Category: Language Study
Reading Chinese the easy way.
One of the major hurdles for anyone wanting to read real Chinese, Chinese written for Chinese natives, is the simple fact that Chinese has no alphabet. The characters in which it is written can appear overwhelming to the neophyte. This in itself discourages many from plunging into reading as would…
Learn foreign languages by having fun reading. ( 1)
One of the many pieces of advice Michel Thomas gave me was to read. I am the first of five kids. Born in NYC I was alone for many years. Sure I had a brother and three sisters but we were never close friends. To this day, I am only…
John Rechy and City of Night.
In the early 1970’s I picked up a copy of the book City of Night by John Rechy. The other day, in a funk, I came across the book again in my library. I wanted something different than Russian verbs of motion to read. I immediately went to a favorite…
What do I do after the Michel Thomas course?
I received a query asking what does one do after using the Michel Thomas course if one wishes to continue on. First a little background information. Hodder is the publisher of the Michel Thomas courses. I am the author of the Mandarin Chinese course; I do not publish them. Hodder…
Another lesson, another lightbulb goes off.
There are times when, because of being tired, wanting a little time off from Russian, or just pure laziness, that I think, I hope Boris cancels class today. It would be so nice to just sleep in. Then I get up, shower, eat a bite, jump in my car and…
My first talk in Russian.
I recently wrote a post on how I was scheduled to give a short talk in Russian before an audience of native-speakers. Well, it happened and here is what transpired. Since I had to speak for 15 minutes or so I made a short mind map of what I wanted…
Following 129 hours with Boris Shekhtman.
About one year ago I began to study Russian with Boris Shekhtman. To date I have spent a total of 129 hours one on one with him learning according to his method. When I began I knew next to no Russian. I had previously spent a semester at the University…
Luca, an inspiring Italian polyglot.
There are many resources on the net that focus on learning foreign languages. However, I have not found most of them too helpful when it comes to getting really consistently good results. So it was nice to discover the work of Luca, an Italian polyglot featured on youtube. Luca puts…
Michel Thomas reportedly teaching from beyond the grave.
Hodder and Arnold, the publisher of the Michel Thomas language courses, has just announced that Michel Thomas personally trained and approved every teacher of each course issued following his demise. This amazing announcement is to be found in an FAQ section issued by the publisher. Here is the quote: “Why…
Russian verbs of motion – Boris Shekhtman’s way.
For those of you who haven’t studied Russian, I suspect that you may not know about verbs of motion. So let’s get acquainted with them. In English we have verbs like come, go, run and so forth. If we want to indicate that we went somewhere then we can just…
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