Category: ZOHO

Funny Language-Learning Scenes

The Funniest Language-Learning
Scenes of All Time!

Learning a new language should be fun! Challenging – CHECK! Different – CHECK! Exciting – CHECK! FUN – DOUBLE CHECK!

 Full Disclosure –  I once won a French scholarship out of Grade 12 and spent about 6 weeks in July-August of 1975, in a full French Immersion program! Outside of travelling for 3 months in Europe in 1979, it was my best summer ever! And my roommates were from Chicoutimi and the first day together, we spent teaching each other swear words! LOL! Yeah, okay .. Grade 12! So, yeah, FUN! I can neither confirm, nor deny … I remember them all!

 DOUBLE Full Disclosure – I am nowhere near as good in French NOW, as I was … THEN! LOL! I like to describe my French now as ‘Corn Flakes French‘! What?

On every box of Corn Flakes, each side panel has English and the corresponding ‘translated’ French on the other side! So if you throw away the ‘little words’ on each side .. YOU HAVE A PERFECT TRANSLATION TOOL! Who needs Google Translate anyways! Which will most certainly be another Bog Blog one day! LOL!

Now go and …… HAVE SOME FUN!

 

Top 10 Funniest Language Scenes


3 Funny Language Learning Commercials


Learning English Really Might be Helpful

TTFN!

Fonts and Typography

Fonts and Typography

There might be 26 letters in the ENGLISH language, but there are SO MANY MORE characters in SO MANY MORE LANGUAGES, that fonts become a very important consideration in everything from blogs to academic publications! And what could be better than FREE! Yes, there are countless professionally created fonts for very specific purposes, but sometimes FREE can be just as good.

At ZOHO I have included numerous free and informative sites for a very large selection of FREE FONTS:

Font Squirrel has a nice interface, a wide range of fonts and a searchable database. For instance, just typing in Halloween provided 8 different fonts!

And a recently posted article on the Best Free Fonts for Designers is here.

And Free Foreign Language Fonts is here!

And another Free Foreign Language Fonts is here!

And the Best Multilingual Fonts in 2020 is here!

And they are now both at ZOHO too!

And what would a Bog Blog be without a YouTube video! Stephen Fry is a constant source of language related videos! He is even at TED

Stephen Fry
Kinetic Typography – Language

TTFN!

 

NEW CALL FACILITY FURNITURE !

! NEW !
The CALL Facility Furniture
HAS ARRIVED!
! NEW !

All the new furniture has arrived in CALL! Many thanks to Marcus and Adam for arranging all of this! Adam was up on campus yesterday, social/physical distancing of course, putting the new furniture into CALL, and taking these photos too! 

The students will certainly be in for a nice surprise when we are all back at UVic and their favourite lab now has spiffy furniture! We will work on the best layout and with wheels on the upright stations, students can move things around to suit their needs! I can hardly wait to get back to UVIC … for even more reasons than just new furniture! 

Thanks everyone who helped out on spiffing up The CALL Facility for students so they can colllaborate and thrive in their studies even MORE!! And a comfy chair suits the bill!

THANKS TO ALL
WHO HAVE HELPED!

GET – THE COMFY CHAIR!!!


TTFN!

 

Working From Home

Most, if not all of us at CHD are now working from home or will be soon.

And that likely means everyone who also works at or attends UVIC.

Hopefully, EVERYONE will be at home soon to stay safe with social distancing and/or self-isolation. Take all the necessary precautions and keep checking back at the UVIC site and with colleagues! We are all in this together.

Many thanks to EVERYONE at CHD for setting us up with UVic laptops and resources so we can do the best possible work, from home, given the circumstances.  Clicking on the banner above takes you to the UVic home page where everyone will get the most recent updates. I would hope everyone is doing that on a regular basis.

One always neglected interest for me is expanding my knowledge of blogging using OAC or The Online Academic Community at UVic. I will try to do one blog each weekday, language related, (or maybe not) either with links, information or interesting topics, just to keep the resources that might be out there, available. I believe that OAC is one of THE MOST UNDERUTILZED RESOURCES on campus, especially so for language learning, so … here goes!

One of the best CALL Facility resources over the years has been ZOHO, or also known as CALL Facility Bookmarks!

Many years ago, I added/collected the best language sites to each browser in The CALL Facility – both Mac and WIN. It rapidly grew and grew in size and time requirements, yet students wanted all the links that I was finding, or had been requested by Instructors. So I attached the bookmarks file in an email. That quickly proved too time consuming as well!

So … to make a long story short, I now use ZOHO to add new websites, either from me, Instructors or students that hopefully prove useful to students! Big shoutout to Mark vH for helping me back then! THANKS MARK!

Available anywhere, any platform, 24/7, I have literally added a new website sent to me from an Instructor, even IN PERSON as their class arrived in CALL ….. and had it posted at ZOHO before the students even logged in at their computers! Then they searched for the key word(s) given to me by the Instructor and they had the link instantly in seconds for their homework, assigment or group project.

Yes, Google could probably find it too, but … just where is it ranked? Way down low? Middle? How many different ads might pop up? Located somewhere else in the Multiverse? Good luck getting ahold of Doctor Strange or even .. The Doctor!

At ZOHO, it is right there, with the keywords and titles that the Instructor wants, not just now …. but … RIGHT NOW! Oh yeah, and it is free too! Easy to maintain as well, which is what I will task myself with in the next few days – cleaning up old websites and maybe bumping into a few new ones!

To see for yourself, you can click on either graphic above to instantly go there, or you could search at Google for the keywords “CALL Facility ZOHO Bookmarks” and … Google is your friend!

Do a search for Klingon at CALL Facility Bookmarks and see what you find – you might be surprised to even find Hobbits once roamed UVIC! And everyone knows about the Vampires at UVic, right?

Greg

Stay safe. Stay at home. Stay healthy. Everyone.