Linguistics

Combien de temps faut-il pour apprendre l’espagnol ? Combien de temps faut-il pour apprendre n’importe quelle langue ? J’entends cette question assez souvent. Il n’existe pas de réponse universelle. Cela dépend vraiment de vous. The post Combien De Temps Faut-Il Pour Apprendre l’Espagnol? appeared first on The Linguist.

In 1987, I decided I was going to put forth a major effort to learn German. I’m going to explain that to you in detail.   Long before I decided that I was going to learn German, I did have exposure to the language. My parents were from Czechoslovakia and they spoke German at home, […] The post Want to Learn German? Here’s How I Did It. appeared first on The Linguist.

Italian is a language that has always appealed to me, as Italy is such a lovely country. I have traveled and hitchhiked through Italy and, at that time, I didn’t speak Italian, so I was relying on my knowledge of Spanish to communicate with people. With so many fascinating places to visit, great food and […] The post The Best Way to Learn Italian appeared first on The Linguist.

You have all heard me stress the importance of input. You have to get the language in you, meaning you have to acquire words, and you have to let your brain get used to the language. I spend most of my time practicing different forms of input, however, the ability to effectively speak is the […] The post How To Become Good at Speaking a New Language appeared first on The Linguist.

When I was 16, we had the option to do our first year of university instead of grade 12 in high school. I decided to move on to McGill University in Montréal as I found high school to be a bit boring. Not knowing what to study, I chose a number of courses in French and English literature. My professor at university named Maurice Rabotin was great! The post How I learned French appeared first on The Linguist.

    Experienced language learners accept uncertainty, yet they keep going. They accept that they don’t fully understand.   In the above video I refer to two kinds of comprehension, listening comprehension and reading comprehension, but in this post I will simply refer to them as language comprehension.     Language comprehension is the most […] The post To Improve Language Comprehension DON’T Try to Understand appeared first on The Linguist.

Accumulating words is the fundamental task in language learning, in other words it is very important to acquire new words. Many learners are under the impression that this is done through memorization. This is not, however, the most effective way to grow your vocabulary. I’ve never been able to learn new words by deliberately trying to memorize them. The more effective way to learn new words is simply through exposure to the language. The post How to Expand Your Vocabulary Without Memorization appeared first on The Linguist.

My third language learning goal is listening. It's the third goal in the hierarchy, but in many ways it's the most important because it's the major activity that I do when it comes to language learning, simply because it's so easy to do. So I can get up in the morning and listen, I can listen while doing the dishes, I listen while I exercise. I listen while in the car, the train or wherever I am. I can always listen. I can listen 15 minutes here, 20 minutes there and before you know it, I have an hour of language learning done. The post Listening: Language Learning Goal 3 appeared first on The Linguist.

Reading is easier than listening. I can work my way through a text at LingQ, look up every word. Let's say I'm in sentence mode, it's a brand new language and if there's seven words in that sentence, I can look up each word and I can kind of figure out what the sentence means. Fuzzy, maybe not totally clear, but I have a sense of what that sentence means. I have a sense of which words correspond to the verb, to the noun and so forth. So the reading is easy. If I just heard those words, I wouldn't be able to do that. So reading is a sort of a step towards being able to understand what you hear. The post Language Learning Goal 2: Reading Comprehension appeared first on The Linguist.

Which is better for language learners, monolingual or bilingual dictionaries? This question often comes up.A monolingual dictionary explains the meaning of a word in the language that you are learning. A bilingual dictionary provides a translation... The post Monolingual or Bilingual Dictionaries for Language Learners? appeared first on The Linguist.

The number one goal in language learning is to acquire words. Keep that as your goal, your major activity, be conscious of the fact that you are acquiring these words. Even though at times it seems that you can't remember them. You can't remember when you need to use them. You keep on forgetting their meaning. None of that matters. The post Language Learning Goal 1: Learning Vocabulary appeared first on The Linguist.

My hierarchy of goals is what I consider to be more important at what stage in my learning. There are seven of them and I'm going talk about the seven today, and then I've been giving some thought to doing one video on each of these seven goals. In other words, how do we achieve those goals? How do we use those goals to improve our ability in the language that we're learning? The post My 7 Goals of Language Learning appeared first on The Linguist.

We live in an age where there are lots of distractions. The multiplicity of media has made it easy to be distracted from whatever task we are engaged with. The post Language Learning Distractions appeared first on The Linguist.

Why do I want to talk about perfection? First of all, I am a dilettante learner. I also recognize that there are people who need the language for professional reasons because they want to get into a school so that they're not just dabbling in the language, exploring, having fun like I like to do, they actually need it. So how good do they need to be in the language? The post You DO NOT Need to Be Perfect appeared first on The Linguist.

*** This post is a transcript of a video onmy YouTube channel. Studying English?Here’s the transcript as a lesson to study on LingQ.   I have said in the past that the best and simplest judge of where you are in the language, of what you have achieved, of your potential in that language is […] The post How to Learn Vocabulary appeared first on The Linguist.

*** This post is a transcript of a video onmy YouTube channel. Studying English?Here’s the transcript as a lesson to study on LingQ.   So many people I know listen to my videos and podcast to improve their English. English is, whether we like it or not, the most widely used international language. So there […] The post Don’t Just Learn Business English appeared first on The Linguist.

I want to talk about history. Why history? Because history fascinates me. I realize that people watch my videos either because they're working on improving their English or because they find my videos in some way motivating and encouraging and therefore encourages them to continue with learning languages, which in turn motivates me to make more videos. The post My Language Learning Motivation appeared first on The Linguist.

It's not a good idea, in my opinion, to demand grammatical accuracy from language learners in school, because so few of them end up speaking the language. What does it matter whether they are able to nail niceties of grammar at the age of 12? To me, it doesn't matter. If there's some way of making them enjoy the process of language learning so that they expose themselves to the language, they develop some degree of comprehension, they develop a certain level of vocabulary, that's good enough. The post How Should Languages Be Taught in School? appeared first on The Linguist.

What are the main problems that I see amongst language learners? First of all, most people don't realize how long it takes to learn a language. So people get frustrated. They get particularly frustrated when they get to that first level where all of a sudden they know a bunch of words and they realize just how little they know of the whole language. The post Common Language Learning Problems appeared first on The Linguist.

A aprendizagem de línguas depende principalmente de três fatores: a atitude do aluno, o tempo disponível e a atenção do aluno à nova língua. Se assumirmos uma atitude positiva, uma atenção razoável e crescente por parte do aluno, quanto tempo levará para aprender uma língua? The post Quanto tempo se levar para aprender uma língua? appeared first on The Linguist.

Of course, we want to speak, we eventually want to speak a lot. Our goal is to speak. We want to speak well, but the emphasis should be on listening and reading because it's something we can do whenever we want, on our own and it really does help our brain become familiar with the language. The post The Importance of Reading appeared first on The Linguist.

***   This post is a transcript of a video onmy YouTube channel. Bonjour, ici c’est Steve Kauffman. Aujourd’hui je veux parler de “l’écoute” dans l’apprentissage des langues, parce que pour moi, c’est, disons, “la tache” dans l’apprentissage des langues. Et pour ceux qui ne me connaissent pas j’en suis à ma 19ème et 20ème […] The post Pour Parler Une Langue il Faut D’abord L’écouter appeared first on The Linguist.

  何度も言ってきたことですが、言語の学習で重要なのはやる気です。何度も繰り返し言い続けているのは、言語の習得は才能でもなく、クラスや教師や勉強の仕方でもなく、主にやる気が関係しているからです。タスクに費やす時間、そして気づくこと。その言語がどうなっているのかに気づくことです。優秀な言語学習者は気づくのが上手になっていくと思うんです。言語に何が起きているのかをより意識し、それにより敏感な学習者が上達も速いですね。     私個人の意見ですが、 スペイン語は学習す..

Part of becoming a polyglot is accepting that you're going to be less than perfect. That means you're going to speak with mistakes. Your pronunciation may not be perfect, but you have this sense of achievement and the intellectual stimulus of discovering a new world, yet another new world with all of the people, and as you learn another language, then the people of that language come alive, the history comes alive. The post How to Become a Polyglot appeared first on The Linguist.

Language learning as we know is about motivation. That's the driver. That's the smart plug that triggers your interest, your curiosity. Content, which feeds that curiosity and those interests, is extremely important. Content that you like, content that has resonance for you. The post Learning Languages with Netflix & YouTube appeared first on The Linguist.

I think very often in the standard classroom there's a tremendous emphasis placed on producing the language, speaking the language, which is fine because that's what people want to do. But what I think is more important is what will I be able to do with the language in a year from now? And from that perspective, I'm not tremendously motivated to speak. The post Don’t Speak in Your Target Language appeared first on The Linguist.

If you can get stuff done in the morning, first thing that kind of sets you up for the day so that even if it's not a very active day, from a language learning point of view, at least you've taken that first step. So typically what I do in the morning is I might, first of all, review a couple of lessons on my iPad from the day before in whichever language I'm learning. Nowadays it's either Arabic or Persian. The post Morning Routine for Language Learning appeared first on The Linguist.

First of all, obviously when you start in a language, whatever you're listening to is not comprehensible. So you can't begin with comprehensible input. You'll begin with input, which is not comprehensible, but which gradually becomes more and more comprehensible. However, if you have access to the text, so you can look up words, then you have a chance. And if you can use LingQ for example, and you can review the words, then you have a chance, or even if you're using Teach Yourself or some other starter book you can gradually get to where material that is initially not comprehensible becomes comprehensible. The post The Importance of Repetition in Language Learning appeared first on The Lingu..

TOEIC, the Test of English for International Communication, is probably the most widely taken test of English language proficiency in the world. TOEIC is taken by around seven million people every year, according to this article in the Wall Street Journal.   It is my observation that most people who take TOEIC, especially in Japan, […] The post All You Need to Truly Ace the TOEIC Test appeared first on The Linguist.

Right now I've been at my Arabic for three years and my Persian for two, I can't say that I speak either language particularly well. I really struggle. My Farsi is now better. I've had the opportunity to use it a bit here and there around Vancouver, North Vancouver, especially West Vancouver. I'm now exploring Egypt in Arabic with Mohammed, my tutor, and I do struggle in our conversations, there is no question. But am I failing in the language? The post Why Many People Fail at Language Learning appeared first on The Linguist.