Transliteration and part-of-speech tagging for Japanese and English (at present).

Intended for schoolchildren. Recommended by Jake Adelstein: ‘Agreat book for learning Kanji and Japanese culture. It teaches by using proverbs, famous quotes.’

Might be interesting.

A linguistics magazine for the public.

Historical examples of Chinese characters: bronze & seal script etc. Strictly, it’s paleography rather than etymology.

‘Religious phrases are scattered liberally throughout Arabic languages. The secret to translating is not to take them literally.’

I especially like ‘shrug report’.

‘a system of communication that uses manual signs, graphic symbols and speech. It is used by and with people who have communication, language or learning difficulties.’

The conlang created for Avatar.

바하사 찌아찌아

‘This is why, when fashionable words show up in our day, we grind our teeth. We’re cynical because we don’t trust fashionable words.’

Graph of swearing in the Guardian over time. Fear not, though, because ‘even a liberal rag like the Grauniad seems to be pretty resistant to the tidal wave of filth [...]’

‘This site is about how you can learn Japanese without taking classes, by having fun and doing things you enjoy—watching movies, playing video games, reading comic books—you know: fun stuff!’

‘Kanjilish is a Firefox add-on that allows you to practice Japanese kanji while you read English (or other languages). […] It replaces the first letter of a word with a kanji of similar meaning. For example, the word read might appear as 読ead.’

How to write regular and cursive Hebrew. Slightly clunky.

How to write Arabic. Includes initial, medial, final and isolate forms.

Wonderful post on language and pedantry by Stephen Fry.

Using ‘less’ with countable nouns: perfectly cromulent since at least the 9th century.

If you notice yourself using these expressions, try using English instead.

English spelling may be weird, but at least it's owned by its users, not defined by diktat.

Solving a word puzzle.

An amazingly unethical experiment: researchers tormented orphans to try to give them speech impediments.