Techniques

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.

Grammar basically describes usage. So since languages evolve over time, sounds in languages evolve over time, usage patterns evolve over time. Therefore the grammar which describes the usage will evolve over time. So how useful is it to attempt to teach people what the rules of usage are before the learner has had enough experience with the language?

***   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.   We regularly see blog posts and videos where people provide advice on how to learn a language in a given period of time: one month, three months, […]

First of all, the first thing I think we need to do to study effectively is to improve our reading skills. If we aren't good readers, we need to become good readers, to read faster, to get better at acquiring information through reading, because reading is very effective, very efficient. It enables us to access so much information, whether in a traditional book or an ebook where we can look [...]

What is the hardest language to learn? I think that's a very difficult question because there are so many factors that enter into that.