• 2017-10-01 » Effective word articles

    At some point, almost every learner starts keeping a vocabulary notebook, but not many take their time to stop and think a little bit about the format of their word articles. My experience suggests, however, that how you write down word articles has an enormous impact on how fast you will memorize new vocabulary. In this post, we will discuss how to make these word articles really efficient and why it is important.
  • 2017-07-03 » Achieving conversational fluency

    If you ask students about their ultimate goal in studying English, many of them will probably mention conversational fluency. And indeed, this is a worthy goal, so it makes sense to stop for a moment and determine what it actually implies and how to get there quickly.
  • 2017-06-12 » Learning through reading

    If you take a look at popular discussion boards, you will probably find lots of debates about reading and its usefulness in regard to learning foreign languages. As it turns out, this question fascinates not only language learners but also serious scientists. In 2014, Paul Nation from Victoria University of Wellington (New Zealand) published a paper on this very topic.
  • 2014-02-13 » Personal dictionary service

    Last time we looked at the importance of vocabulary and discovered that advanced students know at least 9000 words. Consequently, a new question arises - how to learn that many words in an efficient way? And maybe even more important - how to learn collocations?
  • 2014-02-03 » Language aspects

    Last time we looked at English proficiency parts and discussed why it is useful to think about passive and active skills separately. Now we are going to examine such language aspects as vocabulary and grammar and how these aspects differ from each other. I believe that aspect-based learning is an extremely powerful technique and good understanding of it can significantly improve the efficiency of your learning process.
  • 2013-10-21 » Language skills

    When we are talking about English, particularly in the context of measuring our performance, we tend to split the ability to use the language into several subskills and assess them more or less separately. For some people this idea may seem strange or even nonsensical, but in my opinion it allows to approach the whole learning process in a more systematic way.
  • 2013-09-15 » Persistence and efficiency

    It is always surprising to see how many people from around the world want to learn English and how very few of them eventually achieve their goals. Among the variety of problems which accompany studying a foreign language, there are two things that learners usually lack most: persistence and efficiency.