The Blog
What a Japanese proverb taught me about learning English grammar
Don't learn; absorb
There's a phrase in Japanese that I love: narau yori nareru (習うより慣れる).
You'll sometimes see this translated to English as "practice makes perfect", but what I like about this is the way that it's phrased. Narau (習う) means "to...
The importance of collocation
One of the most-overlooked aspects of language learning is collocation. Collocation is the pattern of co-occurrence of words. In other words, it's which words tend to appear together.
Take a word like “cease”: there are certain set phrases that we associate with the word, such...
Japanese on tape - my fortuitous beginning
I think that I started learning Japanese in the best possible way.
I started in the 2-3 months just prior to moving to Japan. Without any really good reason or any idea what I was getting myself into, I had applied and gotten hired for a job with the now-defunct NOVA chain of English conversation...
Welcome to PhraseMix!
PhraseMix is a way to learn languages. It is based on the idea that memorizing phrases is the fastest way to learn. Here's why:
- Learning words leaves out so much information. Some words are used in polite conversation, others only at a bar. Lots of words occur in pairs or...
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