Review of Daniel Tammets book Born on a Blue Day

I've mentioned Daniel Tammet in a few blog posts before. He is an autistic savant with some extraordinary abilities with language. Although he has recently released a second book, I realized I haven't posted a proper review of his first one! So here is a review of Daniels first book Born on a Blue Day.

In his book How to Learn Any Language, Barry Farber calls Indonesian the easiest language in the world. Nothing resembling real grammar, verbs don't change, to make something plural just say it twice etc. I haven't yet had a chance to wade into Indonesian, but I bet I would find it interesting to learn someday. If Indoesian interests you, I have put up a page for learning Indonesian with some possible resources for you to check out.

Voting for Top 100 Language Blogs

Lexiophiles has announced their nominations for the top 100 language blogs for 2009. There are four different categories - Language Teaching, Language Learning, Language Professionals and Language Technology. You can vote for your favorite language blogs until July 27th.

Livemocha Growing

Livemocha continues to grow. They are up to 3 million members in 220 countries, which shows that language learning is a serious concern for a lot of people around the world. They have added several languages with even more to come.

Interestingly, they have used their own membership to increase the languages available by 'crowdsourcing.' Members can add and verify content in their native languages, thus making more languages available for other learners. It's smart and guarantees that some of the less commonly learned languages will eventually have learning materials available.

For example, they have content to learn Icelandic, Ukrainian and Estonian - three languages that have very little material available for the learner via published courses.

Other languages available to learn with Livemocha include Arabic, Greek, Dutch, Turkish, Polish, Romanian, English, Farsi, Finnish, French, German, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin Chinese, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish.

I'm Starting Up the Newsletter Again!

I have some more time available now, so one thing on the site I'd like to work on is the newsetter. I enjoy doing it, and many people have written to me saying that they enjoy it as well. I went back over my notes from the last time I was working on it and I quickly put together a new issue. In case you missed it, you can sign up for the Language Learning Advisor Newsletter here, and you can also find a link to the backissues.

Czech

Last year, I briefly worked with someone bilingual Czech/English. Of course, I couldn't resist picking up a few words of a new language and getting some insights from a native speaker. Incidentally, I broke out a copy of Pimsleur Czech and listened to the first few lessons to compare what he taught me and to work on my pronunciation. There were a few discrepancies. It is not uncommon to find that Pimsleur (or any other language method) necessarily has to focus on one form of pronunciation or one dialect for a beginning learner of a language. There are often other ways to pronounce something, even as common a word as 'thanks.' Keep this in mind as you learn from various sources - stay flexible, adapt and keep learning.

I've added a new page on learning Czech.