Tower of Babelfish
The Blog

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

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    • Category Archives: Blog

    Announcing Fluent-Forever.com and the Kickstarter!

    After a loooong delay, I’m happy to finally have some announcements and updates!

    Fluent Forever Proofread

    Announcement The First: The book is done. It’s been edited, copy-edited and proof-read. Now, the letters and packages my publishers send me start off with “Here’s the book. If you want to change something, please don’t. Seriously. Stop. We’re taking any changes out of your advance. No. Stop it.” For those of you curious about what a proofread book looks like, feast your eyes on this baby: 350 single sided sheets of printer paper, corrected with a red color pencil. Awesome.

    Fluent ForeverAnnouncement The Second: The site is moving to Fluent-Forever.com. All future updates will be located over there. Why? Because no one knows what a Tower of Babelfish is, and because Fluent Forever is a friggin awesome book and brand title. Apologies to all who enjoyed the fish theme; you have 30 days to appreciate it before I take it down foreverrrrrrr.

    Announcement The Third: For the next 29 days, the whole Fluent-Forever.com/TowerofBabelfish.com world is going to be all Kickstarter, all the time. Thus the giant, unignorable banner up top. This Kickstarter is my baby. It’s a tool I created when my editor asked me “OK, if pronunciation is so important, how do you actually learn it?” And I realized that my answer was “Well, if you had the right resources, you could learn it this way, but no one has made those resources yet…”

    Kickstarter LogoI’ve been planning it for about a year, and I’m currently unable to sleep out of excitement, and am writing to you now at 4:30am, after a hefty 4-hour-night’s sleep. The Kickstarter is off to a tremendous start: more than 25% funded after less than 14 hours, and I haven’t even announced it on the site yet. Insane. If you’re reading this, then do these three four five things:

    1. Check out the Kickstarter. If you like it, back it. Even $1 makes a huge difference; the more backers we get, the more the project will show up on the front page of Kickstarter.
    2. Share on Facebook. If you want something to copy/paste, try this:
      If you have ever wanted to learn a foreign language, check out this Kickstarter campaign: http://fluent-forever.com/kickstarter. It’s an amazing project; help spread the word!
    3. Share on Twitter, if you use it! If you want 140 characters to copy/paste, try:
      Ever wanted to learn a foreign language? Check out this awesome Kickstarter campaign and help spread the word: http://fluent-forever.com/kickstarter.
    4. Share on Google Plus, if you’re into that kind of thing.
    5. Share via eMail. Email tends to be a bit more likely to actually reach people, given all of Facebook’s promoted posts and ads and baby announcements with 700 Likes. Here’s a generic email to copy/paste:
      Happy December! A blogger I’m following – Gabe Wyner – is developing an amazing language learning app. He launched a Kickstarter campaign to help fund its development and I’m helping him spread the word. Check it out at http://fluent-forever.com/kickstarter, and if you like it, please share it with your own friends and colleagues!

    That’s all for now. Now that the book’s done, my life’s starting to get in order and the Kickstarter has launched, I’m going to start updating the site frequently. I’ve said that before, but now I’m not lying to you. I promise.

    (PS: To everyone signed up for site updates via email, sorry for the double email today! Shouldn’t happen again!)

    An early review of Bliu Bliu.com

    Screen-Shot-2013-07-19-at-8.52.30-AM.png

    Screen Shot 2013 07 19 at 8 52 30 AMI get a lot of emails about new language websites. Often, they’re some kind of new picture dictionary or online textbook. These can be good or bad, but they rarely fill me with wonder and joy.

    But every once in a while, I hear about an idea for a website that is just marvelous, and if I’m really lucky, it’s even implemented well. Bliu Bliu is one of those websites.

    Continue reading →

    Announcing New York and Boston Language Workshops!

    facebookadThe Los Angeles workshops are starting to fill up, and I’ve gotten enough requests for East Coast workshops that I’ve set two dates: August 10-11 (New York) and August 17-18 (Boston). I’ll have venue information relatively soon.

    Workshop 3: New York (Precise location TBA)

    Saturday, August 10th, 2013; 10am-6pm
    Sunday, August 11th, 2013; 1:45pm-5:15pm

    Workshop 4: Boston (Precise location TBA)

    Saturday, August 17th, 2013; 10am-6pm
    Sunday, August 18th, 2013; 1:45pm-5:15pm

    Prices are the same as the LA workshops: $195 per person, and $175 if you register by July 25th. Also, if you’re attending a workshop and refer someone, you both get $10 back.

    Details here!

    Also, I’ll be extending the early registration discount for the LA workshops for another few days, until July 4th, 10pm. Information about the workshops is going out on a few mailing lists today, and I want to make sure people on those lists have an opportunity to take advantage of the discount before it expires. That’s it!

    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 →

    How to remember words in any language

    Remember words

    Remember wordsTo learn a language, you need to memorize a lot of vocabulary, and memorizing lots of vocabulary can be tricky. You’re faced with unfamiliar spellings and unfamiliar sounds, which makes foreign words significantly more difficult to remember than words in your native language. In this article, I’ll show you how to remember words more easily with the help of mnemonics.

    Continue reading →

    When you forget a language: How to bring it back (and a video demonstration!)

    Forgetting.jpeg

    Forgetting.jpegA few months ago, I realized that I had forgotten a great deal of my French. My book was taking up 40-50 hours of every week, so I didn’t have extra time to study, and I didn’t really want to study French, either. This year is my Hungarian year, and what little time I have, I like to spend on that language. Languages benefit from focus, and so I try to avoid studying two of them at once.

    I needed some way to bring back my French without actually having to work at it, and I found it in the form of television.
    Continue reading →

    How to learn the alphabet in any language

    Cyrillic_Alphabet

    Alphabets (and syllabaries) are the first barrier of entry to any new language. If you want to learn a language like Russian, you’re basically paralyzed until you’re familiar with its letters. But even if you’re learning a language with familiar characters, like Italian, you’re going to feel uncomfortable and wobbly at first; those familiar characters aren’t particularly familiar in words like “zaino” (pronounced dzaino), “gli” (pronounced ʎi) or “cena” (pronounced tʃena).

    I’ve always liked learning alphabets; while I don’t know more than 10 words of Hebrew, my seven years of Hebrew school did leave me with a decent ability to read the Hebrew alphabet. Yay. I had a similar experience in Russian back in high school. For me, alphabets seem to stick in my brain when nothing else will.

    But if learning a new alphabet doesn’t sound like a fun way to spend your weekend, what can you do? This article is about one simple idea: How to learn the alphabet in any language quickly, and how to remember it for good. 

    Continue reading →

    8 Ways to Create Better Flashcards

    Create better flashcards

    Create better flashcardsI’m an Anki nut. In some sense, I owe three of my languages to Anki. One of my favorite things about Anki is its flexibility; you can make flashcards in any way you choose.

    Once you’ve created and memorized a lot of flashcards (I recently passed 20,000 flashcards…geesh), you’ll start to notice that not all cards are created equal. Some flashcards are easy to remember, they teach you precisely what you want to learn, and they generally make you smile when you see them. Others make you want to throw your smartphone out the window. Good flashcards can make the difference between sticking with a language until fluency or giving up after a few months, so I’m making this guide to help others learn from some of my terrible, terrible flashcard-related mistakes.

    Continue reading →