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The Accidental Poetry of New English Speakers
This is a guest post by author Lisa Lieberman Doctor, I found it interesting and decided to post it, here it is: When I switched careers from movie executive to writing teacher, I developed hundreds of writing exercises designed to allow authors access to their protagonist’s deep-seated emotional issues. It’s the internal issue that fuels…
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Raising a trilingual child: a parent’s personal thoughts
In this post, I like to share my experience in raising a child in a trilingual environment, i.e. the case when parents speak different languages and live in a country where a third language is spoken. In our case I am an Italian native speaker, my partner is a German native speaker and we live…
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How to stick to your new year’s resolution of learning a foreign language
The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Good Intentions and new year’s resolutions are typically forgotten as soon we realize that implementing them requires a good amount of willing power, commitment, and determination. In this post, I want to offer a few advice inspired by research studies in human psychology that looked at…
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Language learning nudges: designing an environment that helps you learn
Understanding human psychological biases can help a language learner to design an effective learning environment. This post is inspired by a book that I read recently “Nudges: improving decisions about health, wealth and happiness”. The book is basically discussing how to use humans’ psychological biases to improve decisions and policies. I want to take some…
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How to learn reading by watching movies. Tapping in DVD’s technology to learn a language.
In previous posts, I made the point that movies can be useful tools for language learning, and in particular, I described how reciting movies can be used to improve speaking skills in the target language. In this post, I want to describe another way to use movies to improve another aspect of learning a language: the ability to read.…
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Learning to love the plateau – why sometimes being patient does pay off
“It is few months that I don’t make any progress, I have reached a plateau”. This is a classic sentence from a language learner, who is losing motivation to learn since he doesn’t see any progress. The linear model of learning One of the biggest assumptions made by people that are learning a new practical…
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How do you learn writing German without (over)studying grammar?
I don’t like grammar. Actually I made a point about learning a language without studying the grammar or at least by dedicating to it a very small percentage of my learning time, as I believe that people can learn a lot of grammar without deliberately studying it but simply by exposure to what it is correct and what is…
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Reciting movies to learn a language
In this post, I introduce a technique I am using to learn German while looking at movies. The technique forces me to be less passive than when looking at a movie just for entertainment. Why do I want to force me to be less passive? Well, as I explained in previous posts active learning can help…
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Environmental support for language learning: comparing children and adults
I recently stumbled upon an academic article on how reading books fosters language development around the world. In the article the authors list the ideal environment to foster language acquisition in children, or in the words of the authors the ideal “environmental support for language learning”, these are: Children need to hear many words often Children…
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How to quickly gain some basic knowledge in an unwritten indigenous language
n these weeks I am conducting field research in indigenous villages in the Amazon and, while I am not aiming to get fluent in the local indigenous language (I am working with bilingual translators and my research is short-term) I am very aware that any population appreciates when foreigners make some effort to learn few basic sentences…