term is "bombes artisanales". This was surprising for me because in my experience, "artisanal" is most often used in a positive ( Read more... )

For the last few weeks, my students have been working on French newspaper articles. French newspaper articles with very complex sentences. (Unnecessarily complex sentences, I should add.) Since most of them needed help to unravel the unwieldy things, I gave them a quick rundown of simple vs complex sentences.

With werewolves. XD

Sure, they didn't ( Read more... )