Hyperpolyglot Who Speaks 59 Languages

TweetYesterday I was contacted by someone who claimed to speak 59 languages and he was only 18 years old! My first reaction was: Really?! Well, ‘speak’ is a vague term. In fact, he admitted up front that he was not fluent in all of them. Before jumping into any conclusion of my own, I did [...]

The Most Effective Way to Learn Hiragana

TweetOver the years, I had made a few attempts to learn Hiragana (平仮名), the fundamental character set of the Japanese language. Sadly, in every attempt I quited before completing the first row of あ, い, う, え, お (a, i, u, e, o). I never intended to learn Japanese seriously in the past, so I [...]

Google’s Babel Fish

TweetHere 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 [...]

What is Natural Approach really?

TweetKeith 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 [...]

SRS and the Natural Approach

TweetThe 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 [...]

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