How to Learn Any Language in 3 Months The Okano Isao judo textbook I used to learn Japanese grammar. Post reading time: 15 minutes. Language learning need not be complicated. Principles of cognitive neuroscience and time management can be applied to attain conversational fluency (here defined as 95%+ comprehension and 100% expressive abilities) in 1-3 months. Some background on my language obsession, from an earlier post on learning outside of classes: From the academic environments of Princeton University (Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Italian) and the Middlebury Language Schools (Japanese), to the disappointing results observed as a curriculum designer at Berlitz International (Japanese, English), I have sought for more than 10 years to answer a simple question: why do most language classes simply not work? The ideal system — and progression — is based on three elements in this order… 1. Effectiveness, adherence, and efficiency refer to the “what”, “why”, and “how” of learning a target language, respectively. Ganbare!
CPE - Egzamin Certificate of Proficiency in English - angielski Osobom lub instytucjom, które wniosły opłatę egzaminacyjną za kandydatów nieobecnych z przyczyn zdrowotnych na pisemnej części egzaminu First Certificate in English (FCE), Certificate in Advanced English (CAE) i Certificate in Proficiency in English (CPE), przysługuje częściowy zwrot tej opłaty (60% od podstawowej ceny egzaminu). Zwolnienia lekarskie, wystawione na formularzu pobranym z ośrodka egzaminacyjnego, należy składać w ośrodku w nieprzekraczalnym terminie ogłaszanym każdorazowo dla sesji egzaminacyjnej. Osobom nieobecnym na egzaminie z przyczyn innych niż zdrowotne nie przysługuje refundacja. Indywidualny plan sesji egzaminacyjnej dla każdego kandydata zostanie podany w zawiadomieniu o terminach i miejscach egzaminu (Statement of Entry). EGZAMIN USTNY Na potrzeby części ustnej egzaminu Kandydaci dobierani są w pary przez pracowników ośrodka egzaminacyjnego i nie mogą sami wybierać osoby, z którą będą egzaminowani. Tylko zarejestrowani użytkownicy mogą pisać komentarze.
How Many Words Do You Need to Know in Spanish (or any other foreign language)? And WHICH Words Should You Be Learning? This is going to start out a bit technical and academic, but I promise that if you’ll wade through it you will be rewarded with some very, very useful practical information that you can use to significantly enhance your learning of the Spanish language, or any other second language, by not just doing it better but doing it more efficiently and therefore requiring far less time to become fluent. Plus, it will help you design a study system based on precisely what it is that you want to do with Spanish: speak with native speakers, read fiction, read and/or write in a technical or academic field, etc., or some combination thereof. First, let’s start with some definitions so that we can understand what’s going on here: Lexeme: A lexeme is a reduction of a word to it’s most basic meaning. Corpus: Latin for “body”. The body of knowledge that you based your information on, in this case books, newspapers, transcripts of spoken language, etc. Register: What setting the language is used in. Why?
About the GSL John Bauman Enterprise Training Group This page: The 1953 GSL About this version of the GSLCopying and using this GSLBibliographyJohn Bauman's homepageThe actual 2,284 words, with frequency numbers The 1953 GSL The General Service List (GSL) (West. 1953) is a set of 2,000 words selected to be of the greatest "general service" to learners of English. They are not the most common 2,000 words, though frequency was one of the factors taken into account in making the selection. As published, the GSL is a medium-sized red book, organized like a dictionary. The inclusion of related form under a headword is not consistent. The frequency numbers given for the words provide a way to rank the words in importance for students of English. Back to the top About this version of the GSL The list given here was created by John Bauman and Brent Culligan in early 1995. What follows may be more detail than most people need. Every capitalized headword from the GSL was included.
How to learn a language without translating When you remove translation from your language learning process, you can learn to think in your target language from the beginning. This idea has made the Middlebury Language Schools so successful over the past 100 years and it’s what has sold thousands of copies of Rosetta Stone. Let’s say you’re learning French. You want to learn the word for “house”. Your dictionary says “la maison”. House – la maison. Two things go wrong here. Two, let’s look at what happens when you see this: First, you think “house”. Well, yes and no. “Est-ce qu’il y a un chien dans cette maison?” “Is it that it there has a dog in this house?”. There is a limit to translation. When you could instead train: la maison Doing this allows you to instantly think the word “maison” as soon as you see the picture, and that’s your goal, isn’t it? There’s a trick here, of course. You use English to find the words you need. Here’s where No Translation kicks in. le mensonge pas pas un mensonge la vérité Some relevant blog posts:
Anki - powerful, intelligent flashcards 100 Most Common Words in Any Language[1] It Is in Our Nature to Need Stories | Guest Blog It is in our nature to need stories. They are our earliest sciences, a kind of people-physics. Their logic is how we naturally think. They configure our biology, and how we feel, in ways long essential for our survival. Like our language instinct, a story drive—an inborn hunger for story hearing and story making—emerges untutored universally in healthy children. “Stories the world over are almost always about people with problems,” writes Jonathan Gottschall. The “human mind is a story processor, not a logic processor,” says Jonathan Haidt. Darwin understood how our biology is fitted to the stories in our social environments, noting, “Many a Hindoo…has been stirred to the bottom of his soul by having partaken of unclean food.” Any story we tell of our species, any science of human nature, that leaves out much of what and how we feel is false. Illustration by Julia Suits, The New Yorker Cartoonist & author of The Extraordinary Catalog of Peculiar Inventions. Previously in this series:
Synonyms In popular literary acceptation, and as employed in special dictionaries of such words, synonyms are words sufficiently alike in general signification to be liable to be confounded, but yet so different in special definition as to require to be distinguished. --G. P. It would be nice to provide each of the gismu clusters below with an advice on good usage se papri | cukta | se tcidu | datni A recent proposal by Nick Nicholas: se papri < cukta < se tcidu < datni The proposal is retracted, but the fine semantics of these gismu is obviously something that should be made explicit (and probably has been : Is a blank notebook a cukta, a se tcidu or a datni? klama | muvdu | litru klama has all the places of muvdu plus x5 for vehicle, hence klama < muvdu. litru lacks places for destination and origin, hence klama < litru surely this should be the other way around? nelci | se pluka | prami| se dirba drata | frica mintu | dunli pikta | jaspu Other
Gismu differing in one letter only Suppose each of 1342 gismu is represented by a dot (vertex) on a sheet of paper. Now let us connect with a line (link) those gismu which differ only in one letter. The resulting picture is a graph consisting of vertices and links. The statistics is the following: #of links #of vertices 0 497 1 361 2 226 3 134 4 65 5 35 6 15 7 6 8 2 10 1 (barna) ----- 1342 The champion is barna: 10 links barna: burna badna basna barda barja carna farna garna marna rarna 2 gismu have 8 links: manti: mapti masti manci manri canti danti ganti ranti panci: palci pandi panpi panzi canci lanci manci vanci 6 gismu have 7 links: brodi: bradi bredi bridi broda brode brodo brodu manci: matci manri manti canci lanci panci vanci marna: morna marxa barna carna farna garna rarna pinji: punji pilji pindi pinsi linji minji vinji ranti: ranji ranmi ranxi canti danti ganti manti salci: selci sakci satci kalci nalci palci ralci 15 gismu have 6 links: et cetera... Here is the list of the biggest cluster (161 gismu):
Gismu with similar place structure For example, cilre, djuno, jimpe, and others have similar structure (agent event subject). I've found gismu with 3 or more place structure hardest to remember so i'll put those here. Major grouping...agent event subject (extra) cilre learn x1 learns x2 (du'u) about subject x3 from source x4 (obj. Two operand plus property. places: focus, compared-to, property. zmadu,mleca,mintu,simsa,frica,dukti,jibni,fapro places: focus, focus object, property. ranxi,xajmi,zdile,mansa,sarxe,satci,stace What is to be done about these? But beware of the Inconsistent Gismu Place Structures Gotcha. Numbers, and a few more articles One of the first things you learn in a new language is how to count, and this course is no exception. However, in Lojban, numbers include much more than just counting; for example, in Lojban, some, most and too many are numbers. The numbers from one to nine are as follows: parecivomuxazebisoThis leaves zero, which is no (think "yes, we have no bananas"). Numbers from 10 onwards are made by putting the digits together, just like you'd say a telephone number. 4,592 has a comma in it (or a full stop in some languages, just to make things confusing). Just as we have a word for a comma, we also have one for a decimal point: pi. Tip: Don't get this mixed up with the number pi (π): 3.14159..., which has its own word in Lojban: pai — oddly enough. When you want to talk about numbers as sumti — that is to say, as things in and of themselves — you need to put an article in front of them.
Esperanto Gregg - Gregg Shorthand Copyright, 1918 Edited by Andrew Owen The International Language can be easily and accurately written in Gregg Shorthand with a few modifications. It is assumed that the student, before working through this little book, is conversant with the rules and principles given in the Gregg Shorthand Manual. Consonants Vowels The dot is used to distinguish e from i, but in practical use this is rarely necessary. - Next Page - - Printer-Friendly Version -