I’ve started reading about the history of Iran. Also at LingQ we have Sahra in Iran who has created a series of 26 episodes which I’m now going through. I’ve gone to episode seven of the history of Iran with circling questions. 

I may not be aware of having changed, but then if I go back to when I started with Arabic, it was just noise to me. The writing system was meaningless to me, and now I’m able to read, I’m able to hear and understand a lot. So there is this gradual, almost imperceptible change.

I’m not saying that I’m an expert on anything. I can only share with you my experience of language learning. I want to talk today about how we can make sure that we stay the course. The secret to success in language learning is to stay with it, not to be discouraged, so I kind of looked at some of the things that I’m doing. What is it that maintains my enthusiasm that keeps me going?

So, I’m very happy to have with me today Gabby of Go Natural English because very often we talk about learning languages other than English, although English, of course, is the language that is the most widely studied in the world. In fact, many of my viewers, I know many of you out there, like to listen to me speak English. You can even import from YouTube. Study it from LingQ if you want. It’s just content for learning English. In fact, first, I’ll let Gabby introduce herself and then I have some questions.

Today, I want to talk about passive vocabulary. At LingQ, for example, we say a word is known if you can recognize that word in a context. So if I’m working on LingQ, I see a word. I know what it means in the context. I can say I know that word. I can also say I don’t know that word. In other words, I decide if I know that word. But if I understand the word in that context, typically, I will say I know it. It may be that in a subsequent context I don’t know what it means. I may look it up again. I may move it back to Status 3, a word that I’m learning rather than known, but I control that. 

Can I become fluent in a foreign language? If your answer to this question is no, then you are best to stop trying. If you don’t believe that you can reach the destination in your journey, why start? On the other hand, if you believe you can become fluent in a foreign language, you are well on your way to achieving fluency.

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