Common question… variable answers.
It all depends on what the learner considers fluent, which language they are learning, the environment they are learning in, how motivated they are, how often they study, and so and so forth.
Let’s set the ground rules at 2 hours study per day. Not unrealistic if you consider the Borrowing Time post [...]

Are you fluent?
It’s a pretty simple question. The answers are more than subjective.
To a non-language learner there seems to be the consensus that this question is a definitive yes or no. So not true. Everybody has their own interpretation of what fluency is and while there is a switch in all of us that [...]

Planning your time and using it effectively, this is how we learn a language successfully. It’s not exactly that complicated but it is something that a lot of people neglect. To use the exercise analogy, it’s better to do a little a lot than a lot a little.
Meaning… 15 mins a day for a total [...]

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 [...]

As a follow-up to the Multilingual Children post a while back, this is a question we’ve been pondering lately… How do you develop and maintain literacy in the home language without formal instruction?
The obvious way as we are both teachers is to actively teach our son how to write and give him written tasks as [...]

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 [...]

As Nayoung and I have just had our baby boy – Leon Jaewoo – I may as well do a write up on multilingual children and the common methods surrounding the raising of them. Obviously, we would love for our boy to grow up as a coordinate bilingual of English and Korean… but how are [...]