Labyrinth of language learning

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...

The subject of this blog post is inspired, of course, by the film Aladdin, the latest version of which includes this masterful performance by Will Smith. This post is about language lessons - either for those giving the lessons, or for the learner. The 'genie' in this scenario is the instructor/tutor and 'Aladdin' is the language learner. How do you do language lessons? How do you organise the time and what activities are useful? Let me share my experience - and maybe you can message me with your thoughts. Straight off, let me say clearly, that when it comes to language learning, I am not 'old school'. I can still remember the weekly 'old school' Russian grammar lectures at Cambridge University, scheduled first thing on a Monday morning, at which the lecturer delighted us to every possible metaphor for murder in connection with Russian grammar: "Last veek ve drowned verb aspect and zis morning ve vill strangle ze dative case!" By c...