Not A Monoglot, Honest.

Although I mostly write in English (well, almost 100%) I am not a monoglot.

I find foreign languages fascinating and even though I never truly learned any grammar to speak of, I’m quite fortunate that I can listen and make sense of a lot of phrases, on a good day, or even make a stab at memorizing them.

I suspect that I am, like many people, who learnt languages as an adult, often put off by the conjugation of numerous verbs and the formal, stilted, methods of teaching which have been so prevalent.

Which is a roundabout way of getting to the subject of: the Internet and languages.

We are incredibly fortunate that today we can read newspapers across the globe, which are only published in their native languages, not English, with the aid of online translation tools.

Granted, none of them are perfect, but they offer an insight into other cultures, other ideas and enhance our appreciation of humanity.

No longer do we need Esperanto, but online translation tools will do the job, sufficiently and the world thankfully become smaller and more connected as a result.

Here’s a small (and rather random) selection:

Farsi – Hamshahri – Daily Newspaper, Iran

Thai – Thansettakij Newspaper.

Indonesian – Pesat News

Slovak – Pravda

Russian – Izvestia

Swedish – Norra Västerbotten (Thanks to Jonathan Leman for the idea of this post).

I used Google translate for the above, but there are many more, just type the language required into your favourite search engine with the words: translate online, and see what comes up.