These are some posts that either have gotten heavy traffic, or have gotten a lot of comments (mostly on other social media), or that I just liked.
- Holden Caulfield had it easy: The story of an encounter with an interesting young man in Beijing in the wee hours of the morning.
- Zipf’s Law and the French alphabet: I have no idea why, but this page with a link to a French alphabet song has been read consistently ever since I posted it.
- How to interact with a Parisian waiter: Possibly the most useful post I’ve ever written.
- A typical Saturday morning in Paris: The pleasures and mundanities of life in the City of Light.
- A stain on America’s honor: My horror–as a military veteran–when I learnt about CIA torture of prisoners. (No French in this one.)
- My first surreal French moment: The moment that I knew I was going to love being in France.
- Why supporting traditional French shopping is in your own best interest: How to shop in France–not for haute couture and perfume, but for your groceries and other necessities of daily life.
- A typical Saturday morning in Paris: more about how to shop in France.
- Hawaiian shirts turn out not to be the way to go in the Parisian workplace: This is the single post that got the most reactions from my French coworkers, bar none.
- Some vocabulary from a different France: Language of the French underclass. This post contains my absolute favorite French example sentence, ever.
- Excuse me, you can speak English question?: Another popular post from China.
- Resources for learning foreign languages: Pimsleur: I frequently get asked to recommend materials for learning foreign languages. If you want to get a quick grasp of just enough of a language to make it through a trip, this is a good option.
- Resources for learning foreign languages: Foreign Service Institute and Defense Language Institute courses: If you’re looking to learn a language in depth and are willing to invest the time to do so, these are excellent sources of free, but very high-quality, materials.
Zipf's Law 