At the beginning of this year, I was reflecting on where I wanted to go with language learning. I decided I didn’t want to take on any new languages and I wanted to focus on the ones I’ve already started. That’s not at all how this year turned out. At the end of 2014, I…
Category: polyglot
This whole summer I told myself I would review everything I learned in my first year of Chinese classes and that I would get ahead so coming back after summer wouldn’t be hard. I never managed get myself to open a book about Chinese, so I was really nervous about coming back to it. I…
Back in February, I made a video of my presentation for my last Chinese oral exam (watch here), and I decided to do that again. This is my presentation for the oral component of my final exam for Chinese 1. I’m fairly content with my progress, but I wish we had learned a little more….
I read mostly non-fiction books in my own time, and most of them are language-learning or linguistics books, so I was thinking about writing about the ones I read. I should come up with a catchy name for this series, but first we’ll see if I actually get around to making a second post. The…
Ok, let me explain. The Common European Framework of Referencing for Language (CEFR) is a scale that many people use to describe language proficiency levels, rather than trying to understand all those arbitrary terms like fluent, intermediate, conversational, etc. There are three levels – A, B, and C – and each level has two sub-levels,…
Finding time to study your target language is difficult, especially if you are a university student or you have a job. It’s not that you don’t have the time, it’s just that you’re not taking advantage of the free time you do have. Every time you go on a social media account, such as Instagram,…
So last time I mentioned Chinese in a video, I think I said I could only say that I like coffee, and since then I think I’ve made some progress. I know my tones still aren’t great and my vocabulary is pretty limited, but by practicing for this test, I feel that I’ve gotten a…
Lire en anglais Je viens de passer quelques jours en Belgique avec des amis de ma mère, Kate et Dan. Ils habitent à Verviers et ils m’ont emmené autour de Belgique et à ses endroits préférés. J’ai fait beaucoup des choses que je n’aurais pas pu faire sans eux. Samedi nous sommes allés très tôt…
For almost two years I have known about the polyglot community on YouTube. It all started when I read Babel No More by Michael Erard. He tracked down the world’s most accomplished language learners and wrote about their accomplishments. Soon after reading that book, I found the Polyglot Project, which is a compilation of testimonies…
Originally, I was going to put this stuff in with my other post about my week, but I wanted to do a separate little update about my language learning. Chinese This week was the first week we had our first oral tutorials for Chinese 1. I knew it was going to be the hardest part…