At a recent panel discussion on local Mandarin TV I made the point (once again) that language is key to work place success for immigrants. Lawrence Wang, immigrant lawyer felt that this was an unrealistic expectation. He felt that the mainstream e…

This is from a learner at The Linguist To learn better at The Linguist, I always explore ways to improve my English. This week I practiced in the Pronounce section, which I hardly used in the past. I never learned phonetic symbols, so I did not th…

I have always believed that repetitive listening and reading of interesting content helps to reinforce learning of words and phrases. This is especially true if the repetitive reading and listening is combined with a systematic approach to reviewi…

I was visiting antimoon and came across a reference to the Natural Approach to language learning which took me to a very interesting site about natural language learning. http://maxpages.com/thena The assumption is that the student should spend th…

Something I wrote recently on language learning: I believe that the most important thing for language learning is a lot of exposure to the language, spoken and written. This exposure should take place in the form of content that is interesting and…

I just spoke on the telephone with one of our learners in Vancouver. He is a former research scientist from China (Harbin) who drives a fork lift in a fish packing plant in Vancouver. He has been on our system for 10 days and has saved over 300 wo…

I normally say that non-natives speakers should stay away from swear words. They just do not realize how bad they can sound. Nang Pan has asked me if Russian and Arabic have particularly powerful swear words. I think they do but I am not a speaker…

This is from another Forum where a language learner talked about the overwhelming influence of her native language on her ability to remember what she had read in English. She recommended that the learners try to explain what they have just read i…

I am happy to see two comments, one from Mark and one from Leo. Mark has provided a source of info on the transliteration of foreign names into Chinese. Thanks to Mark for the information. I look forward to the day when, in Chinese texts, most for…

The other day someone asked me if we had scenarios at The Linguist. He meant do we have scripted scenarios of dialogues at the bank, at the train station etc.. I said no. The scenario approach is like so much else in language training; a vain atte…