Techniques

I hear all the time that Google Translate doesn’t work. It’s not accurate. It’s this and that. I think Google Translate is a tremendous resource and not only for language learners. It’s not 100% and it’s better for some languages than others, but I find it extremely useful.

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.

Part of becoming a polyglot is accepting that you're going to be less than perfect. That means you're going to speak with mistakes. Your pronunciation may not be perfect, but you have this sense of achievement and the intellectual stimulus of discovering a new world, yet another new world with all of the people, and as you learn another language, then the people of that language come alive, [...]

I think very often in the standard classroom there's a tremendous emphasis placed on producing the language, speaking the language, which is fine because that's what people want to do. But what I think is more important is what will I be able to do with the language in a year from now? And from that perspective, I'm not tremendously motivated to speak.

First of all, obviously when you start in a language, whatever you're listening to is not comprehensible. So you can't begin with comprehensible input. You'll begin with input, which is not comprehensible, but which gradually becomes more and more comprehensible. However, if you have access to the text, so you can look up words, then you have a chance. And if you can use LingQ for example, [...]

Reading helps you acquire more words, but listening gets your brain used to the language. And of course listening comprehension is a tremendously important skill because if you're speaking to someone, and we all want to speak in the language, if you can't understand what the other person is saying, then it's very uncomfortable and you can't have a very meaningful conversation.

What is CI? What is meant by comprehensible input in language learning? Stephen Krashen uses this term, as well as the term compelling input, to refer to the kind of language exposure we need in order to learn a language. The term CI, in language learning, can apply to both. What do they mean?    […]

What I would call being a lazy language learner doesn't necessarily mean that you aren't being a successful language learner, it just means that you're being lazy the way I'm being lazy. And so there are seven habits I think that we need to acquire if we're going to be effective, successful, lazy language learners.