Not long back, a lively online language learning debate caught my eye. It was around the unassailable prominence of English as a medium for discussion in the polyglot community, and the irony of this within a community of a hundred… Continue reading
If you use Anki to drill vocabulary, it’s tempting to sit back and let the app do all the work. Feed in your phrases, and simply let the algorithms work their magic. On the other hand, if you really want… Continue reading
If only we’d all be a little kinder to ourselves. I read it all the time on social media: fellow language learners beating themselves up for not studying harder, longer, more often. It seems like everybody feels they’re not doing enough.… Continue reading
Bravo, inventor of the three-minute, throwaway pop song. Not only does it provide a little well-needed escapist entertainment, but it also doubles as a fantastic little language learning tool. I’m far from the first language learning aficionado to use music… Continue reading
I had a language learning breakthrough this week. I finally got a handle on the two verbs for ‘to think’ in Greek: νομίζω (nomízo) and σκέφτομαι (skéftomai). Unlike the all-purpose English term, Greek is more discerning. It uses the former… Continue reading
How long should one-to-one online language lessons be? 30 minutes? 45 minutes? An hour? Even longer? I spend a lot of time in online lessons on iTalki. There, as on similar sites, the norm is the hour-long lesson. Although other… Continue reading
This week I completed the final week of one of Dublin City University’s Irish language MOOCs on the e-course platform FutureLearn. And I can honestly report that it was one of the best online language learning experiences I’ve had. If… Continue reading
Life is a journey, and our paths through language learning certainly reflect that. Through our experiences with languages, we constantly evolve. Old habits fade as they prove themselves less effective. And new ones get grafted on, particularly as we learn… Continue reading
Sometimes a really helpful technique is staring you in the face, and you fail to see it. Or you see it, and you fail to use it, for whatever reason. So it was for me with dictation, the wonderfully straightforward… Continue reading
It is fairly uncontroversial to state that we live in troubled times right now. Try as many of us might to separate languages and politics, it is impossible to keep our neat, studious worlds sealed from the social shifts taking… Continue reading