MSI Press Blog

  Excerpt from  Think Yourself into Becoming a Language Learning Super Star Tactics and Strategies   Making Errors Making Errors   Good learners make mistakes and errors. Lots of them. They are risk-takers, and risk-takers take missteps. An important difference between good learners and poor learners is that good learners embrace mistakes and learn from them whereas poor students are afraid to make mistakes, try to avoid them, generally make more from nervousness, and end up both speaking less and failing to develop good speaking skills. In gaining control over your mistakes, understanding the difference between mistake and error is critical. Mistakes occur when you produce something that is not correct by accident; you know how it should be said or written, but you experience a brain glitch so that out slips a misspelling, a wrong form, or a wrong word. Errors occur when you don’t know how something should be said or written, and you guess wrong. Both mistakes and errors are

  Excerpt from  Think Yourself into Becoming a Language Learning Super Star Tactics and Strategies   Sharpening Your Skills Sharpening your skills means becoming better at reading, writing, listening, and speaking. (For this book, we will leave translation and interpretation out of the equation; those are special skills for individuals who have already gained considerable proficiency in the language, but if your goal is to be a translator or interpreter, yes, indeed, you will have another set of skills to sharpen.) Your strategies for sharpening your skills are going to look differently depending upon your reason for studying your language. Your tactics for reaching your strategic goals, commonly also considered learning strategies, [1] will also differ depending upon your goal.   Strategies Before you can decide how to go about improving your reading, writing, listening, and speaking, you need to identify to what extent you need each of these skills and how well you have to be able t