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Are you a serious word nerd? Here are 7 signs that give it away

12 Aug

BrainGain Magazine started this Word Nerd series in March 2016. Since then we’ve written about Americanisms, the secrets to writing a good sentence, to best way to insult someone, accents, and other oddities of this common language we speak. For this edition, we thought about the series itself, and its name. We thought too about […]

Word Nerd: Top 5 writing errors made by undergraduate students

29 Jul

In 2008, Andrea Lunsford and Karen Lunsford conducted a national study on undergraduate writing in the US. The study was called “Mistakes Are A Fact of Life.” It revealed the most common errors made by college students in essays, papers, and other submissions. Even today these errors are common and continue to attract negative attention […]

Word Nerd: 5 forms of poetry that you must explore

28 Jan

 There is no question that Amanda Gorman, with her elegant and measured performance of ‘The Hill We Climb’, headlined the Presidential inauguration. We were all moved by her words & mesmerised by her rhythmic gestures. And, one of the sections that cheered the loudest were those who are interested in reading, practicing, and publishing […]

The Lockdown Diaries – Trying my hand at everything from kimbap to the big mac

18 Jun

Anuradha Phukan, studying for a Master’s in Management at the Durham University Business School, UK, writes about her lockdown experience. Anu at the Durham Cathedral I was born in Noida, grew up in Digboi and Guwahati in Assam, and worked for 2 years in Bengaluru, Karnataka. Due to my father’s transferable job and my passion […]

The Lockdown Diaries: Living a creative life in 30 sq. mts. of Berlin

10 Jun

Janak Mulchandani Janak Mulchandani, a full-time Master in Management student at ESMT Berlin, originally from Delhi writes about his experience as an International student in Berlin during COVID-19. Late in 2018, while working for a German company in Gurgaon India, I decided to learn German for the sake of communicating better with my colleagues in […]

The Lockdown Diaries: How I managed both work & postgrad studies from home in Belgium

3 Jun

Namit Arora The story of Namit Arora, a Masters in Marketing and Digital Transformation student at Vlerick Business School, in Belgium, who is studying and completing an in-company project from home.  My passion for marketing, motivation to build a future in the heart of Europe, and aspiration to study in one of the best European Universities […]

A Brown girl’s guide to studying abroad in China

16 Aug

By Aiman Zaidi  Four months in Beijing sound like an incredible adventure. But when you’re a Brown girl, things are a little more complicated. The chance to study abroad comes with the dazzling promise of adventure and the hope of doors opening.  For a Pakistani Swiss girl, studying abroad offers opportunities me and, in the […]

“I wouldn’t change my study abroad experience for any other”: The story of a German student in France

1 May

Anke Wright at a tour organized by her company. Anke Wright is a German whose life has an interesting French twist. She chose to learn French, and later study in France, when most of her classmates were choosing to learn English and flocking to Anglophone countries. Anke went on to marry a Frenchman and start […]

Word Nerd: 4 words from fantasy fiction that are now part of our real lives

29 Apr

In 1989, ‘hobbit’, a creature from from J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings universe, was added to the Oxford English Dictionary. It comes as no surprise that Tolkien, who is considered the godfather of fantasy writing thanks to his genre defining Lord of the Rings, had a word from his fictional universe recorded in the […]

Word Nerd: 10 German loanwords that English is never giving back

11 Mar

When stepping out of your comfort zone to study abroad, learning a new language is often one of the major reasons. At least it was for me when I traveled westward from Germany as a foreign exchange student to spend a year at an American high-school. For me, learning a language in a classroom, online, […]