Labyrinth of language learning

Lots of people across the world are faced with the challenge of learning a foreign language. You might be in your country of origin wanting to learn a language such as English for your work. Or you might have moved to another country and want to make progress with the local language.  But how do you do it? Is there any prospect of making significant progress? Will you ever be able to give that talk or do that job in another language?  Well, almost certainly yes, but it will take time and staying power. Accept that your ambitious goal may take some time to reach, but, as you make progress, every step is worthwhile in and of itself.  What I can offer is some tips to make your learning more effective .  Let me say straightaway: don't bury your head in an old-style textbook or rely on a language tutor to teach you (their job is to assist your learning) - that is not going to deliver the results you need. Nor is using Duolingo, on its own, although that is...

Just today I wrote my first email in Spanish. It had a few mistakes in it - I asked someone to check it for me and they corrected what I got wrong. But it was intelligible and hopefully I will get a reply. Here it is (corrected): ¡ Hola I! He preguntado a N como funciona el grupo L a C. Me interesa también tu punto de vista.  Más tarde quiero organizar un seminar Zoom sobre esto.   Russell  Having done that, I am now learning the numbers and need to go over the alphabet and pronunciation again. This is the wrong way round... or is it? I don't think it is. I am learning. I can understand stuff in Spanish now and I am increasingly able to compose sentences which are not just modified Italian. Come to think of it, I have never finished a language textbook for any of my languages - not even Esperanto . I have certainly had plenty of teach yourself books, many of which, such as Teach Yourself Russian , proved very helpful. But, like those stabi...

Those of you who know me personally will know that I am an Esperantist, a speaker of Esperanto . Esperanto is what is called a planned or artificial language, invented (if that is the right word) by a Polish Jew, called Ludwik Zamenhof, living in Bialystok in NW Poland in 1887. His vision was to create a language which would be easy to learn and would unite people by serving as a universal second language. Zamenhof authored the book outlining the 16 simple rules of grammar of what he called la Universala Lingvo (the Universal Language) under the pseudonym Doktoro Esperanto (The Hoping Doctor). It was this pseudonym which became the name of the language. Esperanto looks and sounds like a sort of Slavicised Italian. Here is a sample sentence: "En la komenco estis la Vorto." ("In the beginning was the Word"). In my experience Esperanto functions as a language. I have been able to converse in Esperanto and indeed correspond in the langauge. When I was learning...

It's been ages (over three weeks!) since I last published a blog post on language learning. I have been busy, in part, with language teaching, so I would like to share some things I have been observing about this process.  1. Keep reinforcing the basics. So often with foreign languages, we repeat basic mistakes which we learnt a long time. There is always merit in reinforcing basic points and this also increases learner confidence. 2. Have a plan. How many times have you said to yourself, "I need to brush up on my German (or your language of choice)." Organise your learning in some way. Set aside time every day - even five or ten minutes can make a difference, 30 minutes is ideal. If you are going to attempt an hour or more, you might want to break the time up into slots of 20 minutes, so that you can be more effective. And have a plan. In one case I wrote a simple learning plan based on identifying the verbs in short text. This evolved into learning to recognise verb...