My community has changed

My wife is away in Toronto visiting her 89 year old mother. Next month I will go to Europe.One main purpose is to visit my 93 year old uncle in Sweden with whom I am very close. I guess we are all getting older. Tonight I went to dinner in a small…

Intonation and pronunciation

There have been two comments on the subject of pronunciation and intonation. These both came from Hong Kong from Cantonese speakers who have a high level of fluency in English but who want to achieve as close as possible to native speaker pronunci…

Motivation and interesting content.

The comments below certainly confirmed the importance of motivation in language learning. It was also pointed out that we need to communicate in the real world. Of course, in an ideal situation we have the opportunity to speak with native speakers…

Motivation in language learning

You would think that people living in places where English is not spoken, like Japan or Taiwan or Finland, for example, would not be motivated to learn. You would think that new immigrants to Canada would be very motivated to learn. In fact that i…

The Linguist Newsletter

First of all I want to express thanks to Tony for his words of encouragement in his comment. Of course in hockey you can only have 5 skaters on the ice at one time. However, our team having a short bench with only 10 skaters in all, put us at a di…

The Linguist book: Excerpt

I am going to post a few random excerpts from my book over the next few days. This book is entitled ” The Linguist, A Personal Guide to Language Learning.” The book is available in print form in English and Chinese and in e-book version in French,…

More on making mistakes

We now have another comment on making mistakes supporting Pako’s view that we should not make mistakes. I suspect we are not really in disagreement. The important points are: 1) You should not be afraid to speak for fear of making mistakes. Your m…

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Steve Kaufmann about LingQ

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