A Useful Tip

If you want to learn a new language, listen to some music in that language. Then choose a song you liked (begin with slower songs) and look up its lyrics. Listen to the song again... and again... and follow the written words.

Helen Keller

“The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart.”
Helen Keller

Mentor

While revisiting the English language as an adult and after spending years studying French literature, I needed time and practice to adjust to certain English words, which sounded or were spelled (almost) the same way as in French but had different meanings, sometimes even opposite meanings.

If you've read Languages & Life Lessons, you know what I mean, for I've mentioned several such words.

Earlier today, I looked up Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day, as I do every morning, and today's word, mentor, meaning "trusted guide," took me back to the early nineties and my challenge in remembering that it had nothing to do with the French word menteur, which means "liar" in English. 

Reflections

 

Henry David Thoreau

“There is some of the same fitness in a man's building his own house that there is in a bird's building its own nest. Who knows but if men constructed their dwellings with their own hands, and provided food for themselves and families simply and honestly enough, the poetic faculty would be universally developed, as birds universally sing when they are so engaged? But alas! we do like cowbirds and cuckoos, which lay their eggs in nests which other birds have built, and cheer no traveller with their chattering and unmusical notes. Shall we forever resign the pleasure of construction to the carpenter?”
Henry David Thoreau

A New Memoir

Yesterday I posted https://afarinrava.blogspot.com/2023/12/not-always.html, which may have seemed too cryptic because this morning I received a message from a fellow writer asking me what I meant.

Please accept the following as the best explanation I can provide at this time:

I wrote a short memoir in the last few months, and during the editing phase it changed into something I did not expect. I plan to publish it in January 2024. You'll understand what I meant in my previous post once you have the book in your hands.

Not Always

Words make sentences, and sentences make paragraphs... usually but not always.