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Tips, tutorials and resources to aid you on your path towards fluency.

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    • Monthly Archives: June 2013

    New 1.5 Day Workshop Format! (and lower prices)

    Workshoplogo

    WorkshoplogoI’m trying out a new format for the Los Angeles workshops (July 13-14 and July 20-21). Instead of two full days, we’re going to do a full day on Saturday (10am-6pm) and a half day on Sunday (1:45pm-5:15pm). Prices are now $195 for both days, and if you register by the 1st of July, it’ll be $175. I’m doing this for a couple of reasons: First, my main audience in LA is classical singers, and most singers have church jobs on Sunday mornings. By starting later on Sunday, those singers won’t need to cancel work in order to attend. Second, everyone’s strapped for cash, and the idea of shelling out over $200 for a workshop is understandably difficult. By cutting back on the time, I can drop prices without cutting out too much content.

    See the new workshop format here.

    Pictures of Pronouns…and how to learn them

    You!
    You!

    “You!”

    In my list of basic words to learn, I suggest learning subject pronouns (I, you, he, she, it, we, they) using pictures. Instead of “‘Ich’ is the German word for ‘I,’” I suggest memorizing “‘Ich’ is the German word for [Guy pointing to himself].”

    But this may seem like a trivial point. After all, it’s only a small handful of words, and what’s the harm in memorizing just a few translations?

    Continue reading →

    Announcing Workshops!

    Workshoplogo

    WorkshoplogoA few months ago, I put together a workshop at the University of Vienna on language learning. It was kind of a monster; we started at 9am on a Saturday and ended a bit after 7pm, with a 1 hour lunch break. 9 hours of teaching in a day. By the end, everyone was naturally a bit wiped out, but we had so much fun. I really like teaching in that format, and all the attendees really liked learning this stuff. The feedback forms were just overwhelmingly positive, and aside from a few suggestions to split the material into a 2-day workshop, it seems like we landed on a really good format for teaching my whole method in a weekend.

    So I want to do this a lot more often.

    Starting today, I’m planning two 2-Day workshops in Los Angeles for mid July, along with another 2-Day workshop in Vienna in November. I’m also interested in doing some East Coast workshops in August/September/October, though I don’t have quite the same network there as I do in Los Angeles/Vienna, so those are a little more tentative. But honestly, if I can drum up enough interest (let me know!), I’d happily flit around the world putting on workshops all the time. It’s fun to teach this stuff.

    Anyway, you’ll find all the details, along with a fancy video with clips from the Vienna workshop and comments from the feedback forms at the new Workshop section of the website. If you want to attend one, but I’m not offering one in your area, let me know. If I get enough interest in a certain region, I may set one up near you.

    Guest Post: How to memorize text as a singer

    caroling.png

    caroling.pngA friend of mine, Lauri Goldenhersh, runs a wonderful website known as Laurislist. Basically, if you want a job as a classical singer in Los Angeles, you get a subscription to Laurislist, she sends out emails like “URGENT: Baritone needed for Christmas caroling job TOMORROW. $100 in Culver City,” you call, and poof, you have some work. Alternatively, if you have a Christmas caroling job tomorrow and you get laryngitis, you can send an email to Laurislist and someone will call you immediately and offer up his services. Back when I was living in LA, Laurislist was a pretty essential resource.

    When talking to Lauri about my workshops, she suggested I guest post for the Laurislist blog, Singerpreneur. Singers, after all, need to learn lots of languages, and a big group of Los Angeles singers would be great candidates for my Los Angeles workshops. I took her up on it.

    The article I wrote is geared towards singers, but it covers a theme that resurfaces all over the place in language learning: how we remember. Singers have particularly insane memorization needs; we have to memorize long foreign-language texts all the time. So I wrote out a method for memorizing texts that takes advantage of all the memory research I’ve done over the past year.

    Without further ado, jump on over to Singerpreneur: Is there a better way to memorize your texts?

    On the Tagalog/Filipino language (and a book update)

    PhilippinesMap3-1Tagalog is the newest member of the language resource section, and it’s a pretty neat one.

    From the fascinating history of the language to its ridiculously easy pronunciation (English: Economics –– Tagalog: Ekonomiks) to its fairly wacky system of in-fixes (like prefixes and suffixes, just in the middle of the word: graduate + um = grumaduate), it was a fun article to write and research, and it should be a fun article to read, even if you’ve never thought about learning the language.

    And…one last reason you may wish to peruse the Tagalog resource page, even if Tagalog’s not your thing: this is the first resource page that matches the content of my book.

    Continue reading →