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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“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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