For people who love languages, or would but were discouraged.
- Believe in yourself and have the right attitude
- Put in an hour a day
- Use a system that works... like LingQ

03Nov
Pour Parler Une Langue il Faut D’abord L’écouter
*** This post is a transcript of a video on my YouTube channel. Bonjour, ici c’est Steve Kauffman. Aujourd’hui je veux parler de “l’écoute” dans l’apprentissage des langues, parce que pour moi, c’est, disons, “la tache” dans l’apprentissage des langues. Et pour ceux qui ne me connaissent pas j’en suis à ma 19ème et [...]
Read more Pour Parler Une Langue il Faut D’abord L’écouter27Oct
スペイン語の学習に必要なヒントやコツ
何度も言ってきたことですが、言語の学習で重要なのはやる気です。何度も繰り返し言い続けているのは、言語の習得は才能でもなく、クラスや教師や勉強の仕方でもなく、主にやる気が関係しているからです。タスクに費やす時間、そして気づくこと。その言語がどうなっているのかに気づくことです。優秀な言語学習者は気づくのが上手になっていくと思うんです。言語に何が起きているのかをより意識し、それにより敏感な学習者が上達も速いですね。 私個人の意見ですが、 [...]
Read more スペイン語の学習に必要なヒントやコツ20Oct
How to Become a Polyglot
Part of becoming a polyglot is accepting that you're going to be less than perfect. That means you're going to speak with mistakes. Your pronunciation may not be perfect, but you have this sense of achievement and the intellectual stimulus of discovering a new world, yet another new world with all of the people, and as you learn another language, then the people of that language come alive, [...]
Read more How to Become a Polyglot12Oct
How Long Should it Take to Learn a Language?
Language learning depends mostly on three factors, the attitude of the learner, the time available, and learner's attentiveness to the language. If we assume a positive attitude on the part of the learner, and a reasonable and growing attentivenes...
Read more How Long Should it Take to Learn a Language?05Oct
Learning Languages with Netflix & YouTube
Language learning as we know is about motivation. That's the driver. That's the smart plug that triggers your interest, your curiosity. Content, which feeds that curiosity and those interests, is extremely important. Content that you like, content that has resonance for you.
Read more Learning Languages with Netflix & YouTube29Sep
Experience Is The Best Teacher
At the age of 55, I decided to learn Cantonese. I had studied Mandarin and could read Chinese characters, but I needed to develop the ability to understand how Chinese characters were pronounced in Cantonese. I went through a period of six months of intensive listening. That was when I discovered the minidisk player. For […]
Read more Experience Is The Best Teacher22Sep
Don’t Speak in Your Target Language
I think very often in the standard classroom there's a tremendous emphasis placed on producing the language, speaking the language, which is fine because that's what people want to do. But what I think is more important is what will I be able to do with the language in a year from now? And from that perspective, I'm not tremendously motivated to speak.
Read more Don’t Speak in Your Target Language15Sep
English Grammar 101
In order to speak English well you need to learn how words are used and how they come together to form phrases and sentences. Only a lot of listening and reading can help you learn this. You need to train yourself to notice how the words are used when you listen and read.
Read more English Grammar 10108Sep
Morning Routine for Language Learning
If you can get stuff done in the morning, first thing that kind of sets you up for the day so that even if it's not a very active day, from a language learning point of view, at least you've taken that first step. So typically what I do in the morning is I might, first of all, review a couple of lessons on my iPad from the day before in whichever language I'm learning. Nowadays it's either [...]
Read more Morning Routine for Language Learning01Sep
Tips for Learning Russian
I wanted give some important tips for learning Russian. First I'll explain about the writing system, then some interesting things to remember about Russian verbs of motion, aspects of verbs and cases.
Read more Tips for Learning Russian