Some people mistakenly imagine that learning a second language is expensive, that only wealthy people can afford to pay for the language teachers, textbooks, courses, travel expenses, etc. This is simply not true. You don’t need to be able to travel to a country where your target language is spoken everywhere. You don’t need to pay for any expensive classes or even textbooks. It is possible to learn a second language without spending a single cent on this endeavor. Some people also assume that it is impossible to learn another language unless you have a lot of free time. Again, this is not completely true—learning a second language does indeed require plenty of time, effort, and commitment, but it is doable also for a person with a very busy schedule. [Read more…]

How to learn a foreign language is a question that has interested me for a long time. After all, I wanted to learn many languages. More importantly, I wanted to do it efficiently. By now I speak six languages. In this post I will share my favorite language learning techniques and explain what worked (and didn’t work) for me.

Since this blog post is going to be about what worked for me, I must remind that if your memory works differently than mine, then you should do whatever works for you. There is no right way how to learn foreign languages, no magical one-size-fits-all approach that will make you able to speak many languages. People learn differently, thus what works for one person may not work for somebody else. [Read more…]