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…
I posted a video in French earlier, in response to a video message on youtube, from a young Frenchman, who expressed disappointment at the fact that LingQ was a commercial site, even though my videos encourage people to learn languages. I answered…
I could not hear the questions very well, and was under bit of pressure. Made a lot of mistakes. Не очень хорошо слушал, и делал много ошибок, но вот моий интервю.
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…
I suddenly said to my wife over breakfast this morning. “You know the best thing about studying anything on your own?” My wife has recently developed a keen interest in piano but refuses to take a teacher. She just plays what she wants when she wa…
Max points out that Korean has a complicated grammar unlike Chinese or Japanese. Having spent a few months learning Korean I can agree. However, I did not read the pages and pages of grammatical explanations in the books I used, with fancy terms l…
We have a comment from Chris advocating a strong commitment to grammar study as the basic framework for language learning. I disagree. My view is that we first need to get used to the language through intense and continuous exposure. Any effort to…
There is a well known book on golf called “Golf is not a Game of Perfect” by Bob Rotella (available from Amazon) which points out that striving for perfection in golf will simply make players too nervous and uptight to really improve. If players e…
Nangpan asks me why I have started learning Russian. First of all I have always wanted to learn it, just as I want to learn Arabic and Hindi one day, and maybe eventually Turkish and Swahili. But why now? We are redoing The Linguist system and I w…
