Faster Foreign Language Learning

Because foreign language learning is a long-term project, setting specific, achievable goals is critical if you want to stay on track and make continual progress at a good rate. You first time planning your own course of study, though, it hard to know where to start. Here are some tactics to help you set good [...]

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When you’re just starting to learn a foreign language, the thought of trying to build the kind of vocabulary you need for real fluency can be overwhelming. It’s hard to know where to start. The good news is that when you’re learning for first few hundred words, there’s nothing wrong with starting slowing.
Be Picky
Linguist [...]

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If you’re interested in foreign language learning, at some point you’ve probably wondered how to learn a foreign language faster. We all know high school classes and even some professional language courses can drag on for several years and still leave just barely able to communicate in your chosen language.
And yet, with the right [...]

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The abundance of languages on this planet makes for great fun, but it doesn’t make it particularly easy to decide what language to learn.
It’s not a choice most of us make lightly, either. While it’s relatively easy to become conversant in a language, really learning a language to fluency usually does take a investment [...]

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If you’re female and stay long-term in another country, I can almost guarantee you that at some point, someone is going to leave you in charge of one or more toddlers.

I once had the pleasure of spending several hours looking after four little ones all under age four when I spoke about ten words of [...]

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When people say the want to “learn a language fast,” their ideas on what “learn” means and what “fast” means range widely.
Some people mean they want to reach a translator’s or interpreter’s level of fluency in less than two years. On the other end of the spectrum, some people just want to get the basics [...]

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One of the biggest stumbling blocks on the road to fluency is the continual interruptions. Interruptions do more than slow your progress than just take time away from your studies; they also erode the progress you’ve already made.
Just like kids forget what they’ve learned over the academic year while they’re on summer vacation, you [...]

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If you’re getting ready to learn a second language, no doubt you’ve heard horror stories of sleep-inducing grammar drills and hours spent poring over vocabulary lists, repeating words aloud again and again. While you can learn this way, it’s not exactly fun. More importantly, though, it’s not the most efficient way if your goal is [...]

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