How To Improve Your Listening Skills

Reading helps you acquire more words, but listening gets your brain used to the language. And of course listening comprehension is a tremendously important skill because if you're speaking to someone, and we all want to speak in the language, if you can't understand what the other person is saying, then it's very uncomfortable and you can't have a very meaningful conversation.
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Do NOT Go to Language School

What the language school provides is instruction in the language. In other words, explanations of how the language works. The language school provides the materials, the textbooks, the content from which we learn, the language schools can provide encouragement and motivation also. The language school provides a social context where you meet not only your teacher, but other students. The [...]
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Do NOT Study Grammar

Grammar basically describes usage. So since languages evolve over time, sounds in languages evolve over time, usage patterns evolve over time. Therefore the grammar which describes the usage will evolve over time. So how useful is it to attempt to teach people what the rules of usage are before the learner has had enough experience with the language?
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Italki Review: Get the Most Out of the Language Learning Resource

The last 15 years have brought revolutionary change to language learning. Amongst the most popular new opportunities is the possibility to connect with native speakers of the languages we are learning via the Internet, and specifically via Skype. We all take Skype for granted today, but the app was first launched in 2003, in Estonia.  […]
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How I Learned Japanese

***   This post is a transcript of a video on my YouTube channel.   Studying English? Here’s the transcript as a lesson to study on LingQ. Back in 1968, I was sent to Hong Kong by the Canadian government to learn Mandarin Chinese. I spent a year learning Chinese and then the idea was […]
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How to Learn Vocabulary Fast

The most important task in language learning, in my opinion, is the acquisition of vocabulary. If we have enough words, we can make sense of what we’re reading or listening to and we can somehow express ourselves. Vocabulary is much more important than grammar. The grammar you acquire gradually as you become familiar with the […]
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How to Learn English Fast

How to Learn English Fast

If you really want to learn English fast, here is what you do. This advice is valid for other languages as well. The only difference between English and other languages is that most people learning English have had a lot of classroom instruction, which is not usually the case for learners of other languages.   […]
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How to Study Effectively

First of all, the first thing I think we need to do to study effectively is to improve our reading skills. If we aren't good readers, we need to become good readers, to read faster, to get better at acquiring information through reading, because reading is very effective, very efficient. It enables us to access so much information, whether in a traditional book or an ebook where we can look [...]
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