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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

One of the key factors to learn something is to believe that you can learn it. Unfortunately, there is a widespread assumption that in many domains talent is essential to become successful. in this post I try to answer the following questions: Is intelligence genetically determined or can be learned? […]

As children we learn our native language without studying grammar (Sure, later at school we are forced to learn grammar but this happens when we are already fluent). We speak the language in a way that (mostly) follows grammar rules without knowing them, how is this possible? how is possible […]

In this post, I want to share the 3 most important strategies I learned in 2020 about language learning. I learned to value these strategies because I empirically tested them and found that they have improved substantially my learning process. I think these are strategies that can be useful to […]

And if we could learn a foreign language like we learnt our mother tongue? Surely, many of us have thought this while facing the challenge of learning a foreign language. Surely, there is something useful in understanding and analysing how children learn a language without going to a language school. […]

You are reading a book and you start thinking about what are you going to eat for dinner, you are writing a letter and you start checking your e-mail, you are cooking and you start thinking about the book you were reading. In a world full of multi media gadgets, […]

A few days ago I was invited to dinner and I started to chat with a guest. He was German and we started the conversation in German but it was obvious that, even if I could understand about 70% of what he was saying, I had also to struggle a […]