Posts Tagged ‘pronunciation’
Feb
Feb
The sounds of Italian
Now that we’ve got our alphabets learned, let’s take a deeper look at the sounds of letters and letter combinations, and learn a little bit about spelling.
Feb
Feb
You already speak a foreign language!
Remember that knowing what you’re saying doesn’t matter; you’ve only just begun. The goal is to be fluent in one year, not in one day. Though it may not sound like much, you’ve got time. A whole year. What’s important is that you’re already speaking in a new language!
Apr
Apr
The internet is your reality simulator
The internet is full of potential for use in endless unexpected ways. Today, we’re going to talk about two uses which are really not terribly amazing, but which are incredibly useful to the language learner.
Apr
Apr
The sounds of French
When I first got started this with Italian, I started by looking for the alphabet and its sounds, and I used YouTube to hear them correctly pronounced by a native Italian speaker. But several of my readers are learning French, and I never really got things started for them. So today I’d like to just explore the sounds of French.
May
May
Let's learn the Greek alphabet!
Alphabets are scary things — when you understand an alphabet, you are sufficiently equipped to intuit many things about the text written in it, even if you don’t actually know a word of that language. However, when you don’t understand the alphabet, you find yourself saying, “It’s all Greek to me!”
Jan
Jan
Russian vowel reduction
A few months ago, I showed you how easy it is to learn the Russian alphabet. If you’ve been through that, you should already be able to read Russian text, sound out words, and even recognize several cognates. Today, I want to take a look at the really interesting phenomenon of Russian vowel reduction.
In…
Mar
Mar
Hard and soft consonants – a look at palatalization
When you decide to learn Russian, you’re immediately greeted with a few interesting challenges right away on day one. You have to learn a brand new alphabet just to read and write in this new language!
Fortunately, it’s really not hard to learn the Russian alphabet, in fact, I think it’s easier and better than…
Mar
Mar
That’s a beautiful language!
Category: General, German, Italian, Polish, Russian, Spanish · Tags: pronunciation,sounds
This morning I was talking with David Mansaray about languages that sound beautiful, and about their tendency sometimes to lose their luster. This provides me a great introduction to a related topic that I’ve been thinking about lately.
How our view of a language changes
I remember when I first started learning Spanish. I was…