Chris brought Benny The Irish Polyglot’s latest challenge to my attention. Benny intends to spend 3 months in Berlin and achieve the following; 1) to learn to speak German so well that he would be mistaken for a native Berliner, by Berliners; and …
Ta Falado is a great source of learning material for Portuguese learners from the University of Texas at Austin. These resources are available free of charge on the internet. This particular series is a pleasant review of Portuguese usage in Brazi…
I spoke to an immigrant to Canada today, a lady from South America. She spoke excellent English. She managed to combine Canadian intonation with a noticeable but charming Spanish lilt. Her choice of words was definitely that of an educated person….
The role of correction in language learning – very limited and only with permission.I recently did two youtube videos that are related to this subject, one in English and one in Spanish. This has generated some lively discussions. Some people felt…
There was an article in the New York Times recently about the rising interest in learning Mandarin Chinese and the decline in interest in other languages. I wrote the following letter to the NY Times.”A few words of caution on the Mandarin learnin…
Has anyone heard of Mark Frobose, the language guy and his method. In his video at his website, he claims to be fluent in 5 languages. He seems to be an effective simplifier. “If you can say SOS, you can speak Spanish” he says. Anything that simpl…
The following is a little long but interesting. It is an exchange from antimoon. Mitch said Thanks for your summary on Kato Lomb and the link with more information about her. From the article, it looks as if she did not refer to grammar books, or …
This is from another Forum where a language learner talked about the overwhelming influence of her native language on her ability to remember what she had read in English. She recommended that the learners try to explain what they have just read i…
Cliff Kwok, in a comment to my blog, asks about my experience in learning Japanese. Cliff has read my book in Chinese and would like to know more about how I learned Japanese in 6 months. I learned Japanese in Japan. I had a very preliminary expos…
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…
