Accelerated Fluency

LibriVox volunteers record chapters of books in the public domain and release the audio files back onto the net. Thier goal is to make all public domain books available as free audio books.

Recently they have started an initiative to record langauge learning books. These include instruction books, readers, grammar books and many more. In addition to this they also have a large collection of audio books that are read in the native language.

So if you are learning a language you should check out their website.

For more tips and tricks to learn languages quickly and efficiently read the XGI Publications book “Effective Language Learning.”

The download of the 10 free language learning games on the website was very popular. I have added a discount coupon of £5.00 off on “Accelerated Fluency” to the language games PDF.

So if you haven’t yet downloaded the free PDF go ahead and do it now. Feel free to forward the discount coupon and the PDF to friends or family that might be interested in learning a new language!

Happy learning everyone!

A lot of the time when you are starting to learn a new language you can become intimidated by the HUGE number of words in a foreign vocabulary.  It doesn’t really matter how many times you are told that most native speakers only use X number of words, and there are only Y number of grammatical constructs you just need somewhere to start!

The best way to start is the rather obvious method of learning the most common words first. This is often easier said than done, since it can be almost impossible to find a listing of common words. Thankfully the Internet can come to the rescue for you.

On the XGI Publications website is a csv file with the top 100 French words for download. This list was complied using input from Fréquences orales et de production and the WikiPedia Word Frequency Lists.

It is quite possible to use the studies and information developed by linguists studying your target language to discover lists of common words. Another good method of finding common words is to purchase a travel phrase book. These will generally have about 500 words in them, and they will be the most commonly used ones, since obscure words are useless to a traveller or holiday maker.

Once you have learned these words you’ll discover that other words fall into place quickly. I would recommend when you first begin to learn a language you concentrate on vocabulary building to start. A target of learning the top 1000 most used words in a language would take less than a year if you were to learn only three new words a day.

Today I posted a number of games on to the website. This is a PDF with a description of ten games. You can download it and use them to help with your language learning. I feel that it is very important to have fun when you are learning a language. Playing games is a brilliant way to learn. You hardly even notice that you are learning.

The games described in the free PDF are mostly for two people. However if you are wanting to play some games but don’t have anyone around to play, perhaps you can use your computer! There are a large number of open source games that you can download and install for free. Most of these games are multiple language systems, and you can select your language when you install them.

My personal favourite is a game called FreeCiv. This will play on any operating system, however if you are a Windows user you might want to check out this website for Windows Games. If you like simulation games then check out this site which has a list of some of the best ones.

Try to make your language learning fun and enjoyable. I would LOVE to hear from you if you have some more suggestions for learning games and other fun ways to learn a language.