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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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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If you can read this, you absolutely do have what it takes to learn another language. Learning a foreign language as an adult does not take “above average” intelligence or any particular “aptitude” for languages.
Unfortunately, though, a lot of would-be multilinguals get thrown off track by stumbling blocks that have nothing to do with their [...]

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As you probably already realize, the question “How fast can I learn a language?” has no single answer. It depends on what you mean by “learn,” how motivated you are, the amount of time you have for practice, the study material and practice partners available to you, your target language, and of course, you’re language [...]

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A lot of people who’d like to learn another language, but haven’t decided which one, start by looking for the so-called “easy to learn languages.” The trouble is that which languages are easy depends on a few different factors. Below I’ve listed some of those easy to learn languages to give you a start, but [...]

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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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If you’ve ever taken a course with a language school, you’ve probably been faced with the decision between a teacher whose native language is the one you’re learning and a teacher who’s native language is the same as yours.
So, is one better than the other?
Really, this is another one of those questions like, “Which [...]

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If you study a language for any serious length of time, you’re bound to hit a plateau at some point. You gone through a few advance level course books, you know enough grammar to communicate everything you need to, and you already know most of the words you hear on a daily basis.

Language learning isn’t [...]

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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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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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