"You can have everything you want if you can put your heart and soul into everything you do."
- Roy T. Bennett (via nightlyquotes)

rendzina:

over coffee with my mom this morning: “sometimes we hesitate to invite people into our life because we feel like our space isn’t good enough yet. things are a little messy, or our place settings don’t match, or our situation isn’t quite what we want it to be. don’t let that stop you. invite people in anyway.”

(via lustyyouth)

Brutally Honest Rules for Language Learners

zoryanavesna:

  1. If you can`t make your own examples to a grammar rule, you don`t know this grammar rule.

  2. Learning words without context is almost useless. You may repeat something like “road” or “deeply” millions of times and still forgetting them in the most important situations. Memorize phrases instead. e. g. “I crossed the road” and “to be deeply ashamed”.

  3. Prioritize. There are almost 500 000 words in the English language and even more in some non-European languages. If you decide to learn 5 words a day, you`ll need a shitload of time to cover at least the third of the whole vocabulary. So, know precisely what words are the most frequent and the most important for you personally.

  4. No, you won`t learn a language by listening to songs ONLY.

  5. If your level of knowledge is Intermediate or higher, you don`t need the fucking subtitles. Well, in the beginning, you will have a terrible headache and doubts about the whole thing, but every video will be making you a little better. You`ll slowly get used to the accents and intonation. It`ll stop to sound like the endless phrase without any pauses. Just give yourself some time.

  6. Translation from the native language to the target language is useless (if you`re not going to become an interpreter). Write the short texts in your target language instead.

  7. Forget about boring topics from the textbooks. Argue with somebody in the comment section under your fav YouTube videos. Try to persuade me that the Earth is flat (I know it`s insane, but you`ll remember it much better than writing the essay “The current problems of ecology”). Rewrite your own posts. Write down 15 phrases do describe Donald Trump. I mean… Everything is better than a standard way of learning that doesn`t express your inner self. 
  8. Check the pronunciation of ALL the words.
    ALL the time. Your intuition is a great tool. However, it doesn`t cure all the irregular cases. Just look at English words “daughter” and “laughter”, “head” and “heat”, “though” and “thought”. They look almost similar but they sound in ABSOLUTELY different ways. There`s a possibility that your target language also has a lot of such cases. Just spend few seconds on looking at the transcriptions. It doesn`t hurt, I promise.


The post/challenge for those who want to find a language partner.  


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