Just to stir the pot a bit… I thought I would post this chart from my upcoming talk at the Polyglot Conference in Fukuoka (2019). I’ll be giving a talk in which I describe the structure of …
Continue reading
Mandarin tones do take some getting used to, but they are not as complicated as you might think! I have noticed that language learners often decide not to try learning Mandarin because they are daunted by the …
Continue reading
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 reading
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 readingTwitter feed is not available at the moment.
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 reading
Someone on Quora Français recently asked me, “why should I learn Chinese?” (This post was originally written in French for Quora. Lisez son original en français) My opinion? There are several reasons why you’ll want to choose …
Continue reading
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 reading 
