My articles about language learning – tips and tricks, personal experience, observations, case studies and more.
It is fascinating how strongly school determines our behavior and perception of the world. School teaches us to value scores more than knowledge. Some kids study literature, or chemistry, or mathematics because they like those subjects and they are craving for new knowledge, but the vast majority of students are interested in better scores, and
At the end of this February, I launched a podcast for students of Russian. The podcast is in Russian. Each episode lasts five minutes and is dedicated to one selected topic. I think the podcast would be most helpful for intermediate and advanced students, but beginners can also enjoy it. How can one work with
What can one do after failing to achieve something? Learning from failure is a good way to utilise one’s painful experience. Writing a book about your failure and letting other people learn from it is even better. First, you help others avoid the mistakes you made, second, you can heal your wounded ego with the
What helps people to acquire a new language? Surprisingly, it is not adding something new to their everyday practice. It is getting rid of the unwanted help of their mother-tongue. When learning a second language, adult people use their mother-tongue as a middleman between them and their new language. It is unavoidable at some stage
We need goals. They navigate us through the chaos of life. They help us to become what we want to be. They organize us. If you decide to learn a new language, you have to set up your goals. The only problem is that more often than not our goals remain unachieved. Most people start
Have you heard about a language learning method called interlinear translation? I hadn’t, until recently. A few days ago, I got an email from Linas Vaštakas, a guy who runs a project – Interlinear Books for learning languages. In the project, they translate books for language learners in an innovative way, and they have recently
The first steps into a new language are the hardest ones. You know so little, you have to look up every word in a dictionary. You struggle with unfamiliar grammar forms, you can’t distinguish one part of a speech from another, and fail to recognize new grammatical forms of familiar words. It is so frustrating!
The question of why some words look suspiciously similar in Russian and English first arose when I started learning English at the age of 11. I was so puzzled by this fact that I asked our Russian teacher to explain the mystery to me, and she told me that many centuries ago, there was a
“There is a large Russian community in my city, and I have made friends with some Russians. We meet on weekends and chat. We talk a lot. But all we do is talk. Nobody corrects my mistakes, and I don’t feel that I’m making any progress,” one of my students once complained. His Russian was
I’m a great supporter of online education. The Internet opens literally unlimited opportunities, for example, everyone can learn any language for free or next to free, while staying at home. Once I had an online lesson with an English-speaking student who had managed to learn Russian by himself. He did a really great job. He
