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...