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…

One of our learners mentioned the “suggestopedic” learning method developed by Georgi Lozanov. As I understand it, this method stresses the need for the learner to relax, and to forget many of the constraints that society and culture have placed o…

To learn a language you have to learn the words used in that language. You have to learn many words, how they are used, when they are used and which words are used together. That is all you need to learn. If you learn many words and how they are u…

Listen to the podcast of this post. “How many times do I need to listen to the same content item?” This is a question that I am often asked by users of The Linguist. My answer is as follows. How do you feel? Please email me and let me know. I feel…

I have been away for a few weeks. After my business trip to Europe, I was able to spend two weeks in Arizona, mostly in Phoenix. When the weather in Vancouver gets wet and cool, it is nice to go where the sun shines every day. Arizona is such a pl…