Why you should make mistakes

Pako writes in his comment here that we should avoid making mistakes in our English learning. He also encourages English learners to spend more effort on input rather than on output, and on that point I do agree. The more you prepare yourself with…

The bottom line

In this blog I have touched on a variety of questions that relate to language learning. I have talked about learning techniques. I have talked about the importance of choosing content of interest to learn from, about the importance of repetitive l…

On learning many languages

The following is an exchange on The Linguist Forum. a question from your book Posted: Mar 12, 2005 12:22 PM Reply Hi,My name is Zhen-ting. I bought your book about six months ago and found your language-learning journey fascinating! I read your bo…

Why I am against teaching grammar

I am hoping to get some feedback on these views. I often hear learners say that they want to know why a certain structure or sentence is wrong. They are disappointed when a native speaker cannot tell them “why”. There are all kinds of teachers who…

Written and spoken contexts

In trying to copy from the Writing correction area of The Linguist web site I ran into problems with HTML text. The result looks a little messy. I am sorry. However, this text is interesting in that it deals with the issue of grammar based learnin…

Trigger words

I want to try out this idea of trigger words as a key to learning a language. To learn a language, like English for example, you have to master the phrases. You have to be able to use phrases correctly. You have to use phrases almost instinctively…

Testing

What is the best kind of language testing? For English learners. If the person being tested is going into an English language school or English language program I think it is unnecessary to test the learner. I believe that language programs should…

What is coming next?

Over the next few posts I will talk a little bit about testing. How effective are the existing language tests for English? How do we know what our skill level is in another language? How can other people best judge our skill level? Is our own subj…

Improving Pronunciation

The following from our Linguist Forum may be of interest. One of our learners, Assad, sent an MP3 file of him reading a text. This enabled our tutors to pick out areas to work on and provide the following recommendation on improving pronunciation….

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