Here is my latest fish-joke. It was Chinese New Year last week. My colleague of Mexican origin instant-messaged me: ‘新年好’ (good New-Year). Obviously, he had been playing around with Google Translate. So I challenged him that, with the help of Google Translate, he should not have any more excuse not to chat with me in [...]

Keith commented on my previous post, questioning on how SRS can fit into the “natural language learning” model. After all, it is not natural.
It seems to be me that different “language naturists” have different degrees of “naturalness” in their approaches. By all means, I am in favour of the “natural approach” as opposed to the [...]

The other day Kev posted an excellent question in my previous post. He asked:

If you spend progressively more and more of your time on reading and listening (as you should), wouldn’t the amount of time you spend on feeding/reviewing an SRS fade to zero? Therefore, is it worth spending any time at all on an [...]

The key to language acquisition is vocabulary-building. The best way to build your vocabulary is through comprehensive input (i.e., reading and listening). An efficient way to maintain your vocabulary is to use an Spaced Repetition System (SRS). There is no doubt about it. Look around and you will see everybody in the language-learning circle talks [...]

I recently read the book “Sorry, I Don’t Speak French“, which gave a very comprehensive account on the language struggle in the recent history of Canada.
To those who are not familiar with the issue, French has been spoken predominately in the Quebec province, and English in the rest of Canada. The Quebeckers resent the lack [...]