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?
As you go through your day, try to remember at least 10 words that start with a particular letter, say “a”. The words can be nouns, verbs, adjectives or adverbs. To make it more interesting, you may increase the number… Read More »Let’s activate some of your passive vocab!
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
So you’ve prepared for the video and watched it once . You found it interesting and decided that it’s worth a little bit more of your time and effort. What can you do then? Ideally, I’d recommend watching the video as many times as you… Read More »How to learn more from short videos. Part 3 – Watching again and working with vocab
Obviously, it depends on how you want to use your language. Some people are happy with casual chats on holiday and others want to read classical literature in the original. And there’s a huge difference in the number of words one has… Read More »How many words do you need to know in English?
How often do you come across nice words or expressions when you browse the internet? Do you save them anywhere? How to make it fast, without copying, pasting or typing them into dictionaries and translators? These are the questions I… Read More »My Word List – your ultimate app in learning vocab
Now it’s time to watch. Do it in one go without subtitles or pausing for checking new words. This, indeed, is to help you develop the skills of I believe these skills are crucial for learning any language. And I think it makes sense… Read More »How to learn more from short videos. Part 2 – Watching for the first time
Short videos can help you practise implementing the top-down approach and develop your listening skills relatively fast. Unlike longer videos (like TedTalks or series), the shorter ones don’t overload your working memory. It’s easier to stay focused, grasp the main… Read More »How to learn more from short videos. Part 1 – Preparation.
Receptive skills are Reading and Listening, so the big question here is how you actually process information. From cognitive psychology we know about two types of processing: bottom-up and top-down . Bottom-up processing relies on perception or data/ stimuli available around. In this… Read More »What is your approach to learning receptive skills?