Ich habe vor 50 Jahren Mandarin-Chinesisch gelernt. Ich habe neun Monate gebraucht, bis ich das Niveau erreicht habe, mit dem ich Zeitungsartikel von Englisch nach Chinesisch und von Chinesisch nach Englisch übersetzen,…
Reading is the ‘killer app’ for education, communication, and language acquisition in my opinion. It bridges gaps between cultures, connects us with history, and enhances our linguistic abilities. In this post I…
The most popularly spoken Slavic languages are Russian, Belarusian and Ukrainian in the east, Polish, Czech and Slovakian in the west and then the the languages of the former Yugoslavia in the south.
El aprendizaje de un idioma depende fundamentalmente de tres factores: La actitud del estudiante, el tiempo disponible y la atención que ponga éste en el idioma. Si asumimos una actitud positiva, razonable…
Every language has some issues, often grammar issues, that cause learners difficulty. In the case of Spanish, one thing that gives people special trouble is the existence of two forms of the…
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.
Combien de temps faut-il pour apprendre l’espagnol ? Combien de temps faut-il pour apprendre n’importe quelle langue ? J’entends cette question assez souvent. Il n’existe pas de réponse universelle. Cela dépend vraiment de vous.
When I was 16, we had the option to do our first year of university instead of grade 12 in high school. I decided to move on to McGill University in Montréal as I found high school to be a bit boring. Not knowing what to study, I chose a number of courses in French and English literature. My professor at university named Maurice Rabotin was great!
My third language learning goal is listening. It’s the third goal in the hierarchy, but in many ways it’s the most important because it’s the major activity that I do when it comes to language learning, simply because it’s so easy to do. So I can get up in the morning and listen, I can listen while doing the dishes, I listen while I exercise. I listen while in the car, the train or wherever I am. I can always listen. I can listen 15 minutes here, 20 minutes there and before you know it, I have an hour of language learning done.
Reading is easier than listening. I can work my way through a text at LingQ, look up every word. Let’s say I’m in sentence mode, it’s a brand new language and if there’s seven words in that sentence, I can look up each word and I can kind of figure out what the sentence means. Fuzzy, maybe not totally clear, but I have a sense of what that sentence means. I have a sense of which words correspond to the verb, to the noun and so forth. So the reading is easy. If I just heard those words, I wouldn’t be able to do that. So reading is a sort of a step towards being able to understand what you hear.
