Poder Conjugation: All Tenses, Explained Simply (with Examples)
Learn every tense of the Spanish verb poder with clear conjugation tables, example sentences, and an explanation of when to use poder versus saber.
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The Art of Making Mistakes – How and why mistakes help you to learn languages (Guest post by Luca)
“Would you like me to give you a formula for success? It’s quite simple, really. Double your rate of failure.”
—Thomas J. Watson, founder of IBM
Making mistakes is a fundamental part of every cognitive process, whether solving a math problem, making important decisions, or trying to convey meaning in a foreign language.
What’s more, making mistakes and learning from them is not simply a human skill. According to scientific research (link: http://www.sciencenewsforkids.org/2012/08/monkeys-mistake-detector/), animals not only learn from their own mistakes, but they can learn by observing their peers messing up. In the animal world, avoiding blunders may dramatically improve one’s chances of survival. Both humans and animals learn to live and live to learn. Human beings, however have a unique skill: the ability to process and ponder their mistakes.
This can be an advantage as well as a disadvantage. Let me explain why.
Best free online language-specific monolingual and bilingual dictionaries
Throw away your dusty old dead tree dictionaries! They are either too bulky (and expensive) to use conveniently, and not updated regularly enough, or they are too small to cover all the words you might need. It’s the 21st century, so lets embrace all the free online dictionaries available to us! Multilingual dictionaries When discussing […]
Sound Rehab: A 5-Point Program for Kicking Your Visual-Addiction
I’m a musician, and I advocate learning language with your ears instead of your eyes. But I often get pushback for this view: “You can’t just assume that everyone is an auditory learner like you. Personally, I’m a visual learner so I can’t learn a language unless I can see it.” This seems like a reasonable […]
Polyglot conference and re-activating Hungarian
After last week’s announcement, you should know that I had an intensive project to re-activate my Hungarian! The reason I was doing this was to prepare to go back to Budapest to attend the Polyglot Conference, and I had a great time at it, but I did want to make sure I was using some Hungarian outside of it. In this post, I’ll say how both the mission and the conference went!
Firstly, I had signed up for six hours of Hungarian spoken lessons via italki. While I had blogged that I would be putting about ten hours into the project, once again my super-secret project in Berlin was consuming my time, and I barely had 10 minutes before each lesson to quickly revise things. So in total, I had about 7 hours of exposure time to Hungarian before arriving.
I find that because I am so busy on another project, if I don’t actually schedule a lesson, then I can keep putting off the work, so I’m really glad I did put aside that time in advance. Busy or not, when you know you have another person scheduled to talk to you, you’ll make the time!
Free Online Language Learning Resources: A Practical Guide
Build a practical study plan with current free language courses, exchanges, media, dictionaries and feedback tools, with clear freemium limits.
I’m severely deaf and partially sighted, but have learned 5 languages. Here’s my story
So, I’m Julie Ferguson and I have nothing on Helen Keller! I am, however, severely deaf and partially sighted.
My parents realised that I had a hearing problem when I was 2 years old, though I didn’t get my first hearing aid until I was 4. Unfortunately, when I was 4, nobody could understand me babbling away in my version of English, except for my mum and my brother. Apparently, I was bad. I couldn’t even pronounce my own name (it sounded like Ooee Fehuhoh).
I was sent to speech therapy for intensive work before I started primary school, and I remember working on all those weird sounds especially “spoon”. My particular hearing loss makes it difficult to hear consonants, especially s, h, and f.
Mini mission: Reawakening a dead language! (Hungarian)
From the blog’s origin era (2009–2014) — kept as lived proof of the method. See all the missions. It’s time to raise the dead!! My secret mission that is taking up the vast majority of my time in Berlin continues (don’t worry, I’ll tell you all about it when the time is right! For now, […]
Language Learning Quotes and Chinese Proverbs for Motivation
A source-checked collection of language learning quotes and Chinese proverbs, with original scripts, pinyin and practical ways to use them.
Contextese – the most useful language you are already fluent in
I came across this strange video on a break (from my top secret project). It depicts an episode of Law & Order as if it had chickens/roosters instead of people (from an episode of the funny show “Robot chicken”). Because of that, the dialogue is nothing but gibberish clucks.
And yet, it is incredibly easy to follow what is likely being “said”, especially if you happen to know the format that Law & Order episodes tend to take. Which “clucks” did you understand?
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