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

I was turned down by a Meetup group here in Vancouver that advertized itself as a Russian Speaking Conversation and Adventure Group. To be fair I thought I would be turned down since the group was clear on the kind of members they wanted (see belo…

Some idiot is spamming my blog with meaningless comments. As soon as I mark him as spam, he changes his name to something else and keeps coming. Unbelievable that there are people with nothing better to do. Any advice?

I think that the iPad is a revolutionary educational device. Opposition to this idea comes from those who dislike Apple. Personally I do not care if it is an iPad or some other electronic tablet. It is the fact of being able to connect anywhere an…

I was surprised to learn that one roughly quarter of ESL teachers in the US are not native speakers of English. They may be just as good at teaching as the native speakers. However, if I emigrated to China or Poland, I would certainly prefer to le…

Here is an interesting video about Sal Khan, of Khan Academy, who has the most popular (or one of the most popular) educational video channels on the Internet.There were some interesting comments from the audience. It is better to just see the bla…

Here is a one comparison of these different translation engines. What are your views?

Staying on the subejct of listening or speaking your way to fluency, I want to reply to some of the comments I have received. The main task of language learning is to acquire words so that you can understand. This will get you to the goal of fluen…

We need both, but listening is powerful and speaking is largely overrated, especially in the early stages.