Category: Learning

All about language learning.

How I Started Making Use of My “Wasted” Time

A few months ago, I made a switch which has helped me improve my Russian. The switch was simple and it didn’t really require me to dedicate Russian any extra time for learning at all. It is quite common sense, really, but many people still don’t do it. What did I do? Well, the TV shows(!) and the movies that I watch anyway… I started watching them in Russian instead.

How To Learn The Greek Alphabet

The Greek alphabet has only 24 letters many of which are very easy to recognize and we happen to have borrowed an awful lot of letters from the Greek alphabet for our needs. Whether you want to learn how to read the alphabet to read some Greek signs or remember the names of the letters to impress your friends, it’s easy and worth doing. Here’s how you do it.

Do children learn languages in a fundamentally different way than adults?

On one hand, it seems that languages are very different in their level of difficulty in when starting to learn them from scratch: anywhere from Riau Indonesian to Finnish. On the other hand, the general linguistic consensus seems to be that children need the same time to learn the language and they speak them by four. I have been thinking how to reconcile those two and then I thought maybe that’s because children and adults learn languages differently.

How Much Time Is It Realistic to Learn a Language in?

There are many guesses and people suggesting you can learn a language in a night, a week or similar short periods of time. Let’s be realistic for a bit. Let’s look at some data and see what it can tell us for if people in general need a certain time to learn the language, let’s not assume that it can be done way faster with some magical woodoo-learning methods. Here’s what the data tells.

Learn The Chinese Tones in 1 Minute!

If you have ever read about the Chinese language, you will probably know that all the variations of Chinese have tones. Tones are ways to pronounce words so for example if you say dā (with an elongated sound) it means “to hang” while dá (with a rising sound) means “to answer” even though it would feel like the same word in English. All Chinese words have a tone (in one way or another)! Mandarin (the most-widely used variation of Chinese) has four tones + one neutral one. In this post, I’m going to attempt to teach you how to pronounce all the 4+1 Chinese tones in a minute. Let’s start.

It Is Far Easier Just To Learn The Basics

In this post I am going to prove to you that it is a better to learn a bit of many different languages than to learn one or a few languages until fluency if you care about understanding what people are speaking about in the world in general.