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BRAVE Blog

4 tips for improving your pronunciation

4-tips-improve-foreign-language-pronunciationSo you’ve learned the vocabulary, the grammar, the expressions and the idioms. You’ve practiced and practiced and are feeling confident about your speaking ability, but then when you finally get a chance to practice with a native speaker, they keep asking you to repeat yourself. Why is this? Chances are that you are simply not pronouncing the words correctly.

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BRAVE Blog

English (Spanish, Chinese…) as a Magical Language

english phonetic pretty womanBilingual motivations have evolved, as foreign languages became more and more mainstream things to do and use. With some languages, though, curious side effects can be seen. This post is a curious look at the role of certain languages in cultures – and an invitation to discuss some polyglots’ more esoteric approaches. Don’t take it fully seriously – but do join in if you’ve got inspired by it!

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BRAVE Blog

Funding some polyglots: good times for kickstarting language learning?

see what I did there?Last year, everyone was talking about smart watches and a slew of other futuristic gadgets – and the place to make those dreams happen was Kickstarter. This year, I’m happy to say that foreign languages got a lot of attention (and funding!) there as well. How does this work – and what are the crowd-funded wonders that language learners can look forward to?

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BRAVE Blog

The Hardest Part of Learning Any Language – And How Not to Suck At It

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The piercing is there to help pronounce Hungarian words better. (Devastar / Flickr)

“Polish grammar is crazy, man. It’s got, like, seventeen cases.”

“I just don’t get how you can create these monster words in German that go on forever.”

“Why do I have to speak different Japanese to my boss, and to my colleagues???”

“Holy Alphabet, what are these squiggles?”

 

Ask any learner what they think is difficult about learning their language, and they will come up with a long list of things they dislike, struggle with or simply hate. But ask a little harder – for the absolutely hardest part – and the answer is likely to be the same, no matter what language they’re learning.