Natural Language Acquisition

 A review of a tool I've been using:  LingoTrack.com  

  At the start of the Autumn I became confident that I would be able to dedicate more time to language studies and started considering learning other languages besides Russian . I don't think I'm at a level with my Russian where I can justify splitting the bulk of my time between multiple languages but I couldn't see any harm in a fun, month long, language learning experiment. Two languages that I've been interested in for a while are Norwegian and Irish. Norwegian because it is supposedly one of the easiest Germanic languages to learn for English speakers and Irish because I'm interested in Celtic languages and history. I noticed a couple of months ago that my favourite language learning app Speakly, has added Norwegian . While Irish is not on Speakly or LingQ I decided to try out some resources recommended by  Mezzofanti Guild 's Donovan who's 'lexical chunking' approach I find interesting. I also discovered a language tracking website called  Ling...

If you don't have first hand experience of using comprehensible input to acquire a language, are somewhat skeptical of its efficacy and are not sure about investing potentially hundreds of hours into watching or listening to comprehensible input then here's a 30 day challenge that takes around 10 hours in total. The video series teaches you the con-lang (constructed language) Toki Mona through a series of 30 videos each lasting roughly 20 minutes. Toki Mona only has 137 words and has a simple grammar.  The aim of the course is to show you how you can learn a language with comprehensible input and motivate you to apply the same principle to other languages. I don't have time to follow the course just yet but I'd like to give it a go at some point. I don't need to prove to myself the importance of comprehensible input but I think it would be fun to be able to add a language to your repertoire for relatively little time investment. Especially if I can convince some fri...

This is a blog about my various language learning experiments. Currently I am only learning to speak Russian. My future bucket list includes: Ukrainian, Norwegian and Irish but I will wait until I'm at the B1 level in Russian ( The CEFR Levels ) before I seriously attempt those. I may dabble in Norwegian earlier since it's a Germanic language that won't cause confusion with my Russian and supposedly the easiest language for English speakers to learn. You can follow my progress on my other blog:  Acquiring Russian The Natural Way The idea of 'acquiring' a language vs 'learning' comes from people like Stephen Krashen, Steve Kaufmann, and Jeff Brown. And methods like All Japanese All The Time, the Mass Immersion Approach, Refold.la and Teaching Proficiency through Reading and Storytelling (TPRS). In  short my  approach is based comprehensible input, lots of  exposure, not worrying about output (speaking) or grammar  until  later in the process. The core resour...