Well so much for updating over the summer! I think I imagined having a bit more free time to fill, but instead worked ~14 hours a day all the way through. So! Russian thoughts and results:
Tower of Babelfish
The Blog
Tips, tutorials and resources to aid you on your path towards fluency.
Tag Archives: immersion
The book is sold!! (And info on site updates for the next 2 months)
First thing’s first, it’s official!!
Here’s the press release: Crown Archetype has preempted World Rights to 28 year old language learning guru Gabriel Wyner’s THINK IN ANY LANGUAGE, which explores how the hundreds of millions of would-be language learners around the world can bypass current methods that clearly don’t work and teach themselves, through a series of easy-to-accomplish steps, how to learn any language now.
Reader Q&A: Later on - C1 Fluency, Teaching, Immersion, Language Maintenance
Reader questions, part three! Here we talk about the later stages of the language learning process - what C1 fluency means, some of the pros and cons of immersion programs, how to teach using these methods, etc.
Q: How long does it take to reach C1 traditionally (in school)? Did you reach C1 before or after immersion at Middlebury? A: No idea! I took 5 years of Russian in school and maybe reached A2. I think most people have the same experience. At the Austrian school I teach at, students have half of their classes taught in English for 8 years, and at the end of it, some of them are near C1.
Reader Q&A: What to do when - How to use a pronunciation guide, daily routines, custom Anki models
Part two in Reader Q&A, we’ll talk about the order that you should learn things.
Q: I got one of the Pronounce it Perfectly Books. How do I use it with your approach? Should I learn the base vocabulary concurrently? A: I’d follow the book and put the spelling rules into my Anki deck (so words ending in ‘ou’ are pronounced /u/, and words ending in û are pronounced /y/, for example). At the point where you can easily hear the differences between words (between roux and rue, for example), and you know what to expect from a given spelling, then start adding words to your Anki deck in a hurry. At that point, you’ll know how to say 95% of the words you encounter, and if you look a word up in a dictionary and discover that it has an irregular pronunciation, then you can add that pronunciation to your Anki deck.
