From Casual to Heartfelt: Different Ways of Saying Thank You in Greek
Learn different ways of saying thank you in Greek, with casual and formal expressions, pronunciation tips, and examples.
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Why I’m a Humanist after a decade of serendipitous and wonderful travel experiences
I’ve hinted to it in various blog posts, and said it directly in my most recent travel one; I’m an atheist, but since the word gets a little bad rep (it sounds to some like anti-theist or that your life philosophy revolves around opposing religion), the title I prefer is Humanist. This very simply means […]
The 23 strangest habits you’ll pick up after living in 23 different countries
While I usually blog about language learning, I know a lot of you enjoy my travel and cultural updates as much or more. I’ve been travelling the world since 2003, but even forgetting the time involved, I have lived in twenty three countries (and counting); that’s lived as in, spent at least a month (usually […]
The Art of Making Mistakes – How and why mistakes help you to learn languages (Guest post by Luca)
“Would you like me to give you a formula for success? It’s quite simple, really. Double your rate of failure.”
—Thomas J. Watson, founder of IBM
Making mistakes is a fundamental part of every cognitive process, whether solving a math problem, making important decisions, or trying to convey meaning in a foreign language.
What’s more, making mistakes and learning from them is not simply a human skill. According to scientific research (link: http://www.sciencenewsforkids.org/2012/08/monkeys-mistake-detector/), animals not only learn from their own mistakes, but they can learn by observing their peers messing up. In the animal world, avoiding blunders may dramatically improve one’s chances of survival. Both humans and animals learn to live and live to learn. Human beings, however have a unique skill: the ability to process and ponder their mistakes.
This can be an advantage as well as a disadvantage. Let me explain why.
Best free online language-specific monolingual and bilingual dictionaries
Throw away your dusty old dead tree dictionaries! They are either too bulky (and expensive) to use conveniently, and not updated regularly enough, or they are too small to cover all the words you might need. It’s the 21st century, so lets embrace all the free online dictionaries available to us! Multilingual dictionaries When discussing […]
Sound Rehab: A 5-Point Program for Kicking Your Visual-Addiction
(Note: Flow courses are currently discontinued, you can learn about my new courses here) I’m a musician, and I advocate learning language with your ears instead of your eyes. But I often get pushback for this view: “You can’t just assume that everyone is an auditory learner like you. Personally, I’m a visual learner so I […]
Polyglot conference, re-activating Hungarian and very easy click request!
After last week’s announcement, you should know that I had an intensive project to re-activate my Hungarian! The reason I was doing this was to prepare to go back to Budapest to attend the Polyglot Conference, and I had a great time at it, but I did want to make sure I was using some Hungarian outside of it. In this post, I’ll say how both the mission and the conference went!
Firstly, I had signed up for six hours of Hungarian spoken lessons via italki. While I had blogged that I would be putting about ten hours into the project, once again my super-secret project in Berlin was consuming my time, and I barely had 10 minutes before each lesson to quickly revise things. So in total, I had about 7 hours of exposure time to Hungarian before arriving.
I find that because I am so busy on another project, if I don’t actually schedule a lesson, then I can keep putting off the work, so I’m really glad I did put aside that time in advance. Busy or not, when you know you have another person scheduled to talk to you, you’ll make the time!
“Hacking language learning”: My new and improved TEDx talk that includes the best polyglot videos online. Please share!!
I really hope this new and improved TEDx talk will get lots of views, inspire many new language learners and even be considered to be used in the main TED stream to ultimately reach millions!
Even though you may be well aware of my language learning advice, this video shares a new aspect of why I failed at my first attempt to learn Spanish which I have not discussed on the blog yet, and I go through the five most commonly used reasons why adults don’t learn languages and explain ways around them. It also includes clips of the most impressive polyglot videos online within the talk!
40+ FREE online language learning resources
The most comprehensive list of courses, communities, exchanges and more. This is the go-to page for the most comprehensive list of completely free online resources for learning and practising your languages.
I’m severely deaf and partially sighted, but have learned 5 languages. Here’s my story
So, I’m Julie Ferguson and I have nothing on Helen Keller! I am, however, severely deaf and partially sighted.
My parents realised that I had a hearing problem when I was 2 years old, though I didn’t get my first hearing aid until I was 4. Unfortunately, when I was 4, nobody could understand me babbling away in my version of English, except for my mum and my brother. Apparently, I was bad. I couldn’t even pronounce my own name (it sounded like Ooee Fehuhoh).
I was sent to speech therapy for intensive work before I started primary school, and I remember working on all those weird sounds especially “spoon”. My particular hearing loss makes it difficult to hear consonants, especially s, h, and f.
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