articles

I recently wrote on Freestyle Language about how CaféBabel.com's Tower of Babel has articles about linguistic variations amongst 7 languages published in 7 languages!

I am planning to take this further by adding to Free Language the seven news feeds in catalá, Deutsch, English, español, français, italiano and polski. This will provide a new range of news articles for use learning and teaching languages.

As they say here in Grenada, West Indies: soon come!

I just read a great article on some of the most difficult and challenging aspects of learning Mandarin Chinese. The article is written in a sort of humorous and chatty tone, and brings up some of the most frustrating things Chinese learners face when they really get down to the nitty gritty details of learning.

From Article

Not all foreign languages are equally difficult for any learner. It depends on which language you're coming from. A French person can usually learn Italian faster than an American, and an average American could probably master German a lot faster than an average Japanese, and so on. So part of what I'm contending is that Chinese is hard compared to ... well, compared to almost any other language you might care to tackle. What I mean is that Chinese is not only hard for us (English speakers), but it's also hard in absolute terms. Which means that Chinese is also hard for them, for Chinese people.

Read the article on Pinyin.info

I saw in the stats that Heise Open published an article in German in which Free Language is mentioned. My unqualified translation based on a machine translation of the sentence that mentions Free Language is:

In what is probably the most extensive list of language resources, one manages to find some CC-licensed goodies, for example the excellent idea of a vocab trainer for Chinese Hanzi characters - for mobile phones.

Cool! We are certainly doing everything to move towards such a status.

Read the article in German.
Read the article in English using Google Translation.

I wanted to throw up a link to a predefined search for "language" on content4reprint.com.

This search yields a bundle of articles pertaining to language, such as 8 Reasons To Learn A New Language and The Advantages of Learning a Foreign Language.

Just came across a list of 9 tips for language learners.

From the site:

Relax! Learning a language is a long, difficult process. You are going to have ups and downs all along the way, and it is guaranteed that you will make a million mistakes. There will be days, even weeks, when you feel like you are making no progress, and even times when you feel that your Spanish has gotten worse. This is all completely normal, so just DON’T WORRY ABOUT IT.

Learning a language is a process, and just like any other process it takes time. All anyone really needs to do to improve their Spanish (or any other language) is RELAX, PRACTICE, and GIVE IT TIME; and you are guaranteed to get better!

Read more and see all the tips.