How To Improve Your Listening Skills

How To Improve Your Listening Skills

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.

Do NOT Go to Language School

Do NOT Go to Language School

What the language school provides is instruction in the language. In other words, explanations of how the language works. The language school provides the materials, the textbooks, the content from which we learn, the language schools can provide encouragement and motivation also. The language school provides a social context where you meet not only your teacher, but other students. The language school can keep you going. So it is possible that for many people a language school is an ideal learning environment. Why is that not the case for me?

Do NOT Study Grammar

Do NOT Study Grammar

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?

How to Study Effectively

How to Study Effectively

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 things up if we’re on an iPad or on a computer, being careful to avoid the distractions granted. So reading is super powerful.

How to Build a Step By Step Language Study Plan

How to Build a Step By Step Language Study Plan

The biggest thing in a study plan is that you want to develop new habits. I’ve said many times that language learning is a matter of attitude and spending the time with the language. So we want to have habits that reinforce a positive attitude that give us a sense of success.

How Do I Maintain My Languages?

How Do I Maintain My Languages?

I often get asked the question, how do I maintain my languages? You know, I’ve learned so many languages, more or less up to 21. I don’t know them all equally well, obviously. So how do I maintain them?

How Can We Achieve Good Pronunciation in a Language?

How Can We Achieve Good Pronunciation in a Language?

So how do we get to good pronunciation in the language? Well, I think there are three elements. One is the attitude towards the pronunciation and I’ll explain that. The second thing is the most important things that we can do that will give us good pronunciation and the third thing is remedial things. If we have what we consider to be poor pronunciation, what can we do?

Three Stages of Listening to Get to Fluency

Three Stages of Listening to Get to Fluency

A lot of this content, as in the case of our mini stories, has a lot of high-frequency verbs. You’re certainly going to come across the high-frequency words and verbs often and, therefore, it’s easier to get to know them. As you listen to this stuff whereas when you started everything was just noise and you think you’ll never learn this language, particularly if it’s written in a different script like the Arabic script, but with time all of a sudden you start to understand things. 

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Steve Kaufmann about LingQ

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