The blog begins

Hi, this is Hannah. Welcome to my first NELS blog. Here I am going to share with you what I find interesting, and hope that you do too! Please read, comment and feel free to ask me any questions. Let’s be interactive!

1. My books

So, I have just started reading two books. I love reading, and now I’ve actually got 3 books on the go! One is a true story called ‘Almost French’ about the life challenges faced by an Australian when she falls in love with a Frenchman she meets whilst travelling. One of my favourite genres is travel writing: I enjoy learning about other cultures. I’ve travelled a lot myself, and always keep a daily travel journal, and so I get really inspired by reading others’ stories.

My second current book is a Bill Bryson classic – Mother Tongue. I adore Bryon’s books: not only do I learn something from every page, but each has me in fits of giggles too at his clever anecdotal wit. In this tome, he explores the English Language, which I thought, being as how this is an English Language School site, may also be of interest to you. Allow me to divulge more titbits of his prose:

So did you know that English has more words than any other language? How many do you reckon are in common use? 10,000, 50,000, 100,000? Double the last figure and you’re about there! Apparently we use about 200,000, even though the Oxford Revised Dictionary has over 600,000 definitions! And how does that compare with other languages? Well, Germans use 184,000, and the French speakers 100,000. As for Japanese, well, please someone tell me! I’ve read that there could be a similar number to English, but any more scientific research would be very much welcomed!

I could, and will, tell you more about Bill’s book, and will also share my third one…next time!