You hear it all the time and I’m sure you’ve heard it before… The struggling learner with the ‘once a month’ study plan says it. The person that studied Spanish in high school while reading a comic book and not paying attention says it. The ‘average’ L1 English-speaker says it… It’s the monolingual catchphrase: ”I don’t have a talent for languages”
Rubbish.
Everyone has a ‘talent’ for language… it’s an in-built mechanism. We are human. We have language. But what do they truly mean when they say that they “don’t have a talent”? Click here to read more.. »
Had a silly idea… document a self-assessment after set intervals of study; 1-hour, 5-hours, 10-hours and so on.
So, after 1-hour of study what have I achieved? A rough assessment would be: Click here to read more.. »
As ever it’s a very sporadic update… Apologies.
Work and family keep me busy and I’m never able to post as often as I like. I’m going to attempt to keep a language log from now on as I want to document my progress somewhat.
While I use Korean daily I have limited motivation to write about my Korean adventure as the milestones are few and far between these days. I do plan on sitting the TOPIK exam later this year and will review that when the time comes, but for now I have a more interesting challenge. Click here to read more.. »
Just a short note on confidence builders in the last week.
I’ve been chatting a little with Koreans on several sites (mostly sharedtalk; no link because I don’t really like the site) recently to try to add variety to how I approach some pretty typical topics of an intermediate nature; nothing overly complicated. Things like lifestyles, family, interests, travel, etc. Stuff that you will talk about with people all the time… nice conversation starters, those kind of things.
Anyway, what’s the confidence aspect? Click here to read more.. »
As many of you will know, the study at university in an English speaking country you’re likely to need the right TOEFL or IELTS score. And that’s a lot of work. Speaking to some of my international classmates though, I’ve come to realise something. Even though they have an excellent command of English and the right score, they don’t always have the tools for the academic setting. They sometimes lack the relevant vocabulary. Vocabulary that many of us take for granted.
So what do they need to study? Endless wordlists to increase their vocabulary to the 20’000 mark or something absurd? Click here to read more.. »
