The Linguist on Language

Five days to fluency in Czech, progress report #2.  play >

Five days to fluency in Czech, progress report #2.

8/7/2012 | Download File (19.77 MB) - right click to download

As I announced earlier, I am going to spend 5 days in Prague in October. During this period I am going to try to speak as much Czech as possible in order to achieve a breakthrough to fluency. I have been doing a lot  of listening and reading, using LingQ, for the last year, starting at 1 hour a day, and probably closer to 2 hours a day over the last month or so. In the last few weeks,  I have stepped up my online speaking to about 4-5 hours a week. I am hopeful that five intensive days, immersed in the language in Prague, will enable me to convert my largely passive knowledge of Czech into active fluency, or at least enable me to make a major step forward in that direction. I attach a sound file of my most recent conversation with Jarda. I feel I have improved from my earlier conversations, but still have a very long way to go. Remember that the five days to fluency strategy consists of the following. 1) Select a target language, a target date and a target place for the Five Days to Fluency. For me it was Czech, one year, and Prague. 2) Spend a year, or however long a period you feel is necessar, on daily listening, reading, and accumuling vocabulary. Towards the end of the period,  start speaking as part of your preparation. 3) Visit your destination and immerse yourself and watch your passive knowledge become active. Five days is a minimum, in fact all the time that I have. A week or a month would be better.  (The alternative to going to the country where the language is spoken, would be to dramatically step up your involvement with the language at home for a period of 5 days or so, spending most of these days reading, listening, speaking and writing in the target language).   TheDoctor_Bombastic_on_2012-08-07_at_10.17.mp3 Listen on Posterous Permalink | Leave a comment  »

What exactly is the true nature of our literacy problem?  play >

What exactly is the true nature of our literacy problem?

4/26/2008 | Download File (3.69 MB) - right click to download

Here is the podcast I am still interested in the subject of literacy. I phoned another organization involved in Literacy to try to find out what they do and if LingQ can be used. I was told that literacy was...

"Foreign Language Acquisition the Easy Way" Stephen Krashen  play >

"Foreign Language Acquisition the Easy Way" Stephen Krashen

4/12/2008 | Download File (5.32 MB) - right click to download

Here is the podcast My Odeo Channel (odeo/f0ae78f435300db4) "Foreign Language Acquisition the Easy Way" Stephen Krashen My recent conversation with Paul Nation got me thinking. I decided to re-read Krashen. I picked up "Foreign Language Acquisition the Easy Way" which...

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