Free language courses from FSI

The US Foreign Services Institute has a whole bunch of language courses on their website. From Amharic to Yoruba (no Japanese unfortunately, but they do have Thai and Mandarin) you can find coursebooks and audio downloads. The courses are a bit dated, but they seem thoroughly put together and you can't beat the price.

Thanks to inZania for the tip, and for a cool iPhone flashcard app that I am using to practice JLPT vocabulary.

The importance of listening

I think the importance of listening input for students cannot be overemphasised, yet it is severely neglected in Japan, in both public and private teaching settings.

I myself have not really focused on teaching listening so far, for the following reasons:

1. graded listening materials are not as common as graded reading

2. it's hard to categorize listening materials at a glance, like you would with a written text

3. technical issues get in the way: you have to make the materials available to the students, and it's not as easy as just handing them a book or a handout

However, I have decided to have a go at really boosting my students' listening practice. I am going to investigate online delivery, lending CDs, and lending mp3 players pre-loaded with content.

I will post on any challenges and successes with the project. Comments on the subject are also most welcome.

Learning a foreign language

Learning a foreign language is not difficult, but it takes time and commitment.

Anyone can master a foreign language, and it does not require studying verb tables, memorising vocabulary, or buying a lot of books and resources. In fact, it doesn't really involve any of the things we did at school in our foreign language classes. To be honest, many of those things seem as if they were just busy work, things our teachers assigned to us because they are easy to check and evaluate, and give both students and teachers the feeling that they are actually doing something. This is the good news.

The bad news is that it takes a lot of time to master a language. Let's say you want to be in a position where you can understand pretty much everything people say to you in your daily life, as well as be able to watch TV, read a newspaper, and deal with any paperwork that comes your way. You will need a passive vocabulary of at least 5,000 to 10,000 words, and an active one of around half that.

In order to learn a word so that you know it passively (ie you can understand it when you see it or hear it) you will have to encounter it in text or aural input 20-50 times in context. In order to acquire it so you can use it actively (when speaking or writing), you will have to encounter it even more, as well as start using it yourself.

Doing the math (something I am not good at), you can see that you are going to have to read millions of words, or listen to hundreds or thousands of hours of audio, in order to get the exposure you need to the language.

Before you give up and go and take up a more sensible pursuit, such as counting grains of sand on a beach, however, there is a final piece of good news (I was saving it until the end):

None of this needs to be boring or a chore.

With the proliferation of free content on the internet, it is fairly easy to find interesting audio and text on almost any topic, as well as online translation, vocabulary learning, and grammar explanation websites, without spending a penny. I'll be introducing some over the next few weeks.

Here's the first one:

Lingq

A wonderful online system for delivering graded content that is mostly free (you can pay for tutors to correct your written work or speak to). The founder, Steve Kaufmann, has a blog that is well worth checking out.

We're back

Right, I'm back after an absence of about three years. In fact, I've been gone so long that blogspot actually lost my blog -had to poke around to find it and get it reassigned to my account.

I have some plans for this blog over the next few months, and I don't want to spoil the surprise, but expect to see:

-more practical content

-more regular updates

-more on education

I am looking forward to welcoming you here more regularly.

It's the end of the summer as far as I can tell...

Hey kids

Once again almost a month has gone by without me getting round to updating this beast. It is hot again (we had a weird summer that was hot at the beginning, cool in the middle, and is now trying to be hot again for the last few days) and there is not all that much to do right now.

Well, there is lots of stuff that has to be done fairly soon, but this office is a terrible place to try to concentrate, especially on stuff that could be done next week instead.

I'm taking tomorrow off and going for a drive with Chiho to celebrate my birthday. Feels weird having another birthday, I had pretty much forgotten about it until Chiho brought it up. Strange how something that was so important and exciting before can become so commonplace and unimportant!

So, the next time I do this I will be 29 :)

Hot hot hot

Okay, I give up. We have the air-conditioning on in the living room now, and I'm heading for my fourth shower of the day. Ugh.

Why hello there!

Okay, so it's been a while. Allright, it's been more than a while. In my defence, I have been busy recently.

The university classes effectively killed two of my days off (Monday and Sunday -for the classes themselves and preparation respectively) and then to put the icing on the cake I also got a corporate class on Monday evenings.

So the teaching has been taking over my life somewhat.

In other news, it is HOT in Sendai at the moment. Summer started three days ago, but it seems like it is trying to make up for lost time. Strangely it doesn't seem to bother me as much as it has in the past, and I am trying for a no air-conditioning policy at home (you adjust to the weather quicker if you are exposed to it).

Have the weekend off next week so very much looking forward to that. Wooh!