You don’t have to travel to learn a new language. Honestly, you don’t even need to put on pants! I’ve studied several languages from home over the last decade. Not that I don't love travel and living …
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Black Friday Deals to Learn Languages
Too late, come back next year! Or check out my lists of language-learning resources here.
Continue readingShadowing: This Exercise Will Make You Sound Like a Native
Since I posted my blog post on the importance of prosody, many of you wrote to ask for more explanation of how my shadowing exercise works. It is a very powerful exercise and has helped me immeasurably. …
Continue readingLinguistics 101 Series: Why You Need to Master Prosody to Speak a Foreign Language
When you learn a foreign language, you usually study pronunciation, grammar, and vocabulary. Maybe even a new alphabet. But how many of your language teachers have ever mentioned prosody? Prosody is the “music” of language. In spoken …
Continue readingLearn Like a Linguist: Using Swadesh Lists for Rare or Minority Languages
The United Nations has declared 2019 the Year of Indigenous Languages. I know a lot of you are taking that as your cue to try your hand at learning a minority language, from Occitan to Teochew …
Continue readingNot A Moment Wasted: Hyper-Efficient Language Learning with the Monologue Method
View this post on Instagram A post shared by Sara Maria's Language Diary (@misslingdiary) on Dec 2, 2018 at 3:31pm PST Above: an example of a monologue I memorized in order to improve my ASL. Recently, I …
Continue readingSo You’re Not Fluent Yet: Should You Blame Duolingo?
When the recent article in The Cut came out proclaiming Duolingo useless, the glee was palpable. I get it. You’ve spent countless hours at the beck and call of that owl, and you still can’t speak Spanish, …
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