Study New Languages

You may not yet have heard of Lingo Basics. It’s a product being sold for $49.97 and promises many things. Does it deliver?
As I look at my shelves I have MANY language products that I’ve collected over the years. Most of these are books, dictionaries, references, but there are others, novels, dvds, [...]

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We’ve just got back from a Surfside Beach, SC Family Vacation and haven’t been doing a lot of posting lately. I think I’ll be aiming for a monthly posting (give or take a bit), which should give me more time to work on the pages, which are where the real content of the site [...]

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About 6 years ago I set out to improve my Spanish language knowledge and skills. I had taken Spanish in High School, but what little I learned there had faded and my understanding of spoken Spanish was minimal (at best.) I set out with several approaches to learning and now in retrospect I [...]

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This site has some good 1st hand comparative difficulty of the more common Romance languages: French, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese. It seems as though there’s an ongoing debate over whether French or Spanish is an easier language to learn. I’ve seen and heard arguments each way. One argument is along the lines [...]

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I just found this fantastic listing of free language courses online. It covers the “big” languages as well as the less well known… from Abenaki to Xhosa. For many languages there are multiple entries.

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One of the things about the internet is that it makes almost any language available to you. It’s possible to study some of the more obscure languages from any internet connected computer. But how should you choose a language to study? I think the first language you study should be one that [...]

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I don’t recall what I was searching for now… I think I was looking for information about foreign language content on joost.com. Anyway, I ran across this great PDF on using foreign language web content for language learning (Post title here is the same as the article title. It’s adapted from her Masters [...]

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My daily routine varies, but here’s how and when I usually try to work language learning into my schedule.  In the mornings one of my first tasks is to check email and update on overnight news.  While doing this I work through my vocabulary list in Mnemosyne.  Currently I’m getting about 140 or so cards [...]

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“In this course everybody speaks French…” French In Action. I’ve been working my way through this 52 episode video series and, having previously worked through Destinos (an Introduction to Spanish) I can’t help but ask myself why there aren’t more courses like this. I understand there are courses like this for German [...]

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For years I “grazed” I had spent a couple years on Spanish in High School, a year on German in College, six months or more studying French on my own and I just listened/read/flitted back and forth between each. I wasn’t making any progress I wasn’t really trying. In fact, now that [...]

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