Howdy Language Mastery-ites! I’ve got a quick—but extremely important—question for all of you: How can I be of more help?
I started the Language Mastery blog in April 2009 with three primary goals:
To dispel widespread, insidious myths about language acquisition.
Especially the motivation-crushing triumvirate:
- “I’m too old to learn a foreign language”
- “I don’t have time to learn”
- “I’m just not good at languages, so why bother?”
To share time and sanity-saving tips I’ve learned as both a language learner and teacher.
I’ve been learning and teaching languages off and on for well over a decade, and in that time, I’ve observed a few key patterns that separate the many who fail from the few who succeed. The number one thing?
Attitude trumps all. If you’re fired up enough to learn the language and truly believe you can:
- You’ll find the time no matter how busy you are
- You’ll find target language input no matter where you live
- You’ll practice speaking with native speakers no matter how stupid you feel
To help adult learners select kick-ass materials relevant to their goals, interests, and learning styles.
While methods matter, choosing the right materials is far more important. You may follow the latest, greatest, research-based methodologies, but if your materials are so boring or unrelated to your life that you never crack the book or load the app, it’s all for not.
“What you study is more important than how you study. Students are subordinate to materials much like novice cooks are subordinate to recipes. If you select the wrong materials, the wrong textbook, the wrong group of words, it doesn’t matter how much (or how well) you study. It doesn’t matter how good your teacher is. One must find the highest-frequency material. Material beats method.” ~Tim Ferriss, The 4-Hour Chef
I’ve written many posts on these topics so far (see the Featured Articles category for my favorites), as well as pouring my soul into the ever-evolving Master Japanese guide (up to 400 pages as of writing), but I know there are still many questions I’ve yet to answer, holes I haven’t yet patched in, materials I haven’t yet reviewed, methods I haven’t yet discussed, and probably some emails from you that managed to slip through the cracks (I do my best to answer every email I get by the way, but Gmail’s over-zealous spam filtering means I occasionally never get emails from folks not in my contacts).
So here’s what I need from you. In the comments below, please share:
- Specific topics you’d like me to address or expand upon (language learning, specific languages, linguistics, travel, culture, etc.)
- Language learning methods you’d like me to cover in more detail or test out on myself (I’m always happy to be a Guinea pig in the name of science!)
- Language learning materials, tools, books, sites, apps, etc. you’d like me to review
- Polyglots, bloggers, authors, researchers, teachers, etc. you’d like me to interview
- Anything else you’d like to see more or less of on the blog
If you’re not comfortable leaving a public comment, feel free to email me instead (hopefully the Google gods let your message through!)
Onwards and Upwards,
John
hello John!
you quote Tim : he talk about deconstruting the language, why not deconstruct every major language here 🙂
Excellent idea! I like the deconstruction method and think this could really help folks get started in new languages without getting bogged down with too much information. Perhaps I can create them as downloadable one-pagers.
wow, yes it’ll be outstanding ! like a kickstarter for learning the target language 🙂
I bookmarked the Master Japanese Guide a little over a year ago, when it looked like my husband’s company might relocate us to Japan for several years. In preparation for that move, we enrolled our pre-school child in a Japanese immersion school here in the US. The move fell through, but we kept her in the school. Now that’s she’s about to age out of the school (it only goes through kindergarten), we’re left wondering how we continue to support her Japanese since we don’t speak it at all. (I confess, I’m not terribly motivated to learn. I’m more interested in Portuguese and Korean.)
Her current school offers weekly tutoring for the kids who leave the program until age 14 (where, presumably, the students are better served by the Japanese program at the local high school). We hope to take up the tutoring, but that’s still reducing her current 15 hours a week of Japanese immersion to 2 hours of classroom instruction.
Do you know of any kid-friendly online resources for conversation practice? I thought about italki, but I’m unsure if there’s an age guideline for the site and others like it.
Hi Janelle. Thank you for getting in touch. That’s great that your children are learning Japanese! I don’t know of any kid-specific Japanese conversation sites, but you should be able to find a good tutor on iTalki (they do say in their terms of service that you are supposed to be over 13 years of age, but it shouldn’t be a problem if you are the one to set up the account and find the tutor).