For people who love language, or would but were discouraged.

I’m not saying that I’m an expert on anything. I can only share with you my experience of language learning. I want to talk today about how we can make sure that we stay the course. The secret to success in language learning is to stay with it, not to be discouraged, so I kind of looked at some of the things that I’m doing. What is it that maintains my enthusiasm that keeps me going?

So, I’m very happy to have with me today Gabby of Go Natural English because very often we talk about learning languages other than English, although English, of course, is the language that is the most widely studied in the world. In fact, many of my viewers, I know many of you out there, like to listen to me speak English. You can even import from YouTube. Study it from LingQ if you want. It’s just content for learning English. In fact, first, I’ll let Gabby introduce herself and then I have some questions.

Today, I want to talk about passive vocabulary. At LingQ, for example, we say a word is known if you can recognize that word in a context. So if I’m working on LingQ, I see a word. I know what it means in the context. I can say I know that word. I can also say I don’t know that word. In other words, I decide if I know that word. But if I understand the word in that context, typically, I will say I know it. It may be that in a subsequent context I don’t know what it means. I may look it up again. I may move it back to Status 3, a word that I’m learning rather than known, but I control that.