I was reading Jason’s blog called “Beyond Bounds” which I found reflecting back at this post of mine and I came up with this post about motivation to learn where he talks about courage (P.S. Jason has some other interesting stuff on his blog, check it out). He writes:
A new language means a new way of thinking; this is pretty much the definition. New ways of thinking scare people, because their comfortable lifestyles, morality, and conventional wisdoms get challenged on …

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Learning languages in a limited amount of time – is it possible? Well, some people do it. I want to collect a small list of personal stories of people who have done this from the web and link to them here. Here goes:

Chinese in Two Years – a story that I have found in Aspiring Polyglot’s blog about a guy who has learnt Chinese from scratch in two years. Well, pretty impressive, considering it’s Chinese and not some Romance language …

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I have already written about what I think language teaching should be. I would really like to get a lot of courses where languages are taught like that and then I believe we could really make a difference in how fast and accessible language learning would be. Creating courses following this methodology is something I have been trying to do and I want to encourage others to do in Project Labs.
It is no secret that my current attempt at teaching …

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I find two things to be most effective: getting introduced to the language and then practicing it. Some people could say it’s just practice all the way but I think that knowing some things before you dive into speaking can save you a lot of time. Here are some of those things I think you should learn beforehand:

Main things in grammar, such as tenses and cases. I am not saying you should learn all the case endings or tense endings …

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Knowing a lot of languages is cool. Yet, you have to start somewhere and in this post I’m going to talk about how I started and where I advice you start learning languages if you don’t know that many yet and you want that. The short answer to this all is… Esperanto. For the long answer, read on.
So, it happened a couple of years ago. Five, to be exact. There were a couple of events that led me up to …

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I have come across a news article suggesting that just listening to the language without even understanding it is enough to help you learn it. First of all, I don’t quite think so. Why? Well, there are at least three reasons.
First of all, where’s the evidence? There’s an article, okay, that’s a start. What about , experiments with control groups, explanations how exactly that works (what parts of the brain are involved in this and why exactly this happens)? I don’t …

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