Faster Foreign Language Learning

I recently came across and interesting article at Antimoon’s learn English online site discussing problems with the Communicative Approach to language learning. This approach encourages you to communicate very early in your learning, often from the first lesson.
Now, I do understand what the author is saying—you should get input and lots of it [...]

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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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A very common roadblock in learning another language is the fear of speaking the language. We worry we’re going to sound stupid, say one thing when we meant another, or at the very least that people won’t understand us and we’ll sound like blithering idiots.

It’s normal, but some learners have a real dread of [...]

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Live interaction is essential if you want to be able to really communicate orally in your target language. You can learn a useful amount of a language just from tapes, books, software and the like, but that’s just the beginning. Unless you have real-time conversations, your speech will always be faltering, slow, and broken.

Unfortunately, one [...]

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