I’m the kind of person who likes to try new things. Every now and then an opportunity comes up and I can’t resist the urge. Right now, I have a student of mine who happens to also be fluent in American Sign Language (ASL). I’ve been teaching her Russian for a while now, and […]
For busy moms and dads, sometimes it is a struggle to simply bring home the bacon, cook it too, and still have quality time with your children. When you try to add teaching your kids another language into the mix, it can seem like too much for one plate to hold. While there are certainly […]
An Unexpected Encounter My family and I were in Tbilisi, the capital of the Republic of Georgia, several years ago. Tbilisi is one of those hidden gems of the world. Nestled in the foothills of the Caucasus mountains, the city is filled with beautiful sights, warm, welcoming people and, in my humble opinion, the most […]
Culture Shock B.C. (Before Children) I remember the first time I left the country. I went to Honduras with some college friends to visit some of their friends. This was no tourist trip to Roatan. We went native and visited locals in their houses and hiked the trails to visit people in mountain villages. We rode […]
St. Patrick’s Day Wouldn’t Be Possible Without Language Learning Happy St. Patrick’s Day! If your family is anything like mine, your kitchen smells like corned beef and cabbage today. Though my family has many of its roots in Eastern Europe, somehow, a few generations back, the Irish managed to sneak into our family tree, so […]
Ok, maybe you aren’t like my wife and read the dictionary for fun, but if you are serious about language learning, one tool that I literally never leave home without is Abbyy Lingvo. They have a variety of products available (see their website here), and the best dictionary app I have ever used, hands down. […]
Get your move on! Perhaps one of the best methodologies I have encountered for language learning is Total Physical Response, or TPR. As the name suggests, it really gets you up and moving! TPR is a method of language learning that began developing in the late 1950s as a way to both decrease stress in language learning and increase […]
Did you know that there are well over 100 different distinct sounds that can be produced by the human vocal system? Yet the average language only uses a couple dozen of them. The sounds used in a given language are known as phonemes, or the smallest unit of sound used to distinguish between utterances in a […]
Below is a chart of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). These symbols are used to represent all of the possible sounds that can be produced by the human vocal mechanism. This can be a very helpful tool for figuring out exactly how to pronounce utterances in a new language. Think of the chart like a […]
A right thing for a wrong reason. I remember one day when we heard our three-year-old son washing his hands. We’d had talks with him about germs and the need to wash up after using the restroom, and thought, “Oh good, he’s starting to get it!” We even decided to reward him to reinforce this […]