Unconventional language hacking tips from Benny the Irish polyglot; travelling the world to learn languages to fluency and beyond!
Karen, who co-founded the now-retired Immersia language game, offered these words of encouragement. I love seeing similar realisations from people with such different backgrounds. Over to you, Karen: ——— I was born in the Ukraine and my mother tongue is Russian. In school I learned German for 5 years. When I was 15 I immigrated […]
Try five unusual but practical exercises for getting past shyness and starting conversations without relying on alcohol or false confidence.
A U.S. diplomat explains his 2014 Foreign Service Institute routine, language testing and the independent practice that supported his training.
Five reasons to learn an endangered language, from connecting with a community to helping its words and stories remain in use.
Carlos and Jan used romanisation, tutoring, vocabulary review and regular conversation practice to build their Cantonese speaking skills.
From the mission archive, Benny wraps up two months of Japanese study, reviews his progress and prepares to use the language while travelling.
Christine Gilbert shares how monolingual parents can support a bilingual child through sustained, responsive language use and realistic family goals.
Guest writer Adam shares practical ways for introverts to meet speakers, practise a language and work with their own social energy.
This week, I can finally do what I had wanted to do last week and give you a full example of how my conversations tend to be going, right now a little after my half-way point in the Japanese project!
At this stage, I can handle straightforward question-and-answer exchanges pretty well, but my grammar and vocab still need serious improvement and will continue to be my focus over the next few weeks. I’m also not so confident about explaining a concept for a few minutes, and I did a really poor job of describing what “Couchsurfing” was, especially when my lack of important vocab held me back.
As well as this, my accent and pronunciation need lots of improvement. I’m aware of such issues, but they will definitely take the back seat to higher priorities for now.
Social