In this post I will explain how learning German has helped me to learn to identify medicinal plants used in the Amazon. These are apparently two unrelated skills but here I want to show how the principles of learning can be relevant in different fields such as botany and languages. […]

One of the most common errors, when people want to learn a new skill such as speaking a language, is to focus too much on theoretical knowledge rather than on methods to acquire the skill. That is often why people tend to not clearly differentiate between these two aspects of […]

Creative ideas are ideas that somehow fall outside the norm and the usual patterns of the mind. In this post I will describe a technique used to generate creative ideas and apply it to learning languages but it can be applied to find creative solutions to any kind of problem.Author […]

The Rosetta Stone, photo by Elisabeth BeersThe Rosetta Stone is, as the name suggests, a stone inscribed with the same text in three different languages: Ancient Egyptian, Demotic (Another form of Egyptian), and Ancient Greek. Researchers used the trilingual text in the Rosetta Stone as a key to understanding Egyptian […]

Thinking laterally. Photo by Rose-Zhang.Lateral thinking is a term created by Author Edward de Bono to describe a way of thinking that promotes creativity. Lateral thinking consists of solving a problem by using and generating as many solutions as possible instead of just the first obvious solution. By creating many […]

The Forgetting Curve Forgetting: A common experience It is the beginning of the summer, you are sitting on your chair staring the questions on your exam sheet and you realize that you have forgotten all the information that you have frantically read in the last week. “How is this possible? […]

In this post, I am discussing the reading & listening method to learn languages. I came across this method on the language forum “how to learn any language” a great source of inspiration for language learners. The reading & listening method (R-L) consists of reading a text while listening to […]

The method I explain in this post can be applied only if you leave in a country where people speak the language you want to learn. In a recently published book Author John Kay argues that goals are often best achieved indirectly. Similarly, I think that we can often learn […]

This week I will explain how I use google translate to learn German. I recommend this method to people that are at the intermediate level with their language level. While learning German I faced the dilemma that most of the books to learn this language have really boring text. I […]

Who is the best teacher? For a long time, I believed that the best language teacher is a native speaker of your target language but I recently realized that this is not always the case. The crucial factor is to differentiate between who are the best people to practice the language with […]