I would add though that a culture of victimhood and political correctness will allow pretty much ANYbody to feel like they have been victimized somehow, and therefore entitled to something which isn't rightfully theirs.

It really is too bad that these sorts of posts don't generate more comments, I find them just as informative as the language learning ones and they are pretty much the reason I continue to read your blog.

Another vote for text. I can read much faster than normal speech rate. I almost nevef listen to or watch the videos anymore unless they are done in a language I am learning. Since obviously some people are learning english who follow your blog, I would suggest "providing the transcript" for your video or podcast in the same blog post.

I am referring to Krashen in my post above.

I am referring to Krashen in my post above.

Out of curiosity, besides writing papers about language acquisition, how far has he traveled in his own language journey? How many languages does he speak?

I graduated with an engineering degree from a college specializing in engineering. I, and everyone I know who graduated from there are all engineers.

Steve, why was the article rejected? There must have been some comments from the moderator as to why the article was denied.

ok, I found the smart.fm article. Looking at its history the article is maintained by people who do not work for smart.fm. LingQ could have a wikipedia article, it would just have to be written by an independent party. Maybe a LingQ user will start one sometime soon.

Wikipedia's rules are basically that an article must be unbiased, and not an advertisement. Basically they must be written from a source not affiliated with the subject of the article who has no bias toward or against the subject. For example, you cannot write or modify an article about yourself or LingQ, because you (presumably) have a financial stake in LingQ and a biased opinion of yourself and your product. However, someone unaffiliated with you or your company can create neutral articles about your or LingQ, neither of which you would be allowed to modify. I could not find where smartfm is listed on Wikipedia, but if it not there it either doesn't fit the criteria of the specific article or someone just hasn't added it yet.

From a humanist perspective, you are not your ancestor. Why should you bear the burden of guilt for something you did not do? From an economic perspective, it doesn't matter where someone comes from, if they can do the job better than someone else for a reasonable pay, they should get the job.

In pretty much every "skill" that people train in, I have seen people progress quickest in the weeks immediately preceding a competition: powerlifting, sports, chess, poker, math... I see no reason why language learning would be different.

@Milan, loki2504's native language is French, which has either an 80% or 85% (I forget which) lexical similarity to Italian. The languages being so closely related are a big reason why loki learned Italian so quickly. I also achieved fluency in Italian before ever going to the country, so its definitely doable by everyone!

By the way, www.engkoo.com will almost as easily help English speakers learning Chinese as the other way around. It also has an English interface option, which effectively will make it a useful resource for even the beginner Chinese learner.

Oh yeah, I would find this tool extremely useful, especially for mining examples of context from the words I don't know. When I can't get a good dictionary definition of a word I look for it in context using a search engine (or image search) anyway, but the idea that a search engine tailored specifically for learning languages is intriguing. The phonetic auto-complete and wild card system would also be extremely useful for cases when I hear a word while listening to something, but don't know how its spelled or perhaps was unable to distinguish if they made a 'f' or 'th' sound or something like that. That you can also wildcard word types, such as preposition or adjective would make the internet a living thesaurus, or help you learn the nuances of the different "phrasal verbs" of a language. Comparing similar words side by side is a nice feature as well. The fact that definitions can be mined from internet basically means the dictionary will automatically grow and adapt with the language. I find the fact that you can filter your context examples by category such as "technology" or "cooking" would be very useful for examining the different meanings words can have. This tool seems like it has almost everything a language learner could want in one convenient place. Now if only they kept track of the words you know and ones you are studying :-)

www.wordreference.com has conjugators for Spanish, French and Italian, plus I really like the dictionary in general, many entries include examples of the words in various contexts.

I like your "tune in and tune out" analogy, I often find myself doing this while listening. I hear something while listening that sets off a chain of thoughts in my mind, pondering the plausibility of something said or looking at the idea from several perspectives, and then a few minutes later I "tune back in" and realize that the conversation has moved on to an entirely different topic and I have to hit the rewind button.

When I read that I immediately thought of that "Learn while you sleep" crap, but he does not do a very good job at making any sort of distinction at what these products are. He does say though, that "It’s not even really passive listening I’m criticising here – that doesn’t actually exist; it’s passive hearing. When you are truly listening to something then it has your full attention." and "Give the audio your full attention and analyse it. Even if just for a few minutes. This was my main mistake in my thousand-hour experiment. What I should have done was close my computer screen and give the audio my full focus for at least 5-10 minute segments and replay it if possible until I understood it all." and in the comments he writes "If you give the listening all your attention then it's not passive, it's active. Washing the dishes is etc. easy, of course you can focus on the audio for that. That's active learning. House chores require no real focus. If you work as a maid then you can learn a language really well that way, but people who have jobs that they need to focus on at the time and try to have "noise" on in the background cannot do two things at once so easily. " Based on his description of "active learning" I believe he would really have no argument with LingQ being a useful tool for improving fluency.

I believe Benny would consider using LingQ an "Active Listening" scenario, one that he encourages readers to do. I don't believe there is really controversy here. Putting on background noise that you aren't listening to won't help you learn, while actively listening while you attempting to understand what is being said does work. I think the "real controversy" is defining the term "passive listening" in a way that isn't ambiguous. This posts definition of "passively listening" is the exact same as Benny's posts definition of "actively listening". Although I agree that there is nothing earth shattering in his post: it was geared toward properly informing people who believed that just having something in the background will help them learn without having to understand it.

Serge, can you let us know what method you used to eliminate your accent? I'm sure there are many language learners here who would love to learn how to eliminate their accents in the languages they are studying. Thank you.

Different types of people will excel in different scenarios. Some people respond well to high pressure scenarios, attaining much higher levels of achievement when "the pressure is on" and some fall apart. Perhaps a mixture of the two would be most beneficial, a completely relaxed learning environment with regular intervals for self examination. Tests, while some people hate the very idea of them, have their advantages. Regular testing is a motivator to keep improving, rather than stagnating at a level you can be "satisfied with", and there is evidence to show that regular testing improves memory retention. (http://www.sharpbrains.com/blog/2008/07/09/improve-memory-with-sleep-practice-and-testing/) The testing need not have any negative effects for doing poorly, or even necessarily have a "failing" level, just used to gauge progress, improve memory, and motivate.

Benny hasn't "Done It" yet, he doesn't find out until July 12 whether he passed or not. However, he did do well enough on the written and reading portions to merit doing the oral exam, which as I understand it the German test does not let you do unless they feel you did well enough on the reading/writing portions. It is probable that he will have passed at least one section, which will be good enough to claim he reached a C2 level in 3 months (in at least one aspect of the language) Interestingly, to complete this mission he underwent a study regimen of vast amounts of input, including using LingQ to help his reading (and maybe listening) ability. I personally hope he passes, it will give me a lot of inspiration for my C2 exam endeavors.

Benny hasn't "Done It" yet, he doesn't find out until July 12 whether he passed or not. However, he did do well enough on the written and reading portions to merit doing the oral exam, which as I understand it the German test does not let you do unless they feel you did well enough on the reading/writing portions. It is probable that he will have passed at least one section, which will be good enough to claim he reached a C2 level in 3 months (in at least one aspect of the language) Interestingly, to complete this mission he underwent a study regimen of vast amounts of input, including using LingQ to help his reading (and maybe listening) ability. I personally hope he passes, it will give me a lot of inspiration for my C2 exam endeavors.

I listen to Italian Podcasts while driving to work and back home. Essere e Benessere and Moebius from Rai24 are my favorite, they are always interesting and help with the commute.