How is this confusing?

"Everytime they pointed to a banana and said 'yellow,' something wasn't clicking."

Marta explains one of her first memories learning English in a Californian elementary school. Ai interviews. Hammad and Emily act out.


Listen in to hear what's so slippery about bananas.

pic from foundphotoslj and music by Bacilos

Flowers? What flowers?

On Wednesday last week, I (Emily) was lucky enough to attend Talk Time, which is a free conversation group for English Language Learners at the Seattle Central Library.

I spoke with enthusiastic learners from around the world, and I got to brag about this website. While I was there, I captured a couple of questions about English that have been bugging some of the participants. Here's the first question:

Over the weekend Radiolingual readers responded, and then we mixed their answers into a short piece.

Listen to the piece here.

Send us your thoughts and comments and stay tuned for our next question--or if you have a question, send it in!


Write from Karen's flickr photostream and Tulip Trees by Rob Costlow.

_______ in the sky with _______

In class last Tuesday, we started talking about words that have multiple meanings. As one of the new Radiolingual producers explained the two meanings of a Japanese word, we had a little bit of confusion over the relationship between those two meanings.


Listen to the above piece to hear an audio exploration of the word and the process I imagined as we tried to understand the actual meaning of the word.

In any language, how do we build mental relationships between the words we know and the experiences and images that those words describe?

Answered! Give up / Give in

For the first interactive audio Q&A feature, an English language learner asked, "What's the difference between give up and give in?


Listen to the question

Here's a nice, 1-minute mashup (with music) of what RadioLingual listeners had to say.


Listen to the answers


Keep on sending in your great answers and we'll keep re-mixing them!