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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

1) How did social media - and social network sites in particular - gain traction in the US? And how should we think about network effects? 2) What are some core differences between how teens leverage social media and how adults engage with these same tools? 3) How is social media reconfiguring social infrastructure and where is all of this going?

I work with adult migrants and they live with their non-English speaking families. Therefore, unlike children of native English speaking families, these adults are not surrounded by rich English words that are full of meaning. We might say to a child "put your toys away" and they won't understand, so we do it for them. However, we started doing it when they were 8 months old, and after a few more months, they understand what it means.

A useful website for finding out about China and learning Mandarin for children and adults. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/Mandarin+%26+Chinese+culture

Even though this is for learning to write better, I think the focus on word choice would make it an excellent educational game for learning English.

I love 6 Traits of writing; NWREL has a new resource to encourage fun practice for the students who need it most: 5-9th grades; 3-4th can use w/adult assistance; check out this website; I want one!

In fact, some of the greatest obstacles to world-language education are parents who recall their own miserable experiences. Many Americans were introduced to foreign languages in middle school or high school classes that emphasized conjugation of verbs and other dull grammatical tasks rather than relevant communication skills. "Language teaching in the U.S. has been ineffective," Stewart says. "We start it at the wrong age. Teacher skills are not great. There's a focus on grammar and translation." The result: "Adults who took three years of French don't speak a word," she states.\nBut the trend toward competency and away from conjugation is helping create a new generation of language learners, one that gains real-world skills with many practical applications.

the key here lies in the paragraph I clipped: the focus should be on competency rather than on conjugation.

Tool for Online and Offline Language Learning (TOOL) project, funded by the European Union, is building Blended Learning language courses in five European languages (Dutch, Estonian, Hungarian, Maltese, Slovene).

The Autonomous Language Learning (ALL) project, funded by the European Union, is building Blended Learning language courses in four European languages (Turkish, Romanian, Bulgarian and Lithuanian).

Motivating adult language learners to complete courses! This is a project funded by the European Community and carried out by experienced language experts from across Europe.

Young students, in their first year of language learning, can enjoy creative writing in their mother tongue. They then pass on their story to other schools, within a chain, for completion.