Kerstin Cable's Blog, page 43

Linguistic Gift Ideas 2013

Hello blog readers, this Friday we are entering the final few weeks before Christmas! Yes, Hanukkah is over and so are the modern inventions Black Friday and Cyber Monday, and I helpfully dozed all the way through them. Well, here I am, better late than never, in bringing you this year's Linguistic Gift Ideas.

The Gift Ideas Board

On my updated Pinterest board, I have lots of good stuff from cute French t-shirts to funny language guides and travel books. Please have a good peruse and root aroun...

German Vocabulary Topic: Umweltschutz (environmental protection)

Today's post is based on content that I cover with a bunch of friendly people in my German class, and I hope that you'll enjoy it too.

German Study Club

Successful language learning is impossible without a chance to practice, and I know that this can be tough for self-taught folks. So I decided that Fluent Language Tuition will host regular drop-in classes for German learners here in friendly Lancaster, UK. They are called German Study Club, and work as individual lessons without the commitmen...

The most useful bilingual dictionaries with German and English

No language learner should be far from a dictionary, ever, so if you haven't found your favourite yet, consider the following list.

Remember that looking up a word is never guaranteed to mean finding the perfect word at first sight, so you should check how to use it and whether there aren't several meanings.

The trick is this: Just look up your word the other way round, if it doesn't deliver the one you were looking for then you are not done with your search.

LEO

Originally a project from a Mu...

The world's 5 most influential languages

Are you studying one of the world's most influential languages?

The following quote from this video seemed particularly noteworthy:

> Every language is the most important language in the world - to its speakers.
(George Weber)

Read on to find out which languages are named the most influential:

3 criteria of influential languages

The video lists the following criteria as the most influential:

Demographics

How many people speak this language? Where do they all live?

Ease of Learning

How long can it take...

Urlaub, vacances, holiday, vacation

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Fluent Vacation: 10-24 November

Please note that I will be going on a trip over the coming two weeks to fulfil some major life tasks (including a maid of honor speech!! Please send me tips!).

To keep you entertained duri...

Call for your comments about Online Flashcards

Do you use online flash cards for your language learning?

Oliver Antosch certainly does! He decided to learn Mandarin Chinese for his wife and started studying with electronic flashcards. After much success with the method, the two of them decided to create an online platform for language learners, to help them study languages with online flashcards (available in 12 languages including German, Spanish, Chinese and many more. There's even Russian, which pleased me personally - especially after...

Michel Thomas in Fluent Review (Plus: How you can get a free Michel Thomas Method set)

If you have ever browsed the shelves of a book shop dreaming of that date or trip where you speak fluent French, you have probably come across old Michel T. His language learning tapes were a huge success from the 70s and are still popular today. I'm currently using the Michel Thomas tapes myself for my study of Russian. The method is reportedly the same as on the original tapes with the man himself, although here it is a Russian instructor teaching the class.

What I like and adopt about the M...

Lancaster based Russian Taster Course

Are you ready for Russian?

Хорошо! I'm really pleased to help promote a new four week Russian Taster Course in Lancaster City Centre. Hope you can make it!

The course will be delivered by language teacher Masha Golubeva. Masha is not only a talented artist and lovely lady, but also an experienced Russian teacher. So you are in extremely good hands!

The four week taster will include

Introduction to the Cyrillic alphabet
Fun facts about Russia and the Russian people
Introducing yourself in Russian
Use...

The Special Needs Child and the Foreign Language (by Sally Holmwood)

Sally Holmwood, tutor at Indigo Languages is establishing herself as a regular and always very welcome guest here on the Fluent Language blog. Her experiences working with young people of all ages, both inside and outside the UK school system make her views so profound, and Sally has a real passion for her languages to share with you. Today she is discussing a special group of people, often forgotten in the language learning world: Special needs children.

One Tongue, Two Languages

As well as wo...

Book Tip and Free Chapter: Fluency Made Achievable

One of my author pictures!

As some of you might know already, I published my first book this month! It is called Fluency Made Achievable. (Yes, you're right that the book did have the working title "Ultimate Guide to Language Skills" - but then was renamed because I liked keeping the theme of fluency in all my work.)

The work I put into this guide was motivated by a desire to help learners get organised and study the language in a holistic way.

Language learning means always improving and n...