“Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere” – Albert Einstein The year is 2011. I had never felt failure like this before. For the past few months, I had been learning Romanian. I picked it up on a whim, thinking that it would be easy. After all, I already spoke four of Romanian’s […]
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If you had to run a marathon tomorrow, how would you do it? Would you run as fast as possible, trying to get it over with? Or would you pace yourself, making sure you had enough stamina to make it all the way across the finish line — 42 kilometers away? Most people would choose […]
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Has this happened to you? You’re in school, and you’re reading a text out loud in front of the entire class. You wanted to decline, but you couldn’t. This is a requirement, and you’ll be receiving a grade for your performance. Standing in front of the room, you notice your mouth is dry, and your hands are trembling. […]
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“There must be another way,” I told myself, discouraged. I had spent what seemed like countless hours listening and re-listening to a German language audio track, trying to imitate it as closely as possible. I could make the sounds, but when I tried to mimic the rhythm, the pitch, and the musicality of the German native speaker, […]
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“What? You are not French?!?” The girl, a Parisian herself, sat next to me, stunned. We had been chatting away in the hall of a hostel in Prague, Czech Republic, for several hours. For all that time, she had thought that I was one of her own. Not a native Italian, but a born-and-raised français de souche […]
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Has this happened to you? You read a post online about the benefits of reading in a foreign language, and decide that you’d like to give it a try. You sit down with your chosen text, and turn to page one. You read a few words…and then stop. Suddenly, there’s a word you don’t understand. Determined to proceed, you […]
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When I tell people that I speak thirteen languages, they often think that as a polyglot, learning languages is all I do with my time. They’re convinced that I spend the majority of each day studying, and that I have little time for anything else—including friends, dating, travel, and other free-time activities. This is definitely not […]
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Learning a language from scratch can be very intimidating, especially if you’ve never done it before. In school, at least, a lot of the decisions are made for us. In a language classroom, we are told what to learn, how to practice, and how quickly to progress through new material. On your own, the situation is very […]
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Have you ever worried about how to memorize vocabulary? Have you tried to memorize a word over, and over, and over again, but it just won’t stick, at all? It’s happened to me plenty of times. And let me tell you, it’s frustrating. You put lots of effort into getting one short sequence of letters into your brain, and, […]
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One of the most interesting aspects of learning a new language is how it can benefit your life in powerful and often unpredictable ways. I have fond memories of the time when, fifteen years ago, I was sitting on the steps of a fountain in my home city of Rome, Italy. On that evening, I was chatting […]
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