#AskSteve

    I studied Mandarin Chinese 50 years ago. It took me nine months to reach a level where I could translate newspaper editorials from English to Chinese and from Chinese to English, read novels and interpret for people, I did this in the age of the open-reel tape recorder, long before the age of […]

Good language learners notice what is happening in a language. They notice the sounds of the language, and the structure and the vocabulary. They notice as they listen and read. They notice when they use the language. How can we train ourselves in the ability to notice, in order to become good language learners?

Language learning depends mostly on three factors, the attitude of the learner, the time available, and learner’s attentiveness to the language. If we assume a positive attitude on the part of the learner, and a reasonable and growing attentivenes…

The most popularly spoken Slavic languages are Russian, Belarusian and Ukrainian in the east, Polish, Czech and Slovakian in the west and then the the languages of the former Yugoslavia in the south.

If you are going to learn Japanese, you need to decide why you are learning the language. Why did I learn Japanese? My work took me there in 1971. I lived there for nine years, mostly during the 1970s. I learned in Japan, surrounded by the language, on my own, largely by listening and reading and […]

In 1987, I decided I was going to put forth a major effort to learn German. I’m going to explain that to you in detail.   Long before I decided that I was going to learn German, I did have exposure to the language. My parents were from Czechoslovakia and they spoke German at home, […]

El aprendizaje de un idioma depende fundamentalmente de tres factores: La actitud del estudiante, el tiempo disponible y la atención que ponga éste en el idioma. Si asumimos una actitud positiva, razonable y una atención creciente hacia el idioma por parte del estudiante. ¿Cuánto tiempo tomaría en aprender un idioma?   El FSI, el estadounidense […]

My hierarchy of goals is what I consider to be more important at what stage in my learning. There are seven of them and I’m going talk about the seven today, and then I’ve been giving some thought to doing one video on each of these seven goals. In other words, how do we achieve those goals? How do we use those goals to improve our ability in the language that we’re learning?

How many hours a day will you spend with Spanish? This is perhaps the most important consideration and does not refer to how many hours do you spend in a Spanish language classroom. It means how much time do you spend listening, reading, speaking or writing in Spanish. It can be listening to podcasts while walking the dog, reading, watching movies, listening to songs in Spanish or being engaged in a conversation in Spanish. In some ways, exposure to Spanish outside the classroom can be more intense than exposure inside the classroom, unless you are lucky enough to have one-on-one instruction.

When it comes to learning a new language, some learners like dictionaries. They read them. They treasure them. They worry about getting the best possible dictionary. I don’t like using dictionaries. Using them is like one-way love.

What is meant by comprehensible input in language learning? Stephen Krashen uses this term, as well as the term compelling input, to refer to the kind of language exposure we need in order to learn a language. The term CI, in language learning, can apply to both. What do they mean? 

Italian is a language that has always appealed to me, as Italy is such a lovely country. I have traveled and hitchhiked through Italy and, at that time, I didn’t speak Italian, so I was relying on my knowledge of Spanish to communicate with people. With so many fascinating places to visit, great food and […]

    Experienced language learners accept uncertainty, yet they keep going. They accept that they don’t fully understand.   In the above video I refer to two kinds of comprehension, listening comprehension and reading comprehension, but in this post I will simply refer to them as language comprehension.     Language comprehension is the most […]

Every language has some issues, often grammar issues, that cause learners difficulty. In the case of Spanish, one thing that gives people special trouble is the existence of two forms of the verb “to be”. Both ser and estar translate into English as “to be”. Ser vs estar, here’s how to get them straight.   […]

I hear all the time that Google Translate doesn’t work. It’s not accurate. It’s this and that. I think Google Translate is a tremendous resource and not only for language learners. It’s not 100% and it’s better for some languages than others, but I find it extremely useful.

Japanese, simply in terms of the vocabulary, the structure being very different from say English, if you’re an English speaker, is going to be more difficult. However, there are a number of things that make Japanese easier, in my opinion.

French was my first love when it comes to languages. In fact, there’s an expression in French: “On revient toujours a son premier amour.” It means you always go back to your first love. I love French; I love all the languages that I learn, but I have a special affection for French.
I highly recommend learning French for beginners. There’s a whole world that you can access so much better if you speak French. The language is spoken in other countries like Canada.

I recently watched a video which features polyglots Luca Lampariello and Anthony Lauder. In it they make the point that you don’t need to have a large vocabulary in order to be fluent. Anthony has said in the past that even with a few hundred words you can be fluent, or you can be fluent at a relatively low level of proficiency in a language. I don’t agree at all.

Many of us are watching the Olympics in Brazil. Despite all of the bad reports that we always get in the lead up to any Olympic Games – some British newspaper called the 2010 Vancouver Winter games the worst Olympics in the world ever, then there were all the problems with toilets in Sochi and now pollution in Rio – it looks like actually things are proceeding swimmingly, so to speak.

People ask, if I go to Brazil, can I communicate? What language do they speak? First of all, some may not know that Brazilians speak Portuguese. There’s no Brazilian language, there is Portuguese.

I think Spanish is one of the most attractive languages to learn. We can all be motivated to learn a specific language like Mongolian or Finnish because we have a friend or a particular interest. Spanish is different: there are a number of real big advantages to learning Spanish.

Korean vs Japanese vs Chinese, ever wonder what the similarities and differences are between these three languages and how should we go about learning them? To what extent can learning one help you with the others? Let me share my experience in learning these three Asian languages.   How I Learned Mandarin, Japanese and Korean […]

As people who speak multiple languages, polyglots like to use those languages; we like to see how we do. But there is an element of performance. Are you better than me? Am I better than you? For some people that’s fine. I think a lot of us are very happy, in fact, when we hear somebody speak better than we do.

I wanted give some important tips for learning Russian. First I’ll explain about the writing system, then some interesting things to remember about Russian verbs of motion, aspects of verbs and cases.

Combien de temps faut-il pour apprendre l’espagnol ? Combien de temps faut-il pour apprendre n’importe quelle langue ? J’entends cette question assez souvent. Il n’existe pas de réponse universelle. Cela dépend vraiment de vous.

You have all heard me stress the importance of input. You have to get the language in you, meaning you have to acquire words, and you have to let your brain get used to the language. I spend most of my time practicing different forms of input, however, the ability to effectively speak is the […]

When I was 16, we had the option to do our first year of university instead of grade 12 in high school. I decided to move on to McGill University in Montréal as I found high school to be a bit boring. Not knowing what to study, I chose a number of courses in French and English literature. My professor at university named Maurice Rabotin was great!

Accumulating words is the fundamental task in language learning, in other words it is very important to acquire new words. Many learners are under the impression that this is done through memorization. This is not, however, the most effective way to grow your vocabulary. I’ve never been able to learn new words by deliberately trying to memorize them. The more effective way to learn new words is simply through exposure to the language.

My third language learning goal is listening. It’s the third goal in the hierarchy, but in many ways it’s the most important because it’s the major activity that I do when it comes to language learning, simply because it’s so easy to do. So I can get up in the morning and listen, I can listen while doing the dishes, I listen while I exercise. I listen while in the car, the train or wherever I am. I can always listen. I can listen 15 minutes here, 20 minutes there and before you know it, I have an hour of language learning done.

Reading is easier than listening. I can work my way through a text at LingQ, look up every word. Let’s say I’m in sentence mode, it’s a brand new language and if there’s seven words in that sentence, I can look up each word and I can kind of figure out what the sentence means. Fuzzy, maybe not totally clear, but I have a sense of what that sentence means. I have a sense of which words correspond to the verb, to the noun and so forth. So the reading is easy. If I just heard those words, I wouldn’t be able to do that. So reading is a sort of a step towards being able to understand what you hear.

Which is better for language learners, monolingual or bilingual dictionaries? This question often comes up.A monolingual dictionary explains the meaning of a word in the language that you are learning. A bilingual dictionary provides a translation…