Alex, Author at Study with Alex

When to use the Turkish ablative case

January 17, 2023Turkish

Turkish has a lot of noun cases. They mark nouns with their function in the sentence. For example, Turkish has accusative, dative, and locative among others. The Turkish ablative case is one of the major cases that we must look…

Can you learn multiple languages at once?

January 12, 2023Polyglot Secrets

This is one of the most common questions I get from beginner language learners and non-language learners. It makes sense to ask because it goes against everyone's first experience with languages. Most people learn some language in high school –…

Say vs tell (vs talk vs speak): what’s the difference?

January 3, 2023English

The verbs about speaking and quoting are one of the hardest for speakers of some languages. These words are either obvious to you, or they make no sense. Whether you use say or tell is so obvious to learners, but…

When to use the Turkish locative case

December 20, 2022Turkish

The Turkish locative case is one of many cases. I've written about the other cases like dative or accusative before. Fortunately, this one is not as confusing as that one. Turkish learners might overestimate their ability to use this case,…

Language Resolutions: 8 Ideas for the New Year that You Will Actually Do

December 15, 2022Polyglot Secrets

The only people who are more into resolutions than gym enthusiasts are language enthusiasts. January 1st is the time of the year when all the casual language learners come out to start working on their language resolutions, but they drop…

Fix vs. correct: what is the difference?

December 6, 2022English

A lot of things in life need to improve. Often, things in our life can become broken or wrong. In this situation, how do you know which word to use: fix or correct? They sound very similar, but you can…

How to say “need” in Turkish

November 15, 2022Turkish

There are a crazy number of ways to talk about need in Turkish, so I want to break down a few of them. Here are a few ways to demystify needing things in Turkish. General rules Who needs it? Be…

How learning languages helped my English

November 10, 2022Polyglot Secrets

One of my favorite language learning myths is the idea of the uncontrollable mixing. Some people avoid learning another language because they are worried they will confuse languages. In my experience learning about a dozen languages, I've only come to…

Fragile vs. brittle: what is the difference?

November 1, 2022English

My students have told me that knowing how to use fragile vs. brittle is difficult. They both can be translated the same in their native language, so it's really hard to notice how native English speakers use this word. The…

When to use the Turkish dative marker

October 18, 2022Turkish

The dative case of Turkish isn't the most complicated noun case; the award goes to the accusative, which I have written about before. I think dative is a close second in terms of difficulty. However, how can we know when…