Submit your blog!

If you have a non-profit blog or website about learning languages, please post the link in the comments of this post and I'll add it to my left bar.

Prefer to only listen the second language during the first 3 months

In this post I explicitly said "Don't use the written target language in this phase".

Well, scratch that.
What I really wanned to say is "prefer listening over reading during the first 3 months".

There are 2 reasons for that:

1) The number one problem of language learners in the beginning is that they worry too much about not being able to understand spoken language.

Step 1 was designed to erase that completely.

Extensive listening during the first stage of learning a new language is a liberating experience.

It frees you to enjoy the language as stress free as possible: By effortlessly listening.

2) Learning the target writing system when you already know the sounds of the language. This makes learning languages with weird phonetics and cryptic writing (such as English) much easier.

Twitter!

Hello, guys!
Follow my twitter:
http://twitter.com/wuerges

I promise very low volume of twitting in both English and Portuguese. Not more than 2-3 twits per week.

Hearing disability and Language learning

Please check this awesome post from RevTK forums:

http://forum.koohii.com/viewtopic.php?pid=95421#p95421

Game Recomendation: Demon's Souls for PS3

A cheesy game, with a cheesy title. But a hell of a game: Demon's Soul it is.

Recently I got this game and at first it was a pain because althought it is a Japanese game, it is completely dubbed in English. It has no Japanese audio.

But the game is really interesting and really, really hard and it really got my attention completely during the last 2 weeks. Half because the game itself and half for reading these strategy guides from the internet. In Japanese, of course.

For Demon's Souls, this is the best:
http://www.geocities.jp/kouryakubo/ds/index.html

The sad thing is that I beat the game today =/
Now I need something else.

Btw, anyone knows what is the equivalent of gamefaqs for Japan?

Human Rights Declaration in 100 languages

Awesome page from librivox:

http://librivox.org/the-universal-declaration-of-human-rights-by-the-united-nations/

Quick Guide to learn any language effectively, enjoyably.

1) For 3 months, listen to the target language.  Audio books, Movies, Music.
- All you have to do is pick up one word here and there.
- Don't use the written target language in this phase.
- Translations are OK.

2) Learn the basics of the writing system.
- Memorize the alphabet/hanzi/hangul/whatever.
- Alphabets and syllabaries should not take more than 2 weeks to learn.

3) For a few months, try to learn as many new words/day as possible.
- You need about ~2000 words families.
- The faster you do it, the better.
- Mine these words from real, authentic, native targeted material.
- Prefer transcriptions of audio you have already listened.
- Also use Books, Comics, Articles, etc.
- Use Flashcards to memorize words within sentences.
- Translations are OK.

4) Forever, listen and read to the target language.
- Now on, translations are evil.
- Use only monolingual dictionary definitions in the new Flashcards you make.