The Linguist

03May

3 May 2022

How Long Does It Take to Learn Spanish?

How many hours a day will you spend with Spanish? This is perhaps the most important consideration and does not refer to how many hours do you spend in a Spanish language classroom. It means how much time do you spend listening, reading, speaking or writing in Spanish. It can be listening to podcasts while walking the dog, reading, watching movies, listening to songs in Spanish or being [...]

19Apr

19 Apr 2022

My 7 Goals of Language Learning

Techniques

My hierarchy of goals is what I consider to be more important at what stage in my learning. There are seven of them and I'm going talk about the seven today, and then I've been giving some thought to doing one video on each of these seven goals. In other words, how do we achieve those goals? How do we use those goals to improve our ability in the language that we're learning?

24Mar

24 Mar 2022

Language Learning Distractions

Techniques

We live in an age where there are lots of distractions. The multiplicity of media has made it easy to be distracted from whatever task we are engaged with.

17Mar

17 Mar 2022

The Seven Secrets to Language Learning Success: Part 2

Learning Techniques

Last week I wrote about the first four secrets to language learning success: spend the time, do what you like to do, learn to notice and words over grammar. Today’s post reveals the last three secrets.

10Mar

10 Mar 2022

The Seven Secrets to Language Learning Success: Part 1

Learning Techniques

People often ask me how I learned 20 languages. I will tell you what works for me; you’ll have to decide if this can work for you. Here are the first four secrets to language learning success...

24Feb

24 Feb 2022

You DO NOT Need to Be Perfect

Techniques

Why do I want to talk about perfection? First of all, I am a dilettante learner. I also recognize that there are people who need the language for professional reasons because they want to get into a school so that they're not just dabbling in the language, exploring, having fun like I like to do, they actually need it. So how good do they need to be in the language?

17Feb

17 Feb 2022

Ser Vs Estar in Spanish

Learning Spanish

Every language has some issues, often grammar issues, that cause learners difficulty. In the case of Spanish, one thing that gives people special trouble is the existence of two forms of the verb “to be”. Both ser and estar translate into English as “to be”. Ser vs estar, here’s how to get them straight. […]

03Feb

3 Feb 2022

How to Learn Chinese: My Top 6 Tips

Learning Chinese

I studied Mandarin Chinese 50 years ago. It took me nine months to reach a level where I could translate newspaper editorials from English to Chinese and from Chinese to English, read novels and interpret for people, I did this in the age of the open-reel tape recorder, long before the age of the Internet, […]

27Jan

27 Jan 2022

How to Learn Vocabulary

Techniques

*** This post is a transcript of a video on my YouTube channel. Studying English? Here’s the transcript as a lesson to study on LingQ. I have said in the past that the best and simplest judge of where you are in the language, of what you have achieved, of your potential in that language is […]

20Jan

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.