When you think about it, the vast majority of people learn a language to speak it. It’s pretty obvious that that’s a big motivator. But a question that is commonly asked (”how can I improve my speaking?”) gets the all-too-often reply of “to improve your speaking you have to speak”. Sounds crazy right?

It’s not as [...]

“Scriptorium” is a nice term coined by Professor Alexander Arguelles, personally I just used to think of it as a writing exercise that I had been doing naturally. But now that it has a name that is becoming recognised in the language learning community it makes it all the more accessible.

First off, let me detail [...]

You’ve all heard of “listen and repeat” but have you heard of “shadowing”?

I won’t say it’s a little known concept because I know many language learners that have used this technique or something very similar in their own studies without ever encountering the term itself. They simply stumbled upon it themselves through their own trial [...]

Just like there are two sides to every story, there is no one text that will reveal everything. Your best bet to getting the full story? Treat your language study like your diet… eat something different from the menu whenever you can.

Not only would it get boring eating the same food day-in, day-out, but you [...]

Once you get to a certain level textbooks stop being all that useful. You know the material inside and out and there’s nothing new or challenging. So what can you do?

It’s pretty straight forward actually… Get your mitts on something real!

In short, things that were written by native speakers for native speakers are the next [...]

Constant review equals constant progression.
This isn’t exactly a new concept when we take the age-old adage of “practice makes perfect”, but it is something that is often neglected when learning a language.

The approach I’m going to outline is one I use for actual course material (Assimil, Linguaphone, FSI, etc.) mostly from the beginning of [...]

Krashen introduced the theory that we acquire language via comprehensible input. That is to say that if we are exposed to language at a level we understand then we can begin to acquire it. This ties in with my strong support of Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development, which can be basically broken down by saying [...]

There are about as many language learning products as there are icecream flavours. And just like icecream, some are delicious and some should just be avoided like the sweet perfume of durian. To make life a little less roulette-like, I’ll give you a list of some of the products I have personally used with some [...]

So, the eternal question. How often do I study?

The answer: as much as you can, as often as you can.

Simple huh? I’m being serious…

If you don’t have much time and you can only spare two hours a week, then you’re much better off doing 15 minutes a day than one 2 hour session. Why?

Because just [...]

You always hear about how busy people are these days and I suppose it’s true. But really, how much time do we lose each day? I would guesstimate that I lose at least 2 hours everyday.

How did I come to that figure?
- Driving to work: 40 minutes
- Showering: 20 minutes
- Waiting in queues: 5 minutes
- [...]