20Jan
Levels of Language Proficiency: What Is Fluency?
20 Jan 2022

Levels of Language Proficiency: What Is Fluency?

Learning Techniques
I recently watched a video which features polyglots Luca Lampariello and Anthony Lauder. In it they make the point that you don’t need to have a large vocabulary in order to be fluent. Anthony has said in the past that even with a few hundred words you can be fluent, or you can be fluent at a relatively low level of proficiency in a language. I don’t agree at all.
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29Dec
29 Dec 2021

My Language Learning Motivation

Motivation
I want to talk about history. Why history? Because history fascinates me. I realize that people watch my videos either because they're working on improving their English or because they find my videos in some way motivating and encouraging and therefore encourages them to continue with learning languages, which in turn motivates me to make more videos.
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14Dec
How Should Languages Be Taught in School?
14 Dec 2021

How Should Languages Be Taught in School?

Education
It's not a good idea, in my opinion, to demand grammatical accuracy from language learners in school, because so few of them end up speaking the language. What does it matter whether they are able to nail niceties of grammar at the age of 12? To me, it doesn't matter. If there's some way of making them enjoy the process of language learning so that they expose themselves to the language, they [...]
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07Dec
The Definition of a Polyglot
7 Dec 2021

The Definition of a Polyglot

Motivation
As people who speak multiple languages, polyglots like to use those languages; we like to see how we do. But there is an element of performance. Are you better than me? Am I better than you? For some people that’s fine. I think a lot of us are very happy, in fact, when we hear somebody speak better than we do.
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02Dec
2 Dec 2021

Common Language Learning Problems

Motivation
What are the main problems that I see amongst language learners? First of all, most people don't realize how long it takes to learn a language. So people get frustrated. They get particularly frustrated when they get to that first level where all of a sudden they know a bunch of words and they realize just how little they know of the whole language.
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17Nov
17 Nov 2021

The Importance of Reading

Techniques
Of course, we want to speak, we eventually want to speak a lot. Our goal is to speak. We want to speak well, but the emphasis should be on listening and reading because it's something we can do whenever we want, on our own and it really does help our brain become familiar with the language.
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