bab.la blog

The Oxford University Press recently announced the Word of the Year 2009: to unfriend. It is the process of removing someone as a ‘friend’ on a social networking site such as Facebook. So finally we found a way of breaking up the easy way: Just unfriend the person on Facebook, usually the person won’t even notice it unless he/she looks into his contacts. I guess it is similar to not answering phone calls any more. So, if you want to keep up the good old way of “announcing” the break up do the following:

1. Set your relationship status to single.

2. Unfriend the person.

3. Send a direct message “It’s over”, or if you want to make it more public just post a status update “Let’s just be (unfriended) friends.”

4. Join all single groups on Facebook like “I am single and I am hot”, “Single and sexy”, “Men are plain stupid” or “Women: STOP talking”, “Who needs a boy/girlfriend when I have me?”, “Me, myself and I” to show your true committment.

5. Don’t forget to go all the way: Unfollow on Twitter (is there a unfollow Monday or so on Twitter?), delete the person from your Skype list etc.

If this doesn’t work, we recommend some of the expressions in the “When all else fails” section of our complaints survival guide.

Now, that’s it. Over and out.

Andreas

Hey, Language Lovers around the world!

Today is Barack Obama’s inauguration… inauguration – what a word, do only Germans have problems to write and pronounce it properly?

Anyway, three words from Obama became world-known in the last year: Yes, we can.

Regardless if you like the slogan or not, it is short, crisp, straight to the point.

Now the question is: Would it be possible to translate this slogan properly into some other languages? How would you translate “Yes, we can” into German? “Ja, wir können” – no. “Ja, wir schaffen es.” – maybe.

So our language blog Lexiophiles posted a voting for the best translation of “yes, we can” into seven languages.

Please check it our – and vote for the translation you like best. And after that, please add it into our dictionary.

Have a great day,

Thomas

By now you surely have found Waldo, right? Today I wanted to point out a cool list at our language blog Lexiophiles. Actually, it’s two lists. You might think: “Gee, bab.la is really cool, but are there any more cool language websites out there?” We say: “Yes, there are.” We have a saying in Germany (do we Germans have a saying for everything I wonder?) “den Wald for lauter Bäumen nicht sehen” – so we created two lists just for you to shed some light into the forest:

I am still amazed by the quality of the mentioned blogs and podcasts as some of them are “hobby” projects. You can download all of the top 10 podcasts on iTunes – no excuse to start learning a new language today. But before you do that, make sure you found Waldo.

Andreas