Blogging on Bilingualism podcast

http://bloggingonbilingualism.com/category/podcast / (http://tinyurl.com/yz2abww)

"Another link to the Australian radio show Lingua Franca, this podcast shares the story of a James Panichi who moved from Australia to Italy with his family at the age of nine. His comments shed light on the way language and culture affect personality. Moving from Australia to Italy introduced him to his father in a new way. His father had always been there, but his full personality was hidden by his immigrant’s (unschooled) English. When James also spoke Italian fluently after living in Italy, his relationship with his father changed for the better. He also discusses his perspective of bilingualism and biculturalism from his personal experiences as an Italian-Australian.

Listen to the podcast “Daddy, I almost never knew you!” here (http://tinyurl.com/ykf4poh) at the Lingua Franca site.

See previous post for a link to a podcast on Lingua Franca (http://tinyurl.com/yhxk3wy) by a German-Australian on his relationship with is bilingual daughter."

Free Mandarin resources with pinyin, word-for-word translations and mp3s

*Especially useful for beginners in Mandarin*

Though I prefer to use dialogues and not simply sentences for learning, I think this is a great and extensive collection of useful sentences and audio to raise your awareness of the sentence structure of Mandarin, and probably learn quite a few new words of vocabulary as well.

http://www.zhongwenblue.com/
http://www.zhongwengreen.com/
http://www.zhongwenred.com/

You can read about how I started out in Mandarin here

http://davidamartin2sblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/how-i-learned-to-understand-1000-words.html

My new blog on learning Mandarin from scratch

Check out my new blog on learning Mandarin from scratch

http://mandarinfromscratch.posterous.com/

How to Learn to Speak (Czech) Fluently

My thanks go to Jeff Lindqvist at LingQ for turning me onto this site

http://sites.google.com/site/fluentczech/Home

On it, Anthony Lauder defines what he thinks fluency in a language is, describes his struggle with fluency in Czech, and gives great suggestions as to how fluency can be attained, primarily using what he calls 'connectors'.

Learning Languages Like Children

This is a re-post of one of my recent contributions in this thread http://www.lingq.com/learn/zh/forum/1/5099/ on the LingQ Open Forum

@ asadkhan

You may have been listening passively for 6 years, but HOW INTENSIVELY? (how many hours per day EVERY DAY)? Students in the ALG program, on average, go to class 3 hours per day every day for a year before they start speaking - that is, they listen very intensively over a relatively short period of time.

I've found that after only 60 hours of listening to Mandarin (an hour a day every day for 2 months), words and phrases are starting to just 'pop' into my head without me even thinking about them. I'm certain that this type of 'thinking' is not detrimental, as the words and phrases just 'rise to the surface' and you're not yet trying to say them out loud. The 'thinking' the article refers to is trying to 'come up with' language (whether it's grammar conjugations or vocabulary) instead of just drawing on the vocabulary base (which INCLUDES grammar) you've acquired from listening.

@ Cantotango

I do believe that words and phrases will come naturally if you listen INTENSIVELY and wait long enough to start speaking. Just ask Steve about his experience with Russian, which I've heard native speakers say he speaks very well - check out his video and the comments here

http://tinyurl.com/yzkc6a7

Notice that, although he has to think about what he wants to say, the words and phrases seem to 'flow out' quite readily, an obvious sign that he did lots of natural listening to the language before starting to speak to any great extent. And, although he may make some mistakes with grammar, remember that native speaker children ALSO make grammar mistakes ('I goed' instead of 'I went' etc. - confer Krashen's Principles and Practice in SLA) and yet they still come out speaking fluently.

I think that, once you reach a certain level of understanding (ALG posits about 80%) after CONSISTENT and INTENSIVE listening, you've already established a solid pronunciation and grammar base, at which point it's just a matter of activating your passive vocabulary (which, once again, INCLUDES grammar like conjugations and endings etc.) while continuing to augment it, which is what Steve says he started doing after about two years of learning Russian.

Finally, consider that adult native speakers also make grammar and pronunciation mistakes and yet we still think of them as 'fluent speakers'.

------------------------------------------------

This is A.J. Hoge's text and recording of an excerpt from ALG's Dr. J. Marvin Brown's article entitled 'Learning Languages Like Children'

http://tinyurl.com/yfwef8l

The original and unabridged article can be found here

http://www.algworld.com/archives.php

Lingro (Ling Grow) language learning tool

Below is a description of the lingro language-learning tool, which I think is a great supplement to LingQ, especially if you're an Anki user. Also check out Ramses' description of the available functionalities here http://www.spanish-only.com/2008/09/lingrocom-dictionary/

Quoted from the lingro website (http://lingro.com/docs/about.html):

lingro was conceived in August 2005, when Artur decided to practice his Spanish by reading Harry Potter y la piedra filosofal. As a competent but non-expert speaker, he found that looking up new vocabulary took much more time than the reading itself. Frustrated with how slow existing online dictionaries were, he wrote a program to help him translate and learn words in their original context. lingro's mission is to create an on-line environment that allows anyone learning a language to quickly look up and learn the vocabulary most important to them. Whenever we're developing new tools for lingro or planning the next big step, there are two principles we always consider:

• Knowledge and information essential to human communication and interaction should be free and accessible to everyone. This is why we created the most comprehensive set of free dictionaries available under open licenses so that anyone can contribute, download, redistribute, and modify the dictionaries for their own needs. These licenses guarantee that they will always remain free and useful to society. • To have the best dictionaries, you need to have the best tools. Every tool we create, from games, quizzes, and study tools to in-context word lookup is designed for you, the user. To us, this means that they should be intuitive, fast, easy to use, and hopefully fun. :-)

Why you think you need grammar

Yet another great post from Ramses at Spanish Only: Learn How to Learn Spanish

http://www.spanish-only.com/2009/12/grammar/

I personally don't spend any of my time learning grammar, as listening, reading and learning vocabulary are more interesting and grammar knowledge comes as a result, not as a precursor.

If it's not top-down, get outta town.