To Improve Language Comprehension DON’T Try to Understand

    Experienced language learners accept uncertainty, yet they keep going. They accept that they don’t fully understand.   In the above video I refer to two kinds of comprehension, listening comprehension and reading comprehension, but in this post I will simply refer to them as language comprehension.     Language comprehension is the most […]
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How to Expand Your Vocabulary Without Memorization

How to Expand Your Vocabulary Without Memorization

Accumulating words is the fundamental task in language learning, in other words it is very important to acquire new words. Many learners are under the impression that this is done through memorization. This is not, however, the most effective way to grow your vocabulary. I’ve never been able to learn new words by deliberately trying to memorize them. The more effective way to learn new words [...]
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Listening: Language Learning Goal 3

My third language learning goal is listening. It's the third goal in the hierarchy, but in many ways it's the most important because it's the major activity that I do when it comes to language learning, simply because it's so easy to do. So I can get up in the morning and listen, I can listen while doing the dishes, I listen while I exercise. I listen while in the car, the train or wherever I [...]
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Language Learning Goal 2: Reading Comprehension

Reading is easier than listening. I can work my way through a text at LingQ, look up every word. Let's say I'm in sentence mode, it's a brand new language and if there's seven words in that sentence, I can look up each word and I can kind of figure out what the sentence means. Fuzzy, maybe not totally clear, but I have a sense of what that sentence means. I have a sense of which words [...]
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