Languages - Homepage
How to Learn Any Language in 3 Months
The Okano Isao judo textbook I used to learn Japanese grammar. Post reading time: 15 minutes. Language learning need not be complicated. Principles of cognitive neuroscience and time management can be applied to attain conversational fluency (here defined as 95%+ comprehension and 100% expressive abilities) in 1-3 months. Some background on my language obsession, from an earlier post on learning outside of classes: From the academic environments of Princeton University (Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Italian) and the Middlebury Language Schools (Japanese), to the disappointing results observed as a curriculum designer at Berlitz International (Japanese, English), I have sought for more than 10 years to answer a simple question: why do most language classes simply not work? The ideal system — and progression — is based on three elements in this order… 1. Effectiveness, adherence, and efficiency refer to the “what”, “why”, and “how” of learning a target language, respectively. Ganbare!
70+ Online Language Communities and Resources
The world wide web can be a good place to start learning a foreign language. This is a compilation of language communities, tools, and other online resources that'll help you get started. Also don't forget these resources - 30+ Language Tools For Firefox and Dictionary Toolbox: 50+ Dictionary & Reference Sites Language Communities Chaula - Chaula is a pronunciation dictionary created by the community and a social network where you can help other people learn your language. FriendsAbroad - An online community of language learners speaking over 80 languages across 200 countries. Huitalk - This is a language learning community where you can chat with other Huitalk members, access the article resource, and join the forums to learn new languages. iTalki - Language exchange network wherein you can find a partner and practice speaking a foreign language using an instant messenger or iTalki's text and voice chat tool. Novlet - A collaborative story writing tool in several languages.
How Many Words Do You Need to Know in Spanish (or any other foreign language)? And WHICH Words Should You Be Learning?
This is going to start out a bit technical and academic, but I promise that if you’ll wade through it you will be rewarded with some very, very useful practical information that you can use to significantly enhance your learning of the Spanish language, or any other second language, by not just doing it better but doing it more efficiently and therefore requiring far less time to become fluent. Plus, it will help you design a study system based on precisely what it is that you want to do with Spanish: speak with native speakers, read fiction, read and/or write in a technical or academic field, etc., or some combination thereof. First, let’s start with some definitions so that we can understand what’s going on here: Lexeme: A lexeme is a reduction of a word to it’s most basic meaning. Corpus: Latin for “body”. The body of knowledge that you based your information on, in this case books, newspapers, transcripts of spoken language, etc. Register: What setting the language is used in. Why?
Verbal Planet
About the GSL
John Bauman Enterprise Training Group This page: The 1953 GSL About this version of the GSLCopying and using this GSLBibliographyJohn Bauman's homepageThe actual 2,284 words, with frequency numbers The 1953 GSL The General Service List (GSL) (West. 1953) is a set of 2,000 words selected to be of the greatest "general service" to learners of English. They are not the most common 2,000 words, though frequency was one of the factors taken into account in making the selection. As published, the GSL is a medium-sized red book, organized like a dictionary. The inclusion of related form under a headword is not consistent. The frequency numbers given for the words provide a way to rank the words in importance for students of English. Back to the top About this version of the GSL The list given here was created by John Bauman and Brent Culligan in early 1995. What follows may be more detail than most people need. Every capitalized headword from the GSL was included.
Language Teachers, Tutors, Classes - Private Lessons, Home Tutor
How to learn a language without translating
When you remove translation from your language learning process, you can learn to think in your target language from the beginning. This idea has made the Middlebury Language Schools so successful over the past 100 years and it’s what has sold thousands of copies of Rosetta Stone. Let’s say you’re learning French. You want to learn the word for “house”. Your dictionary says “la maison”. House – la maison. Two things go wrong here. Two, let’s look at what happens when you see this: First, you think “house”. Well, yes and no. “Est-ce qu’il y a un chien dans cette maison?” “Is it that it there has a dog in this house?”. There is a limit to translation. When you could instead train: la maison Doing this allows you to instantly think the word “maison” as soon as you see the picture, and that’s your goal, isn’t it? There’s a trick here, of course. You use English to find the words you need. Here’s where No Translation kicks in. le mensonge pas pas un mensonge la vérité Some relevant blog posts:
MyMemory
Anki - powerful, intelligent flashcards
100 Most Common Words in Any Language[1]
It Is in Our Nature to Need Stories | Guest Blog
It is in our nature to need stories. They are our earliest sciences, a kind of people-physics. Their logic is how we naturally think. They configure our biology, and how we feel, in ways long essential for our survival. Like our language instinct, a story drive—an inborn hunger for story hearing and story making—emerges untutored universally in healthy children. “Stories the world over are almost always about people with problems,” writes Jonathan Gottschall. The “human mind is a story processor, not a logic processor,” says Jonathan Haidt. Darwin understood how our biology is fitted to the stories in our social environments, noting, “Many a Hindoo…has been stirred to the bottom of his soul by having partaken of unclean food.” Any story we tell of our species, any science of human nature, that leaves out much of what and how we feel is false. Illustration by Julia Suits, The New Yorker Cartoonist & author of The Extraordinary Catalog of Peculiar Inventions. Previously in this series:
Synonyms
In popular literary acceptation, and as employed in special dictionaries of such words, synonyms are words sufficiently alike in general signification to be liable to be confounded, but yet so different in special definition as to require to be distinguished. --G. P. It would be nice to provide each of the gismu clusters below with an advice on good usage se papri | cukta | se tcidu | datni A recent proposal by Nick Nicholas: se papri < cukta < se tcidu < datni The proposal is retracted, but the fine semantics of these gismu is obviously something that should be made explicit (and probably has been : Is a blank notebook a cukta, a se tcidu or a datni? klama | muvdu | litru klama has all the places of muvdu plus x5 for vehicle, hence klama < muvdu. litru lacks places for destination and origin, hence klama < litru surely this should be the other way around? nelci | se pluka | prami| se dirba drata | frica mintu | dunli pikta | jaspu Other
