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 everybody.

I’m pleased to anounce that I’ve finished the first lesson for one of the many totally free language courses we are going to have: the French course.

I’ve also added some notes about the French phonetics.

I’ll start right away with the second lesson (I find myself right now with a lot of free time on my hands, so it wouldn’t surprise me to finish the second lesson in the next couple of hours).

I’m also thinking on adding German lessons soon. I really want to see this website grow, it would please me to start seeing people getting benefits from it.

Oh, right! I hope you like the new site’s layout. I loved the simple design. You’ll be able to navigate through the site using the navigation widget in the sidebar (where it says “Free Courses”).

Well, I’m off to start the second French lesson.

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.

One of the most common problems people may find when trying to learn a foreign language is memorizing new words. I know the best thing you can do for learning new words is to use them in a conversation, as only memorizing them could give you the problem of not understanding well how to use that word in a sentence. I highly recommend you to learn your first words doing or reading conversations, but if you already know the basics of the grammar of the language you’re learning, I believe memorizing words isn’t a bad idea.

For this technique you’ll need: post-it notes, a pen and a dictionary. Search for words you’d like to learn in your dictionary and write them in the post-it notes (one word per post-it). Then just paste your post-it notes in places where you’d see them frequently, like in the bathroom, in your bedroom, in your car, etc. That’s all! Pretty simple, right?

The secret behind this so simple technique is the subconscious mind. When doing your daily tasks, you’ll be reading the words you posted subconsciously, making it easier to remember them. Now, it’s important to say that you won’t be memorizing all the words you posted magically; this is just a technique for making the memorizing a lot easier. After some days after all the looking to those yellow papers, try to study a few minutes the language you’re learning, and I bet you the words will become more “familiar” and will stay in your mind forever.

If your concern is to memorize a huge number of words quickly, you can use flash cards and this technique; combining these techniques results in a fast memorizing, but be warned: using flash cards sometimes makes you not to remember the words for a long period of time (well, at least that’s what happens to me), which can result as a waste of time and effort.

That’s it, this is a very very simple way of making the language learning a bit easier. You can use the post-it technique to memorize other things, like answers for an exam, concepts, or even a script! Actually, I once used this technique for memorizing a script in high school; just leave the script pages around the usual places you visit, and try looking at them occasionally, without actually reading them.

Remember, this technique is for helping you remember what you want to memorize, not to magically memorize everything.

I invite you to try this trick, and if it works for you, I’d like to know how well were your results! Also, if you liked it, I recommend you to wait for the publication of my next language learning technique. Good luck!

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 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!

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.

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.

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!

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!