A while back, I shared a link to a funny Stéphane Guillon video—when I was actively preparing for DELF, I really enjoyed his style of delivery (even if I didn’t understand everything he said).  At the time, watching him read his ‘episodes’ for the radio made me wish it were possible to have a copy of his speaking notes.

Fast-forward to a couple of weeks ago—–while searching my local library for audiobooks for my son, I was playing around with the search filters and ended up looking at children’s audiobooks in different languages.   Through that process, I was pleased to discover that they had a copy of a children’s audiobook read by Stéphane Guillon (honestly, I can’t say enough about the fantastic Edmonton Public Library).

The name of the book is L’atroce monsieur Terroce », by Nicolas de Hirsching.  As a bonus, they have a copy of the printed…

With a strip of  rainbow-coloured carpet weaving a path up the stairs and onto the wall around the whole store, it’s not hard to understand why any kid would love to spend a few hours hanging out in a bookstore like the Poplar Kid’s Republic Bookstore in Beijing (蒲蒲兰绘本馆).   Located right next to a cafe I used to visit in the Jianwai SOHO area, it had lots of great origami paper and Japanese (as well as Chinese and Korean) books. I picked up some books for my son the last time I was in Beijing but, if anyone knows of a similar kind of international children’s bookstore in Canada *please* let me know!

One book that I picked up from that shop is called (えんぴつで書いて読む日本の童話), which you might translate as « Penciling through Japanese Children’s Stories ».  The concept of the book is remarkably simple: famous pieces of children’s…

The following post is my own version of Jarvis1000’s post on making time for language learning. I was really inspired by his post so I wanted to share it with my own experience and how I work language study into my day to day life.

I don’t tell a whole lot of people this, but I have both a full time job (people don’t know this part) and a full time music career (most people know this part) and so the time I can spend studying language is sometimes limited. For me, practice often takes priority. And besides that, at the end of a full nine hour work day, one of the last things I want to do is study or keep working (or practicing 😦 ), so finding time to dedicate to language learning isn’t always easy. Learning another language has to be something you really want to…