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, or Ukrainian, or High Valyrian. You feel ineffective, incapable. You wondered if it was just you. I’m writing this post on a long …
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After a month-long break from language-learning to focus on my business, I’ve just booked my next trip: Prague --> Bratislava --> Lviv --> Kiev! Of course, this means I have some new languages to learn (Czech, Slovak, and Ukrainian) and one language I need to revive from very dormant slumber (Russian). As soon as I started making these travel plans, …
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Hej allihopa! This weekend I participated in Sandra Schellhase’s Language Jam social media challenge, in which participants have four days to study a language which they are randomly assigned. I was so happy to get Swedish! I’ve always been a bit of a Scandinavia-phile, and some of my family lives in Sweden too, but I always felt guilty about …
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Working on your accent? So am I — in six languages. As a native speaker of English and an adult learner of Spanish, French, Mandarin, Korean, Indonesian, and ASL, I’ve had my fair share of phonetic struggles, from Mandarin tones to that rolled Spanish “r”. But guess what? There are concrete steps you can take to improve your accent, especially …
Read More »We’re at the end of the 30-Day Record Yourself Challenge, in which language learners are recording themselves speaking in their target language for at least a minute every day. It has been challenging to keep up, but I’ve found it an invaluable method for language learning, and I’ll tell you why. The #30DRYC is the brainchild of linguistics student Aaron …
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