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 […]

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 […]

For this post I created an infographic on the “language learning formula” that allows to learn a language effectively. This formula shows that motivation and opportunity are essential to learn a language, where opportunity is defined as the “time spent inthe language” multiplied by “the methods used to learn the language”. Time spent […]

As a parent raising a trilingual child I am aware that my son’s exposure to my native language (Italian) is mostly limited to the time I spend with him. As exposure to the language, i.e. language input, especially comprehensible input,  is one of the key determinants of first language acquisition, and few […]

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 […]

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. […]

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 […]

“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 […]

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 […]

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 […]