Language Resources
Do you want to learn Russian? Perhaps you find yourself struggling to find resources that help you start speaking. When I started out, I certainly did. Many of the tools that I found when I started learning Russian were grammar-heavy textbook style resources and they didn’t offer me a lot in terms of day-to-day conversation. Rather than learning how to say “what did you do...
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I recently announced that I am revising a language that I studied in the past – Korean. My first time around with Korean was a struggle. At the time, I was between Japanese and Korean as my next language project, but when my good friend Lindsay of Lindsay Does Language expressed interest in learning Korean alongside me, I chose Korean over Japanese. During those six...
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I often feel guilty for taking breaks. I feel as though I’m not doing the right thing if I’m not being productive. I also hate to give things up once I’ve already invested a lot of time into them. With Korean I did the first – I took a long break (read: more than a year) and I was afraid I was going to end...
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When we think of verb conjugation, we often think of it from a European language perspective. We run through the verb conjugation tables we learned in school – I run, you run, he runs, she runs, we run, they run… But Japanese doesn’t handle verbs in quite the same way. Rather than needing to figure out how to conjugate verbs based on who is doing...
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In April, I wrapped up my second Add1Challenge, this time for Japanese (the first was for Croatian). I also started my third. This time around I’m doing it for… *drumroll* Korean. And Russian. I couldn’t decide between the two. Russian is a language I’ve studied pretty lightly up until this point and I’ve never really gone deep with it. I recently had a lesson that...
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Aesthetics typically refer to the nature and appreciation of beauty. When applied to the linguistic field, it refers to the appreciation of language’s beauty and nature. On a more informal level, aesthetics of language could be viewed as our individual perception of the sound and beauty of a language. This is form where the idea that “French is romantic” or that “German is harsh sounding”...
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The majority of my intensive Chinese language study was in preparation for the HSK exam. For a year, I focused on test preparation, having to put speaking and learning conversational language on hold until after I sat the exam. The minute the test was over, I immediately for more colloquial lessons and learning material. After learning textbook Chinese for so long, I was eager to...
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A short while ago, my good friend Kerstin Cable posted a question in her Facebook group. She asked, “if you could only study one language for the next five years, what would it be?” I began to type, thinking it would be an easy answer. Chinese – duh! It’s not my native language and it’s the language I speak with Little Linguist, so I need...
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Language Resources
I am always on the lookout for good audio resources. Because I spend so much of my time in the car, this is where I do the bulk of my language study. For languages like Croatian, there’s not a lot available, so whenever I find something, I’m over the moon. Because my goal with many of my languages is to attain a conversational level, listening...
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Language Resources
It’s easy to think that if you spend enough time with your language’s vocabulary and grammar that one day, you’ll master the language. But a language is so much more than just words and grammar. And in order to effectively learn a language, you first need to learn how to learn. You can be the most dedicated grammar learner or have more points than all...
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