Time to learn — and dream

It’s time to refocus. That, at least, has been the lesson I’ve learned from the past months. Living in a more confined world has made me reassess what is important to me. I have made a similar assessment here in the magazine. What language is essential for you to learn? The result is our “English for now” feature. To make this learning experience as realistic as possible, our author Vanessa Clark created a German family, the Naumanns, and tasked them with using English in a way that, we hope, is close to your own language needs. Join the Naumann family on page 38.

In our Travel feature, we’re going to whisk you off to remote island destinations. I love learning about new places and, this time, I discovered that, in addition to the Channel Islands off the coast of northern France, there is another group of islands with the same name that belongs to California. “Island retreats” begins on page 24.

Finally, I invite you to take a look at our new pronunciation page, Phonetic Fun. Here, we list words in this issue that you might find hard to pronounce with their phonetic symbols. We also explain the sounds represented by less common phonetic symbols.