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 […]

Many people in the language-learning community argue that watching movies is a good way to learn languages. Of course, almost everybody likes the idea of learning a language by watching a movie but then, when you try, you may find that most of the conversations in movies are really difficult […]

In a previous post, I explained the reading-listening method that consists in reading a book while listening to its audiobook version. As an alternative, I found very useful to use free online content that is available both in the audio version and in the text version. For example, I found that both […]