This is the second part following up on last week’s blog about the American school system failing to teach foreign languages in a way that results in fluent students.  I ended the introduction with the statement that it isn’t the fault of the students, but rather with the method in which they’re taught, so first … Continue reading Why Foreign Language Classes Fail: Teaching Methods

This week on Duolingo I ended up hitting level 25, which is the max level, in Inglés para Hablantes de Español, something colloquially called the “reverse tree” when using Duolingo to help with language learning.  After completing the tree of courses in the language that one is interested in learning, so Spanish for English Speakers … Continue reading Learning Tool Deep Dive: Duolingo

I’ve discussed motivation for language learning in a roundabout way a couple of times before in this blog, because it’s such a key component to success.  Without motivation in the big picture, it’s easy to get bogged down in the day to day, get discouraged or bored, and drop the endeavor like it was an … Continue reading Finding Motivation Day to Day

Very early on in my journey to learn Spanish, a common theme among the blogs and videos giving language learning advice was about having a clear goal in mind for what level you wanted to get your ability in the language up to.  Overall I think that’s a really solid piece of advice when starting … Continue reading Understanding Language Levels

I’ve tried to be careful on this blog when referring to input to not be overly biased in favor of reading specifically.  I won’t pretend that I don’t have any bias, because I do think that reading is superior to other forms of input based solely on the density of input.  Even though I’m still … Continue reading Preferred Input Styles

I think that so far in this blog, I’ve done a bad job of accurately describing my listening comprehension level in Spanish, and may have presented things in a misleading way.  Not on purpose, mind you, describing these sorts of things is kinda hard.  It’s difficult to be truly impartial, what with my perspective of … Continue reading Defining Listening Comprehension

If you were to jump down to the numbers section for this week’s blog, you would see that last Saturday was rather abnormal for me.  I had the day that was unusually free and could spend it basically however I wanted to spend it, and it turns out that what I wanted to do was … Continue reading Language Learning: Work or Play?