Everyone owns one.. at least one. Or at the very least, has access to one. People that don’t even study languages own one. Dictionary play a pretty major role in the lives of people of all ages. They’re set a standard for us to follow… sometimes we disagree, and sometimes we all get along. So how [...]

Just some thoughts on learning a foreign language through another learned language.
If English is your L1, many people only attempt to learn another language through English. And that’s fair enough, but it might not be the most practical if you have other tools at your disposal. Professor Arguelles strongly suggests people that dream of being [...]

First in the series of looking at study materials is going to be LingQ.
LingQ is the brainchild of Steve Kaufmann (who you can find on my Blogroll over there —-> …and down a bit). Steve speaks a number of languages very well and the site is very much a mirror of his own preferred learning [...]

Speaking a language that isn’t your own requires a lot of confidence. Taking that first plunge into the proverbial deep end of conversation with a native of the language is something that can’t really be rushed in my opinion. Yes, there are arguments that output is critical to building this communicative confidence, but where do [...]

Something that is currently being debated in several circles is just how an additional language is added to one’s arsenal. There is of course the more traditional idea that we learn a language through dedication, study and hard work. And there is the fanciful idea that we simply acquire a language. Like many things in [...]

In the first Self-Study Materials overview we covered the big names of Assimil, Linguaphone, FSI, etc. This time we’ll go over a few of the other big names; the big names that many of our readers will be more familiar with – Teach Yourself, Colloquial, Hugo and Living Language.

Teach Yourself: In many parts of the [...]

Nothing too technical here… this is just a short post about how to trick yourself into learning. I’m sure you’ve heard countless times before how you should learn in context… but it can be a little vague at times right? So… in laymans terms.. the mythical in context beast is one that pretty much means [...]

I’m sure if you’ve been a teacher for any length of time you will have stumbled more than once at creating a valid and reliable test for your classroom. The question is, why are we always struggling along attempting to reinvent the wheel? Countless people before us have researched and implemented successful assessments for the [...]

The Zone of Proximal Development is a concept that was introduced by Lev Vygotsky and is still one of the foundations for educational development together with Piagetian theory. I’m personally a big fan of the Zone of Proximal Development and it’s little brother, scaffolding. Whether this is teacher-initiated or self-guided scaffolding it doesn’t matter… finding [...]

I think I’m safe in assuming that actively studying vocabulary isn’t very popular for most people. It’s something that is often tedious and associated with rote memorisation. This doesn’t have to be the case as there are a few other popular methods out there. Your best bet is to fiddle around and find out what [...]