Tag: Learning

Let’s be clear about one thing: I suck at languages. I am your typical 27-year-old American white dude: grew up in a single language household, didn’t try at Spanish AT ALL in school, went to college, got a job, and life went on in my monolingual world. Somewhere in there I fell in love ...

If you’re actively trying to improve your Spanish, getting a little bit of practice every day is an extremely effective way of doing that. For anyone who’s already in the habit of checking Instagram at least once a day, it’s a great place to get that regular Spanish fix, without ev...

In the world of personal development and self-improvement, subliminal learning has garnered significant attention. It is a technique that claims to harness the power of the subconscious mind to facilitate learning and behavior change. But what exactly is subliminal learning, and does it truly ...

Learning Mandarin is difficult. After 90 hours worth of classes and nearly 2000 flashcards, I’m still struggling to even understand everyday real-life conversations. According to the Defense Language Institute (DLI), Mandarin ranks as a Level 4 foreign language, which means t...

Learning a language is a long and daunting task, no matter which language you choose to learn. They all have their own unique quirks, and their own unique stumbling blocks, that make the learning experience that little bit different for each. Chinese is, at the end of the day, just another langua...

In Malaysia, language is often politicised, and among the Chinese diaspora, it is no different. Malaysian Chinese folks are divided into “English-educated*” and “Chinese-educated” groups. (* English-educated can also mean that you went to a Malaysian national school, where...

I met some students who just arrived in Taiwan. They had a specific purpose, which was to learn basic conversation in Chinese, for example, using Mandarin to buy food and have small talk to their Taiwanese friends. Some of my students told me s/he wants to get a job in the future so s/he made the ef...

Recently, I developed interest in learning Telugu owing to my Telugu friend. I know Hindi and Punjabi (Punjabi is my mother tongue).While learning, I observed some interesting features of the Telugu language. Some of these features might be confusing for a Hindi speaking person. While learning a ...

Have you tried learning Mandarin from any other language besides English? While pinyin is the defacto phonetic system for foreigners to start speaking Mandarin fast, Hindi and other native Indian languages ranging from Tamil, Bengali, Malayalam and Marathi all make learning Mandarin pronunciations e...