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The Tadoku contest, also known as the Read More or Die contest is about to start again. If you haven’t heard of it before, it’s a twitter-based contest designed to motivate you to read more in your target language. For one month, you try to read as much as you can. You read on your [...]

The first Tadoku contest is set to start at midnight on January 1st (your time). If you haven’t signed up yet you only have a few hours to do so, so if you are interested in participating, jump on it! What’s Tadoku? Tadoku (多読 – Japanese for “read a lot”) is a foreign language reading [...]

Here’s a language learning tip that has worked really well for me: learn to cook.  And when you do, use recipes in your target language.  Great way to learn language.  Here’s why: Recipes are short – most recipes fit on one piece of paper, and that’s including a big picture of the end result. Recipes [...]

Learning a language is like having a pet.  You need to feed and water it everyday.  You can’t miss days.  Many people who try to learn a language do really well at first.  They are really motivated.  They daydream about being a master of their target language and it gives them all this purpose and [...]

My Japanese teacher back in college spoke perfect English. I wanted to speak perfect Japanese someday, so talking with her was always motivating to me. One time I asked her if she could remember what got her interested in English in the first place. She said yes, she remembers the very day it happened. She [...]

I ran across a word in a book the other day.  植民 (しょくみん [shokumin]). The first character (植) means plant, as in trees, vines and flowers.  You find it in the Japanese word for plant, 植物 (しょくぶつ [shokubutsu], plant+things), and also in the word that means “to plant (a tree)”, 植える (うえる [ueru]). The second [...]

It’s been a little over a month since I started learning Thai using the TV Method.  I finished my first drama on April 10th.  Since then, I’ve started two new dramas and have been watching them plus some cartoons. BORING STATS In the 33 days I’ve been watching Thai television, I’ve racked up about 41 [...]

I’ve been reading a book in Japanese on World Religions.  It’s basically an overview of the major world religions, and some of the not-so-major ones too.  I was looking at one of the history sections in the book and I saw this cool word: 十字軍 (じゅうじぐん – juujigun). The character 十 (juu) normally means ten, [...]

I just finished the 8th episode of the Thai drama I’ve been watching.  That brings me up to 12 hours of Thai TV watched.  Passing the 10 hour mark seems as good a time as any to make my first progress report, so here goes.. Greetings Keith tipped me off that the first thing that [...]

One of my favorite language blogs to read is Keith’s Voice on Extreme Language Learning.  Keith is analytical about his language learning methods and he writes very clearly.  Currently, he is trying to learn Chinese through what he calls the TV Method.  The TV Method is a system where you watch a lot of TV [...]