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

The comments below certainly confirmed the importance of motivation in language learning. It was also pointed out that we need to communicate in the real world. Of course, in an ideal situation we have the opportunity to speak with native speakers...

You would think that people living in places where English is not spoken, like Japan or Taiwan or Finland, for example, would not be motivated to learn. You would think that new immigrants to Canada would be very motivated to learn. In fact that i...

First of all I want to express thanks to Tony for his words of encouragement in his comment. Of course in hockey you can only have 5 skaters on the ice at one time. However, our team having a short bench with only 10 skaters in all, put us at a di...

We now have another comment on making mistakes supporting Pako's view that we should not make mistakes. I suspect we are not really in disagreement. The important points are: 1) You should not be afraid to speak for fear of making mistakes. Your m...

Pako writes in his comment here that we should avoid making mistakes in our English learning. He also encourages English learners to spend more effort on input rather than on output, and on that point I do agree. The more you prepare yourself with...

The following is an exchange on The Linguist Forum. a question from your book Posted: Mar 12, 2005 12:22 PM Reply Hi,My name is Zhen-ting. I bought your book about six months ago and found your language-learning journey fascinating! I read your bo...

I am hoping to get some feedback on these views. I often hear learners say that they want to know why a certain structure or sentence is wrong. They are disappointed when a native speaker cannot tell them "why". There are all kinds of teachers who...