Multilingual flashcards

Why learn one language at a time when you can learn lots?

I started this as a way to reinforce my current languages while adding new ones as a common problem many multilingual speakers face is that they have specific vocabulary in one language but not the other.

For example, when a Japanese friend came to visit me when I was living in Italy and I suddenly had to talk about Renaissance art and history in Japanese instead of Italian my head nearly exploded.

Similarly difficult was being asked about the Fukushima nuclear disaster and tsunami in my Italian oral exam or the Libyan refugee crisis in Japanese when all the information I consumed and the conversations I had about these topics were in the respective other languages.

For this reason I have been making a conscious effort to ensure equal access to relevant vocabulary in all my languages, rather than just the one most pertinent to the information.

Having several languages alongside each other also makes it easier to see cross-linguistic links, common origins and help you to remember more vocabulary.

I will be posting multilingual flashcards with words and phrases below – when there are enough they will be grouped by topic to make them easier to use.

For these cards I will be using 10 languages: English, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Italian (IT), French (FR), German (DE) and Spanish (ES), Irish (GA) and Polish (PL).

Apart from the languages that I speak well I am not guaranteeing these to be completely free of errors, though I do my best. Each translation is checked with a variety of dictionaries, monolingual webpages, books and encyclopedias where possible. I have also checked with a native speaker if anything is unclear.

If you do spot any mistakes (I’m only human!) I would really appreciate it if you let me know so I can correct them as soon as possible. If there are any topics you would like to see, please let me know those too.

Thank you!

Click on each page below to see them arranged by topic or simply scroll down to see them in order of creation (more than 200 published so far!).