Tower of Babelfish
The Blog

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

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    • Category Archives: Book Updates

    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!)

    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 →

    Workshops at the University of Vienna! (and other news)

    images-3In partnership with the Online School for Unconventional Academics, I’m putting on a day-long language learning workshop at the University of Vienna on March 30th, 2013. (And if there’s enough interest, an additional two workshops in April and May) If any of you are nearby, then check it out! For those of you who aren’t in Vienna, you might find the little workshop website entertaining anyways; there’s a 20 minute interview about language learning methods, and a little demo of my languages.

    Continue reading →

    A Two/Seven minute quiz for *non*-German speakers (and a much overdue update)

    First, the update: The book is chugging along, and will take substantially longer than I had predicted (and will be much better for it!).  So far, I’ve gotten my thoughts, theories and research down on Memory, Pronunciation, Word Learning, Grammar, Vocabulary lists and Mnemonic Use, and the next step (aside from some remaining research and thoughts on Reading/Writing/Listening/Speaking) is reworking it into a friendly, clear presentation that’s an enjoyable book to read (and not a textbook).  As we start cutting textbooky sections out of the book, I’ll be posting them here.

    My current goal, aside from finishing the book, is to provide some high quality pronunciation tools here, because there’s just not very much available that’s easy to use and effective.  

    Continue reading →

    The book is sold!! (And info on site updates for the next 2 months)

    First thing’s first, it’s official!!
     
     
    Here’s the press release: Crown Archetype has preempted World Rights to 28 year old language learning guru Gabriel Wyner’s THINK IN ANY LANGUAGE, which explores how the hundreds of millions of would-be language learners around the world can bypass current methods that clearly don’t work and teach themselves, through a series of easy-to-accomplish steps, how to learn any language now.

    Continue reading →

    The Vowels Video is done! Book Agent, pronunciation help, site updates, la la la.

    Video News: The last English Pronunciation and International Phonetic Alphabet video is done!  Check it out here (or directly on YouTube).  Future videos plans in the short term include: French/German/Italian Pronunciation.  Medium term: Russian Pronunciation.  Longer term: Who knows!

    Pronunciation Help: Once you’ve seen the vowel video, you can use these charts to compare your target language’s vowels to your own vowels.

    Book News: We’re represented!  The wonderful Lisa DiMona at Lark Productions is representing the book, and the final final proposal is just about ready!

    Site Updates: A few minor repairs, corrections and organizational fixes.  Added StumbleUpon buttons (go click them! Yay!).  A reader found a nice concise Spanish pronunciation guide that I’ve added to the Spanish section.  I’ve found some neat Chinese resources (for learning tones and entering characters), and I’ve put them up on the Learn Mandarin Chinese page.