Mello Method Books

I have written some teaching books for several languages, all of them are based on modern and traditional language concepts, but at the moment they are available only for schools.

Read More

How to choose a language school or Methods of self study

Stop looking at, start speaking!

This week I have been organizing some of my books and I have found some "pearls", that are some old books from the last century, that I have been collecting since I was a child, because my dream is to establish museum of the foreign language in my city. It is really funny to observe how good were the old books, they could not have a great design and funny cartoons, but the content is undoubtedly further better then the majority we have available in the language market nowadays. Sometimes my pupils bring me the material they used in the former school, or with the former teacher, and I get astonished to realize how bad they are, and I can easily find out why the majority of learners who study in language centres seldom reach their goals, obviously the fault is not entirely on the books, but it is partly their fault, the language market is only interested in the money, they are not truly interested in the language, sometimes they do not know nothing about methodology and claim themselves experts.

People really do not know how to choose a foreign language school or teacher, they simply believe in their claims and empty words and apply for the course, but it is exactly for this reason that the "learningless process" starts, bad teacher, bad books, no methodology and a lot of money and time invested, year after year until the person gives up, and starts the belief of inability.

People have no idea how to choose self-teaching books not even language school or teacher, here I will share some tips:

How to choose a language School:

1-when you go to know the school or methodology, do not accept to go only to the basic lesson, ask them to watch an advanced lesson in order to be sure that the school does what it promises, if the students in that advanced group is not speaking in a flow, give up immediately of the school.

2- observe if they only have foreigners as teachers, in fact to be a native is not a symptom of ability to teach, sometimes a non native teacher, but with experience is far better than a native with NO experience in teaching.  Sometimes people insist in the need of a native speaker as a teacher, but knowledge is no use without ability to teach it.

3- if you decide to study by yourself the choice of the material is a critical part of the whole process, as it will be through it that you will learn the language, so you have to decide your form to learn the language. Some people prefer to learn by reading, others by listening, and some others by speaking. You can check on the Internet about various method available, for sure there are good reviews and specialist's opinion, as there are a lot of methods the only form to discover which one is the best for you is by discovering the way your brain prefers to learn, that is, if it prefers to learn by reading, listening, writing or doing, or even with some of those.

The language material marketing is really huge, we have material for “all the tastes and wallets”, some are free of charge and amazingly fantastic, some are incredibly expensive and ridiculously bad, in the bookshops we become doubtful in front of the large amount of

material, so how to overcome this problem? Many linguists, polyglots and experienced language learner have been trying a lot to evaluate the quality of materials, but we have never arrived in middle term, some love certain material while others hate the same ones.

So, I will suggest you the material I use to learn new languages, I promise in the future make a detailed review about such courses:

I particularly use the following:

Assimil Series (perfect for the step by step approach)

Colloquial Series (perfect for the grammar)

Teachyourself series (perfect for the grammar and activation system)

Pimsleur Audios (perfect for no-reading moments)

Michel Thomas audios and methodology on the whole (perfect for putting everything together and start speaking).

Lonely planet – phrasebooks (perfect to have in your pocket all day long).

So, these are my favourite methods, not necessarily in this order, nowadays I am working in a challenge to try Pimsleur Method so you can check old posts to know more about it. Later on I will do reviews about the others.

Please, do not hesitate to post any comments, send me an email, or even vist my channel in youtube  

Read More

Are you afraid of Hungarian Language?

Let's see some facts about Hungarian Language:
The Hungarian language is really interesting, but it is also a very dificult language to learn, as it has almost no conections with other languages I have previously studied, because most of the languages I have studied are from the German and Latim (Romance) families, and a few from slavic languages, so if I put them together I will not recognise not more than 25% of Hungarian, that is a language in complete darkness, see more details in the table below.

Origin of word roots in Hungarian[1]
Uncertain			30%
Finno-Ugric			21%
Slavic			20%
German			11%
Turkic			9.5%
Latin and Greek			6%
Romance			2.5%
Other known			1%

[1] A nyelv és a nyelvek ("Language and languages"), edited by István Kenesei.

Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest, 2004, ISBN 963-05-7959-6, p. 134)

I also found a blog that treated the difficulty of Hungarian, according to the blog Hungarian  is one os the 10th most difficult languages in the world:

The hardest languages to learn overall

1.Mandarin
2.Polish
3.Arabic
4.Hungarian
5.Japanese
6.English
7.Finnish
8.Basque
9.Lithuanian
10.Icelandic

Source:lexiophiles link here.

And now, will you join us in the challenge of learning Hungarian with Pimsleur?
I have been preparing a video to share what I have achieved so far, coming soon. 

Read More