If you know more than one language, people will often wonder how you have the brainpower to keep them all in your head, and switch between them at will. “How the hell do you do that?”, I remember being asked. “Do what?”, I said. “Switch languages! How is it possible?” The person I was speaking to, a barista by […]
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“Talent wins games, but teamwork and intelligence win championships.” – Michael Jordan What if I told you that you can learn to speak a language fluently through the Internet, and that you can do it quickly and easily from the comfort of your own home? Well, there is a way. It is called a language exchange. A language exchange […]
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After all, that’s just a dream, isn’t it? Forget speaking with perfect pitch and pronunciation, moving from topic to topic, knowing the meaning of every single word, and crafting elaborate sentences one after another. Sure, it would be great, but for the most part, we language learners are simpler souls with simpler dreams. We want to speak a […]
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Do you want to be good at speaking a foreign language? Of course you do! You wouldn’t be here, otherwise. It’s the number one goal of nearly every language learner. The problem is that many learners go about trying to speak in the wrong way. Or worse, they don’t actually try to speak at all. The hard truth […]
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When it came to developing the best language learning plan, I used to tell myself: “This is it!” “This is the year!” Have you ever said this to yourself before? That this year, finally, is going to be the year that you make a language learning breakthrough? “I will finally speak Italian fluently”. Or something along the lines of: “I will read […]
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Have you ever heard of using active listening to learn a foreign language? If you haven’t, let me tell you the story of how active listening made a huge impact on my language learning. Let’s rewind to some 10 years ago. The year is 2008. I had just reached an intermediate level in Russian, a language I was […]
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“Adopt the pace of nature, her secret is patience” – Ralph Waldo Emerson When people ask me how to improve their listening comprehension in a foreign language, the same story always comes to mind: It is the story of an American student, by the name of Alex, who hired me to be his language coach. What struck me […]
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“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 […]
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