The Blog

Don't try to learn similar phrases together (or you might make a dumb mistake like I almost did)!

Should you learn similar words and phrases at the same time, or words and phrases that are different from each other?

The first instinct for most language teachers and learners is to group similar vocabulary together. When I first began learning Japanese, I had a list of animal names to study, a...

Try studying English once an hour!

When and how often do you study English? Do you do it once a week? Every day? What about every hour?

There's a blog that I'm a big fan of called All Japanese All the Time (AJATT). The author, Khatzumoto, discusses theories about how to learn a foreign language quickly and well. Yesterday he...

How learning grammar is like painting.

Language learners sometimes try to learn too much at once.

For example, I often get questions like this:

I don't know how to use 'the' and 'a'. Can you explain how to use them?

Well, no, I can't.

First of all, "the" and "a" are too...

Finding a different way to explain tenses

I'm working on writing some posts to explain tenses. (Like the past tense, past progressive, present perfect, and all those lovely terms you learned in school). Of course, there's a ton of information out there already which explains these ideas. But I have to figure it out and explain it in my...

Why you shouldn't focus on the differences between words and phrases.

People really seem to like it when I point out differences between words or phrases. This morning I sent out a Twitter message about my recent post, "I'll just be glad when it's over." The message I sent out got a lot of response - people re-tweeted it and wrote back about it, and about twice as...