The Language Learning Dictionary
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Before learning a language.
Invest a little time now, to save 100's of hours later.
Avoid the mistakes made by most language learners.
Discover how to personalize language learning for yourself.
Contents:
Enjoy!
Complexity
Future Trends
The Language Learning Dictionary
A
Age
Some of the biggest myths related to language learning surround age. And while age is one of the many factors that determine your ability to learn a language, it is far from the most important.
B
Beginner-Trap
You probably know more people who have given up learning a language than people who have reached fluency. There are a few main reasons why people don’t make it out of the “beginner” level, and if you can plan for those reasons, the chance of accomplishing your language learning goals increases significantly.
Benefits
You probably wouldn’t sign up to invest hundreds of hours into something unless you saw some benefit to doing so. Let’s make sure you are aware of ALL the benefits so you can keep your motivation strong when times get tough during your language learning journey.
C
Complexity
Imagine each object in the world, both abstract and concrete, is assigned a combination of letters that form a word (there are about 170,000 words in English). Enter verbs and pronouns, a new set of words invented to connect these words and to replace them—and that is just the beginning.
Confidence
While confidence is most evident during conversation, it also plays a key role in almost every other aspect of language learning, even if we aren’t directly conscious of it.
Courses
Contrary to what you might expect a website focused on independent language learning to advocate, we still believe courses are a great resource.
Cross-Over
If you have already read the entry on complexity, you are familiar with how difficult the language learning journey is. But don’t worry — we have some good news! Every language you learn is likely to have some Cross-over with a language you already know—and you can use this to your advantage.
F
Fluency
The idea of “fluency” is subjective, so everyone has their own definition. Let’s take a look at why that can be a problem and how you can go about defining fluency for yourself.
Freak Speak
If you are learning a language, conversational fluency is likely one of your goals because speaking a foreign language is incredibly rewarding. We designed Freak-Speak to help you accomplish this goal.
Future Trends
Should you even learn a language if in 10 years, devices will be able to perfectly translate conversations in real-time? In our opinion, probably.
G
Goals
Goals determine how you will personalize your language learning experience, making it as motivating, effective, and successful as possible. All too often language learners set goals that are too aggressive or too general- and that can lead to problems.
English
Arabic
Chinese (Simplified)
Dutch
French
German
Italian
Portuguese
Russian
Spanish