Hello everybody!

I’m pleased to announce that we already have 2 on going courses: the French and the German ones! I’m continously adding new lessons, and I believe they will be about 50 lessons long.

I got a lot of free time, and I’ve been working only on Language Blog. I hope we get enough visits soon, so reopening the forum becomes a good idea.

If you have any suggestions for the lessons, or any complaints (because of an error with them, for example), please let me know through comments in my posts (I read them all and I generally answer them all).

Also, if you want to contact me for anything else more private, you can send me an e-mail to amaury (at) languageblog.net. I can even help you with your marriage, you can tell me jokes, you can invite me to a dinner, I just have too much time on my hands and I’m bored to death.

If you want to do your good deed for the day try telling your friends about Language Blog. It won’t cost you a dime and it will make me happy and motivate me to work even harder.

Hello!

It seems I haven’t written something since April, that’s almost 4 months! I was very busy, but I guess I’ll have plenty of time from now on.

I have to learn french presto, so I guess I’ll work on french articles and a french course. My bet is that working on a french course will greatly help me on learning it.

Also, I’ve been studying C# (a programming language) like crazy (for college), and I’m thinking on creating a C# course (it’s a language, too, so it fits in this website).

I hope I haven’t lost my valuable readers. If I have, I won’t blame you, as I have let die Language Blog Anyway, I promise to myself that I will revive the site and make it a wonderful place for all of you.

About 2 weeks ago I found this interesting article while looking at digg.com. The author explains how to learn a lot of a language just by following some simple steps! This guide helps you to start learning a language, but not to master it. Also, if you’re already somewhat advanced in that foreign language you’re learning, it won’t help that much, but it’s still great information!

Click here to read it.

Also, I wanted to announce that I’ll be updating the blog each weekend. I’ve found myself very busy with homework, so weekly updates is the best i can do I’ll upload the first Spanish lessons today or tomorrow, along with a new article, so stay tunned!

I’ve met several persons who have told me they’d love to learn a foreign language — particularly English. When I hear them say that, sometimes I ask them to practice with me (having a conversation in that language), and 90% of the times they refuse to do so, replying with “It’s embarrassing!“.

I understand them, because I have too felt embarrassed many times, but about a couple of years ago, I learned the lesson.

Someday, I was chatting with one of my best friends, Martin, who lives in Canada. Chatting with him (in English) was something usual, but then, he asked me if I had a microphone. Fortunately  (or unfortunately), I told him I did have one. He asked me if I wanted to have a voice conversation with him. Again, fortunately (or unfortunately) I replied yes.

Even though our chat conversations were fluent and natural, it seemed it was a whole different story with voice conversations. My responses got reduced to shy laughs, yesses and noes.

After several sessions of voice conversations with my friend, I noticed I was getting better, and not just that, but I was speaking with a wider vocabulary. I’ll explain this.

When I chat with someone, I usually try to use a minimal vocabulary, as I don’t want to waste my precious finger’s energy (he he he). But when I have to use my voice to communicate, it’s a different story, as it’s far more easier. So, this means if you speak the language instead of writing it, you’ll be most likely using a wider vocabulary. And the most interesting part is you’ll not just be using it, but getting used to it.

When I began learning German, I liked to learn up to 100 words per day, and I was happy because I was starting to be able to understand somewhat some German articles. But after around a week (that would be 700 words learned), I tried to write some phrases in German and noticed it was really hard for me to do so. I opened my German course book, and there wasn’t any problem at remembering the words, I knew their meaning, but just couldn’t make any sentences.

Now I understand that when you’re starting to learn a foreign language, you need to speak it, not just memorize words and/or understand its grammar. If you learn that “le chat est blanc” means “the cat is white” in French, try to practice that phrase and its components all you can. Don’t just leave all that learning floating in your brain!

Also, don’t be shy, and if you find an opportunity to practice what you know, practice it!

You should know that Language Blog isn’t just focused on “spoken” languages, but to everything that can be categorized as a language. So, you could include sign language and programming languages to the subjects we’re going to be handling.

This turns to be something really good to me, as I’m studying computer engineering, and I also love learning foreign languages!

We want you to expect soon some really good information not only about french, german, spanish, etc. but about C, C++, C#, PHP, ASP, etc! We hope this is going to create more interest on the audience, as visiting Language Blog will turn to be a good resource of both language learning and programming.

After studying around 30 minutes French or German I start to get tedious and anxious. It has always been like this, and not just for languages, but for almost everything: math, chemistry, programming, etc. About a year ago, I found a really good way of studying languages, which never got me tired or anxious.

I’ve always been a computer geek and always loved to play computer video games. Someday, when I started wondering about things (usually this happens in bathroom…), I started questioning myself how did I learned English (I’m from Mexico, so my first language is Spanish). A good percentage of my English was learned at school, but what I discovered was that most of my English came from video games, especially RPG’s (Role Playing Game). Then, a marvelous idea came to my mind: why not do the same with French and/or German? Immediately I began my search for some games.

After a good research, I remembered I had a game called The Secret of Monkey Island, the CD version, which came in several languages. I began playing it in Italian (I didn’t know any Italian, 0%, nada), and after around 30 minutes, I noticed I started to understand a lot of words. After beating the game in 2 days, I was able to talk some Italian (just some… I wouldn’t survive in Italy… or maybe I would, but just because the Spanish is like a brother to the Italian). Then, I decided to start the game again (damn, I love that game), and during this second time I was able to understand around 70% of what the characters were saying. And after beating it the second time, I started it in German. Well, I guess you got the point by now.

The most important thing about this technique isn’t how fast I started to get a catch about the words, grammar, etc., but how long I lasted playing the game! When I study French the classical way, I only last about 30 minutes without a headache… when I study French playing a video game, I only last… well, I’d last until I gotta go to college.

If you believe you can stand against studying languages the classical way, do it! You’ll learn in a better quality way. But if you are struggling because of all those headaches, I recommend to try this out.

Don’t have a video game to start studying? Well, you can download The Secret of Monkey Island. This game is so old they made it abandonware (it’s free). Or you can buy a video game which comes in several languages.

Good news, everyone!

Today is the day, Language Blog will be launching its forum today. We’ve been really busy and we didn’t have the enough time to just upload the forum (it will be a phpbb forum). We’ll be editing the forum layout through the days.

We expect people to come and post their questions, their answers or just say “hi!“. We will appreciate it a lot, as it’s a good motivation for us to see our community to start its growing.

Have fun!

Language Blog is going to release a word pronunciation section, where we’ll be uploading sound files containing how a word in a certain language is pronounced. We’ll begin with Spanish and French, and eventually we’ll add more languages, like German and Italian.

We want this section to become as simple as possible, so you can easily search for all the words you want at a comfortable speed.

We recommend you to subscribe to our blog so we can let you know when this service is going live, or you can bookmark us!

Soon we will be launching our forum, so you can get in contact with other language learners and start helping each other. Even we are going to be able to lend you a hand!

As Language Blog is just starting, we expect to see few people wondering around the blog, but we’re sure we’ll be having great numbers of people at the end of march.

Different ways of communication are being planned to be implemented as Language Blog grows. Our mission is to help you learn the fastest and easiest way possible, and we’re sure we’ll get it done.

This blog is planned to become the biggest interactive community regarding the learning, practicing and teaching of languages in Internet.

In this so globalized world, to know how to speak several foreign languages is becoming a must. And as the Internet is the most globalized communications tool, it’s logical that learning or practicing a new language through it it’s an excellent idea!

We decided to create a blog because we found it a great website model to start interacting with people right away. As we post our entries, people can comment about it, and exchange opinions with us and with other people. But the blog won’t be the only way for doing this! We will implement chats, forums and wikis; the objective is to learn being helped and helping others!

For now we’re just starting, but we recommend you to bookmark us, subscribe to our blog and/or RSS us so you stay tuned about the new implementations and some useful information. You can subscribe and RSS us in the sidebar of this webpage.