Amazing coincidences and old jackets
My daughter has been doing her end-of-high-school Matura exams. This week, she called me to tell her about her English listening exam that she had just completed. What she told me was a pleasant surprise. The listening text was about my home town in the UK. Maybe that wouldn’t be too surprising if I came…
Free AI Chatbot – see below for details!
Last year, I took it upon myself to create an AI chatbot for people to practise their spoken English. If you have read the post previous to this one, you’ll see that I am more than happy that AI has entered the arena of tools for language learners but I am fairly confident that in…
Learning tools
When, quite a few years ago, I started my first language teaching course, the tools available to us were limited compared to what is available to the language learner and teacher nowadays. I had to prepare my own OHP slides – something so old that most of you reading this won’t even know what I’m…
Making monumental mistakes
I remember way back in the late 20th century, I was in a French language lesson doing a dictation, which was one element of our lessons I particularly despised. I did my best and handed in my written interpretation of the sounds I’d heard. The total number of words was about the same as this…
1001 albums
In 2025, I read about a project. There’s a book called 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die . I don’t particularly like bucket lists or being told what I must do before I die but what I liked about this was that someone created a simple app which offers one of these albums…
The Babel fish
“The Babel Fish is small, yellow and leech-like, and probably the oddest thing in the Universe.” So begins the description of this strange creature in the classic 1979 book ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’ Douglas Adams, the author of the book, described a fantastic creature that you place in your ear and which allows…
“Language learning is like cooking”
I heard this statement many years ago. The simple premise is that you could have the most expensive pots and pans, the best kitchen utensils, the most exquisite oven but if you can’t actually cook anything with this collection, you’ve got a problem. Almost all of us learn foreign languages using methodology that hasn’t fundamentally…
First steps… again
I first started writing a blog many years ago – certainly before my now-teenage kids were on the scene. I think I wrote a couple of pretty good posts but then other events caught up with me and time disappeared, and this was before we all had smartphones permanantly in front of our faces. Maybe…
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Andy Highton Language Training 