Noel is the founder of Smart Language Learner. When he isn't learning languages or writing about it, you can find him enjoying the good life of Costa Rica, where he lives with his wife and 4 children.
Spanish is easy to learn.
French too. Oh and German as well.
Chinese is much, much easier than you think.
Russian? A breeze…
Yeah, I get it:
The authors of all those ¨Why language X is easier than you think¨ and the even bolder ¨Why language X is easy¨ blog posts probably want to encourage you to learn a language.
Boredom, frustration, a sense of inferiority.
If you’ve ever tried to learn a language, you know these feelings all too well.
You don’t want to feel them…
So you spend an enormous amount of time and energy to try and suppress them.
Why? Because you think they have tremendous power.
The power to destroy your dreams of learning another language and make you never try again.
If you allow yourself to feel their disturbance, you think you will be sucked into a deep well and never come out again.
The average Western tourist (or expat) acts way too nice when abroad.
A fake happy, innocent, and weak attitude takes possession of him as soon as he sets foot on foreign soil.
His eagerness to be accepted by the natives is written all over his face.
Now you might think … so what? Someone who wants to be liked. Big deal!
But in underdeveloped countries, there are still some unwritten social laws.
And such open attitudes can get you in trouble.
If you want to learn a language, you can’t really avoid Spaced Repetition.
But that doesn’t mean you have to use Flashcards.
There are many ways you can use Spaced Repetition without them…
In fact, you can use Spaced Repetition for almost any language learning activity. And doing so can seriously accelerate your learning.
In this post you’ll find 4 ways to do just that.
An often overlooked aspect of language learning is pronunciation.
Many learners want to “sound like a native”, but then do almost nothing about it.
To sound like a native you don’t necessarily need more words. That helps, of course, but no one will mistake you for a native speaker if you sound like Tarzan all the time.
Problem is, we’re often unaware of the pronunciation mistakes we make. We need someone to tell us where we’re messing up.
A new App called Speechling can help you with this.
Recent years have seen an incredible rise in the number of language learning materials available — overwhelmingly digital.
Most of the language learning Apps around are pretty poor in quality and superficial at best.
Fortunately, there are exceptions.
FluentU is one of them.
In this post we take a detailed look at how you can get the most out of this remarkable tool.