Link: https://www.lingomastery.com/italian-stories-review-copy
I downloaded this ebook successfully by giving them my email address. It looks like a quaint book that could help someone learn basic Italian better.
Anyone here know how to speak Italian? You could check out the book and let us know if you think it's any good. ^__^
Dedicated to my wife, who tends to go gaga when listening to handsome older men speaking Nordic languages.
Here are a couple of things you might want to know to improve whatever you're practicing. :) And a quick lesson on brain chemistry!
Here's James again. This time he's got some very interesting approaches to learning English. They even apply to any language you're trying to learn! (In James's case, he's learning Spanish.)
Check it out. Do you think his tips are sensible and workable?
Well not me, personally, though that would be super cool. 
I have an ongoing project with people from the region, so I'm a little familiar with the politics, if not the culture.
But anyway, here is a story I found about a guy's experience learning to speak Ukrainian while living in Ukraine. I love reading about other people's success stories. It helps me stay interested in language learning. ^__^
(edit - link fixed)
Are you eating and drinking now? Good. :)
This is the easiest, friendliest, most well-explained video on basic prepositions that I've come across in a decade. If those prepositions easily confuse you, then you might find James's video quite helpful. 
So English is not only the required international language for pilots worldwide. It is also apparently the language of science! 75% to 90% of all scientific papers today are published in English. 61 of the world's top 100 universities are located in an English-speaking country. That's a lot of foreign language learning for smart people!
Things about learning languages that polyglots have in common:
Anna explains how verb tenses really work using a thing called "grammatical aspect". I hope this is helpful to you. It was very helpful to my former trainees who always had trouble with verb tenses when learning to communicate in English. :)
Because sign language is a foreign language. :) Oh, and I found it eerily quaint that the whole video had no sound. That was an experience.
This presents some interesting points on how a new language is learned and why certain methods work and why others don't. I'm still on the fence about what they talk about here, but i'm willing to try them out.
For example, a study showed that putting Spanish subtitles on a video did not help Spanish learners develop their English. I don't see how that works because I've generally learned to understand Japanese better that way. I don't know. I'll withhold judgment and you can decide for yourself if it's helpful or not. :)
In this 10-minute video, veteran journalist, radio talk show host and experienced interviewer Celeste Headlee talks about the ten most important things you need to have better conversations with anyone, anywhere in the world.
10 Ways to Have a Better Conversation
My favorite is number 2. "Everyone is an expert in something" so always assume that there is something you can learn from the person you are talking to. 
TED-Ed has a phenomenal collection of videos that make it easy to understand difficult topics. Here is a collection of four videos on grammar that can help you with your writing!
I really liked this particular TED-Ed selection because I sometimes like to write fiction. :)
I've read many new books on Kindle reader, but I tend to like paperbacks more. There's something visceral about having the actual book in your hands and flipping the pages, and sometimes smelling the oldness of the book paper. My wife and I have more than a thousand paperbacks and hardcovers at home.
Le Petit Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry is such a pleasure to read in the original French.
You can find a copy of it online here.
http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks03/0300771h.html
Gutenberg.org also has a wealth of other books in different languages. It's great for when you are really trying to immerse yourself in the language you love, and it can provide context for some of the things you've already learned.
Here's are some real useful tips that get you to understand and retain information faster. Hope this helps!
The International Dialects of English Archive is a collection of recordings of people speaking English from all over the world. It shows the distinct ways that mother tongue influences and regional influences can change the way a person speaks English. You can check it out here: https://www.dialectsarchive.com/
This site was very instructive for some of my trainees, back in the day. One of the best uses for it is to develop some idea of how the native speakers speak, so that there's less confusion when listening and trying to understand them.
For those who learn by doing and imitating, this is a great English speaking resource for you. :)
My favorite section is under Europe>Ireland. :D
This is Ronnie. She's awesome. And kind of weird. But still awesome. :D She is one of several English experts who makes short videos on learning the language better. I encourage you to try out her other videos on YouTube. This one has some short, practical tips that my trainees have used to great effect. I hope they work for you too. :)
This video helped solve a lot of problems for me. My students almost always confuse the short i and long e sounds when saying English words. This was because their native tongue was Filipino, which is influenced by Spanish, which has Latin-derived vowels. So the letter "I" sounds like "ee". This is similarly found in Japanese and I believe Russian as well.
Filipino: Lito (Lee-toh)
Japanese: Kimiko (Kee-mee-koh)
Russian: Kirilenko (Kee-ree-leng-koh)
So the short I sound gives them fits. But after I showed them this video and taught them how to "feel" for the tense vowels, they found it easier to do! Thank you, Lisa Mojsin.
Here is an excerpt from Ann Cook's ebook, American Accent Training. I use it every time people get discouraged in my accent training classes. (I've done a lot of training in the outsourcing industry and Anne Cook is a classic resource. For a whole decade, many companies thought that you have to really sound American if you were going to work the phones. Thank goodness that's no longer true these days.)
~~~~~
Why Is My Accent So Bad?
Learners can be seriously hampered by a negative outlook, so I'll address this very important point early. First, your accent is not "bad," it is nonstandard to the American ear. There is a joke that goes: What do you call a person who can speak three languages? Tri-lingual. What do you call a person who can speak two languages? Bilingual. What do you call a person who can only speak one language? American.
Every language is equally valid or good, so every accent is good. The average American, however, truly does have a hard time understanding nonstandard accent. George Bernard Shaw said that the English and Americans are two people divided by the same language!
Some students learn to over-pronounce English because they naturally want to say the word as it is written. Too often an English teacher may allow this, perhaps thinking that colloquial American English is unsophisticated, unrefined or even incorrect. Not so at all! Just as you don't say the T in listen, the TT in better is pronounced D, bedder. Any other pronunciation will sound foreign, strange, wrong or different to a native speaker.
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Language learning speeds up a lot if you can practice with someone who knows your goal language well, or at least knows it better than you do. I like French and I would like to learn more of it, but I don't know anyone fluent in it that I can practice with, face to face. I tried asking at the office, I asked my friends, and I looked around the local community guides. But I still haven't found someone I can speak French with in real time.
Did you ever have this problem? How did you find someone to talk to?
Comparatives are wonderful words and I think they are really good tools for practical learning.
If I were shopping around for a sturdy, inexpensive cellphone case, and I saw some that were too expensive I might ask, "Do you have some others that are cheaper than these?" That's technically correct, but a bit unwieldy. It's nothing you'd really say in a conversational tone. Better to ask, "Got anything cheaper?"
If you were bargain-hunting in your native language, how would you say "Got anything cheaper?" ^_^
Speaking English well isn't all about pronunciation, but pronouncing words properly does matter. Here's an interesting video about the American "T" sound that I found very useful in all my years of training others to speak English.
American English speakers have a curious way of pronouncing words sometimes because it's important to get the words to connect together, as if you're speaking one really long word. This is sometimes called "linking words" or "liaisons." Because of this rule of connecting words, the way you pronounce the letter "T" in US English can be done in four different ways.
One way of doing it is to pronounce the T as a "fast D." Check out the video and I hope it helps. :)
Google says that the Russian name for rabbit is "krolik" while the name for hare is "zayats."
If I were to call a daughter or niece "zayats", does a nickname like "Zayatska" or simply "Yatska" make sense? Or is it wrong? If it's wrong, what is a good nickname for someone I want to call a hare?
I love looking at the stars. I live near a major city so there's a lot of light pollution, but I still look up for long periods of time, now and then. What I see is charming and beautiful. What's really up there, out of sight is... breathtaking.
I want to take my family somewhere in South Asia to a place that's practically devoid of light pollution (and preferably not dangerous to tourists). I want my kids to see what the sky really looks like at night. You guys got any suggestions?
Je vi dans ma maison d'oestrogene. Je vis avec ma femme et mes deux filles. J'ai deux chiens de compagnie qui sont des filles. Mes voisins sont principalement des femmes.
Tout est rose dans ma maison.
If I want to say that my pet dogs are female, should I use "des femmes" (women) or "des filles" (girls) or should I say something different?
