The sheikh’s sixth sheep’s sick.

That is probably the most difficult tongue twister in English, owing to the tricky consonants and phonemes put together. But do you know which other sixth is happening? That’s right, The Language Closet is celebrating their sixth anniversary today!

We have been operating on a weekly post basis for the past couple years or so now, exploring certain interesting quirks some languages have, and also expanding on our etymology series called “Word Bites”. Although meant to provide bite-sized etymologies of certain interesting words, some more recent posts have ballooned in length. We still want to continue this series, but if longer etymology essays persist, we might consider renaming that series into a more appropriate series title, since an average length of 700 words per post would make “bite-sized” a lot closer to being a “choking hazard”.

We have also seen a steady increase in readership over the past year, with our post on Duolingo speedruns gaining particular attention. And so, we would like to thank you for your readership, and interest to explore what makes languages so interesting, such as the learning, its features, or its depiction in various contexts.

You may have seen advertisements on our website as well. While some may find it annoying, the template we chose for our website aims to help maximise readability on mobile, tablets, or on desktops. Furthermore, it serves as the main way we could maintain the website’s upkeep. Reader donations could be another stream, but we are not really sure how we would implement this just yet. Stay tuned for our updates on such things.

Another thing we would want to work on is a new logo design, one that better represents our site, our content, and our ethos. Our current logo is the Chinese character for “love”, which includes the character for “heart” in red. It ultimately represents the love for languages, but over time, as these experiences build up, we also want to show, in some form, the trove of experiences accumulated over these years of language learning and writing about it. We would update our “About us page” to give you a better idea of our ethos here.

Lastly, while we have been producing regular weekly content for various themes for the past year or two, coming up with topics to write about, or read up about is not really that easy. Behind each post, is a synthesis of information of what is given, what is not, and what could be done. We would also like the hear from the community about posts that would want to be seen — are there specific topics you are particularly interested in us covering? Thus, we would like to reach out and gather writing prompts and ideas for our site. If you have interesting topics about languages you want us to cover, please reach out to us through our Contact page.

It has been a really fun year coming up and exploring these various topics in language and language learning, and definitely many more fun years to come! Thank you all so much for your time reading our content, and take care!