Several years ago, maybe five or more, I was strictly against using Translators. I had a couple of good reasons for that: 1) they made people lazy, 2) they gave bad translations. At university I was taught to use a… Read More »Should you use Translators in your language learning?
Did you know that there’s a railway in the Sahara Desert? Or that you can take a ride on a special tourist train there? The Mauritania Railway opened in 1963. It consists of a single, 704-kilometre railway line that links the… Read More »A train in the desert
Now I’m trying to carve out some time for reanimating my French, and I’m using news articles for this. Articles are great because they are relatively short, can be of a vast variety of topics and the language is not… Read More »Learning From Articles: A Simple Algorithm
Of course, if you’re going to the country where the language you’re learning is spoken, you’ll get practice anywhere and there’s not much to write about. But, what if it’s not the case? Can you still do something useful for… Read More »Language Practice While on Holiday
Let’s say you have someone to talk to in English, maybe a native or maybe a person who knows the language much better. Does it mean that by speaking to them you will improve your speaking skills? Not necessarily. I’ve had… Read More »How to improve your speaking with real conversations
How well do you know the English for what surrounds you on a daily basis? At home, at work, in the street or in shops? Oftentimes, we learn new vocab through books, videos, online courses or even conversations and then try… Read More »A simple technique to learn the words you really need
The main point of these games is to revise/ recall vocab in a fun way. Although you can also use gestures, miming and drawing pictures to explain your vocab picks (like in the Activity game), my choice would be to… Read More »Guessing games
The good news is “Yes, you can”! Below is a video from a polyglot explaining how. The video is 17 minutes long, so to save your time I’ll mention his main ideas and develop them a little bit. Repeating everything out… Read More »Can you really improve your speaking without anyone to talk to?
I think YouGlish is a perfect tool for learning languages independently (without a teacher). Have you used it yet? Read on even if you have to take maximum benefit from the service. When we’re learning new vocabulary, there are some words… Read More »YouGlish, your best friend in learning vocabulary
Several years ago I realised that although I was teaching a lot and preparing for classes a lot (all in English), I would switch to Russian when doing general search on the Internet. I understood that actually searching in English… Read More »Browsing in English