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Advice for language learners General warning: what follows may or may not apply to you. It's based on what linguistics knows about people in general (but any general advice will be ludicrously inappropriate for some people) and on my own experience (but you're not the same as me). If you have another way of learning that works, more power to you. Given the discussion so far, the prospects for language learning may seem pretty bleak. It seems that you'll only learn a language if you really need to; but the fact that you haven't done so already is a pretty good indication that you don't really need to. How to break out of this paradox? At the least, try to make the facts of language learning work for you, not against you. Exposure to the language, for instance, works in your favor. So create exposure. * Read books in the target language. * Better yet, read comics and magazines. (They're easier, more colloquial, and easier to incorporate into your weekly routine.) * Buy music that's sung in it; play it while you're doing other things. * Read websites and participate in newsgroups that use it. * Play language tapes in your car. If you have none, make some for yourself. * Hang out in the neighborhood where they speak it. * Try it out with anyone you know who speaks it. If necessary, go make new friends. * Seek out opportunities to work using the language. * Babysit a child, or hire a sitter, who speaks the language. * Take notes in your classes or at meetings in the language. * Marry a speaker of the language. (Warning: marry someone patient: some people want you to know their language-- they don't want to teach it. Also, this strategy is tricky for multiple languages.) Taking a class can be effective, partly for the instruction, but also because you can meet others who are learning the language, and because, psychologically, classes may be needed to make us give the subject matter time and attention. Self-study is too eas

VocabularySpellingCity is a fun way to learn spelling and vocabulary words by playing engaging learning games using any word list. The most popular activities are Spelling TestMe, HangMouse, and our vocabulary games, available to Premium Members. The most popular word lists are Sound Alikes, Compound Words, Hunger Games and SAT Words. This is a free app!

MyVocabulary.com offers free vocabulary lessons, word lists, and word puzzles designed for middle school and high school students. The vocabulary lists are based on books commonly used in middle school and high school classrooms. MyVocabulary.com also offers word lists and activities based on SAT vocabulary. Visitors to MyVocabulary.com will find stand-alone vocabulary lessons as well as activities to complement the reading of specific stories. Applications for EducationIf you're planning a series of lessons on one of "standard books" for middle school or high school, MyVocabulary.com could provide you with some good vocabulary lists and lesson ideas to get started. Students prepping for the SAT should take some time to explore the SAT word puzzles offered by MyVocabulary.com

Phrays is a simple site that publishes a new word of the day everyday. Each word is published with its definition and part of speech. Visitors to the site are encouraged to write and submit a sentence using that word. Registered users can read the sentences submitted by others and vote for their favorite sentences.

Heteronyms (also known as heterophones or homographs) are words that are spelled the same, but have different pronunciations and different meanings.

Heteronyms (also known as heterophones or homographs) are words that are spelled the same, but have different pronunciations and different meanings. In some cases, the words have similar or related meanings, such as record (verb) and record (noun) - The artist will record his new record in the studio this week. In other cases, the words may be completely unrelated, like bow (a knot tied with two loops) and bow (to bend forward at the waist out of respect) - The little girl with the red bow tied in her hair took a bow at the end of the recital. Context clues are crucial to determining which pronunciation (and meaning) is represented by a heteronym.

Academic Word List Coxhead (2000). The most frequent word in each family is in italics. There are 570 headwords and about 3000 words altogether.

Look up words to find their meanings and associations with other words and concepts. Produce diagrams reminiscent of a neural net. Learn how words associate. - It's a dictionary! It's a thesaurus! - Great for writers, journalists, students, teachers, and artists. - The online dictionary is available wherever there's an internet connection. - No membership required, it's free.

Improve your vocabulary while having fun. Test Preparation & Vocabulary Building for K-12 & ESL Students. Free Flash word games including Hangman, Word search, Match Game, The Vocabulary Quiz

Learning to recognize word roots early on is crucial in a child's education as it not only helps carry spelling skills over to reading fluency but also greatly increases general comprehension skills, reading or otherwise. A fun way for kids to build their repertoire of root words is by playing online root word games.

"Hello students, We want to tell you something about News in Levels. We write news in three levels of English. You can learn English very fast when you use News in Levels every day. How? It is simple. We repeat the same words in one level again and again. So, when you read and listen to our news every day, after 2 or 3 or 4 months, you will understand all the words in one level. Then it is time for you to go one level higher and do the same. After one year, you can understand people who speak English and you can know 3000 most important words in English. At News in Levels, you can learn English naturally and fast."

If you want to learn how to learn English vocabulary, you need to know which words to learn.\nIf you are a teacher, you also need to know which words your students need to learn.\nCambridge English Lexicon was first published in 1980, and the fifth printing was in 1991. There might have been further printings, but it seems to be out of print now.\nTHE GOOD NEWS is that Amazon does have a few second hand copies available at very cheap prices, so get in quick if you want to buy one of these rare gems!

The Cambridge English Lexicon is a great book to help teachers and students identify useful English vocabulary to learn.

To accommodate differences, Vocabulary and SpellingCity had added several lists of British spelling words and their corresponding US words.

From Richard Byrne Free Technology for teacher, quoted below:Listen and Read - Non-fiction Read Along Activities Listen and Read is a set of 54 non-fiction stories from Scholastic for K-2 students. The stories are feature pictures and short passages of text that students can read on their own or have read to them by each story's narrator. The collection of stories is divided into eight categories: social studies, science, plants and flowers, environmental stories, civics and government, animals, American history, and community. Applications for Education Listen and Read looks to be a great resource for social studies lessons and reading practice in general. At the end of each book there is a short review of the new words that students were introduced to in the book. Students can hear these words pronounced as many times as they like. Listen and Read books worked on my computer and on my Android tablet. Scholastic implies that the books also work on iPads and IWBs"

Non-native English learners are often amused, intrigued, and confused by the use of compound words in English. Oddly, in English, there are three forms of compound words: closed form (notebook), hyphenated form (mother-in-law), and open form (real estate).

There are a dozen word games on SpellingCity to build familiarity with the usage, pronounciation, and spellng of each word. Teachers can build their own word lists for a library of 45,000 words. The price is right (free for these uses)

Two main groups of people can't live without electronic translators.\nThe first group are students who are studying in a foreign language. More often than not, English is their second language (ESL) and being able to look up words quickly is essential to student success. Electronic translators are super fast, and students with electronic translators look up more words more often than people with paper translation dictionaries.

From addition words and elementary math to geometry vocabulary and every type of number word in between, students can find the right list right here with all the math definitions they need to be successful in math.

Literature-based word lists for all grade levels (kindergarten through high school). http://bit.ly/9uMY66