One of the biggest struggles any language learner has is learning new words. This particularly true with English which has one of the biggest vocabularies of any language. But, there are probably fewer words to learn than you might think to get to decent level of comprehensive and communicative ability. The problem is, how do you know how many words you know? How big is your vocabulary?
The idea of learn, extend, create is a major part of triplo. It is used to organise the three types of lessons we teach and is a central idea in our approach to teaching English. But where does it come from, what does it mean and why do we use it? Learn, extend, create, is connected to ideas about designing an effective language course as well as the cognitive process that we use to acquire knowledge. Here we will explain the origins of learn, extend, create and tell you why we think it is important.
Education is changing, it has to change. The world of work is not the same as it was twenty years ago, let alone one hundred and fifty years ago, when mass education was first widely rolled out to provide educated workers for the industrialising world. The problem facing education today is that the knowledge that you learn at school or university is quickly becoming out of date because of the pace of change in technology and the work place. The question then is, what do I need to learn? First of all you need to learn to be a “dynamic learner”, someone who is able to develop their skills and knowledge as needs arise, but more than gaining knowledge, you need to harness four key skills that are transferable across domains - the "Four Cs” of creativity, collaboration, communication, and critical thinking.
Love it or hate it, TOEIC is one of the features of learning English in Japan, and for many people it is necessary for career advancement. Everyone is looking for ways to improve their score, usually with the least amount of effort, so we’ve put together nine tips for improving your score on TOEIC… but some of them do require some effort. We’ll start with the ones that require the least effort.
Knowing when to use a, an and the, is one of the hardest things for Japanese learners, partly because there isn’t an equivalent in Japanese. It came up again in a lesson and so we thought we give you a quick explanation.
An app for this and an app for that. There is a smartphone or web-app for almost everything these days, and they are extremely popular and, in most cases, useful. Of course as learners of English, or any other language, we are looking for ways to make our learning easier and more effective, and there are many popular apps for learning languages. However, the question remains, can you actually learn English through an app? The answer is yes and no. Here’s why.
As adult language we can take advantage of some shortcuts to help speed up the learning process. One simple way is to find words that are almost the same in both languages. This is quite common among languages, such as Spanish and Italian, that have a common origin, but what about with English and Japanese? Of course, you already know the answer: katakana words.
What kind of English lesson do you like? What kind of lesson helps you learn English the best? I’m sure you all have your own ideas about the best way to learn English, and over the years there have been a number of different styles in teaching a second language that have been in and out of fashion in the English classroom. To help you understand some of the approaches that we, and others use, we thought we’d give you a brief review of the popular styles in English teaching, that way you can understand more of what we do and think about what works best for you.
Learning new vocabulary is difficult but there is one technique that you can use to help optimise your ability to remember. In fact it’s something that you’ve probably already used if you have ever you used a language learning app such as DuoLingo, iKnow or Memrise, because they are all based around the same principle. This principle is called “spaced repetition”.
