KUASAI 20 BAHASA POPULER DUNIA

After a very long time-consuming break, i finally could finish reading some excellent inspiring learning-languages books. And today, i’d like to share the excitement of reading one of those books to you 🙂

Well, the book i just finished to read was “Kuasai 20 Bahasa Populer Dunia” published by Panda Media. The content was mostly about “inroduction” to learn 20 foreign languages and was written to be suitable for most readers.

There are 10 “main” chapters and 1 “specific” chapter discussed in 226 pages. The first 10 chapters mostly talk about the benefits of learning new languages and the methods to learn foreign language, while the 1 specific chapter in the end of the book talks about 20 foreign languages you can start to learn.

The 20 foreign languages explained in this book are English, Chinese, Greek, Esperanto, Germany, Dutch, Russian, Malay, Persian, Turkish, Japanese, Italian, Arabic, Spanish, France, Hebrew, Hindi, Portuguese, Korean, and Romanian. Here in the last chapter, you can read about the history of a language, its relationship with another language, alphabet system, and also the culture of its origin country.

Why it’s important to learn foreign language?

Copyright: noche / 123RF Stock Photo

This book explains that mastering one or more foreign languages bring a lot of proven benefits: stay healthy, access to new knowledge, carrier improvement, etc.

Read more about the benefits of learning foreign languages here.

What language(s) should I learn?

Learning a new language is always dilemmatic—especially out of school. I am learning Italian now, and there were many backgrounds that finally forced me to learn Italian than Japanese and Korean—yeah, I once wanted to learn Japanese. 🙂

And, to start learning new language(s) you will need a bunch of reasons/motivation: study abroad, travel around the globe, the similarity of target language with our own language or the ease of target language, etc. After you find your “most suitable” motivation, you need to start to find the perfect language for you to learn. And, this book will reveal what language(s) you should learn. Not only that, the easiest and the hardest languages to learn are also revealed.

What do I need to learn a new language?

Dictionary, comprehensive text book, vocabulary book, native speaker, course, and internet are only tools. Which one do you really need as your “ultimate weapon”? The book offers better and wiser method to accompany your first days of learning new language.

What else?

For me, it is a very light-to-read book that must be owned by whoever: students of high school, university students, teachers, and WHOEVER! Learning a language is fun and brings a lot of incredible benefits. And in the market, this book is one of good “starter packs” to know about secret of learning foreign languages that suitable for most readers.

MENERJEMAHKAN DUNIA: IF YOU ARE AN ENGLISH TEACHER, THIS IS A MUST-READ BOOK FOR YOU!

Menerjemahkan Dunia is a book authored by Mr. Dewantoro Ratri that tells us mostly about how to be a “good English teacher” based on his bulk teaching experiences. The book contains 202 pages with very “light” language, using informal daily conversation style (plus a lot of humor) so readers wouldn’t get bored reading it till the end.

The book tells us about the process of Mr. Dewantoro to be an English trainer—more than to be an ordinary English teacher. On his journey to succeed like nowadays, he met a lot of inspiring people and in his book, he shares all the stories.

The book is consisting of 7 main chapters with some sub-chapters each. Here in this post, I’d like to “expose” my 4 most favorite sub-chapters with a few of words. I hope you’ll buy the book and experience the amazing of Menerjemahkan Dunia.

WANNA DOWNLOAD STORIES IN AUDIO FORMAT FOR LISTENING PRACTICE?

It’s getting harder for me to steal a few hours in the middle of my recent activities, even only to write a short post for this blog. But I had promised myself that posting an article here is as important as my endless daily routines.

In this occasion, I just want to share you about a very nice site where you can take some benefits from.

Do you often need narrative texts to help you teach your students or just as an exercise for yourselves?

Do you often need an audio podcast to train your students or even just to train your listening capability?

If the answers are “YES”, then maybe you want to visit http://www.storynory.com/. There, you are not only able to read various English short stories, fables, and fairy tales by famous writers, but you can also listen to the audio format of the stories and download the audio for later use—free of charge!

Are you interested? Go to http://www.storynory.com/ now and have a nice day!

THINGS YOUR ENGLISH BOOKS DON’T TELL YOU

For about a month ago, I bought a very interesting book entitled “Things Your English Books Don’t Tell You” from Buku Kita. The book contains a lot of information that can be rarely found in the common English text books (and also in the classroom).

The contents of the book were actually a compilation of tweets by @englishtips4u. But, although the book was “developed” from tweets on Twitter, it doesn’t literally mean that the book only contains short sentences as on Twitter. So, would you like to read further about the book? Here we go:

ARE YOU (STILL) WASTING YOUR TIME WATCHING FOREIGN LANGUAGE MOVIES TO TRAIN YOUR FLUENCY?

It’s a new year term here in Indonesia (actually, it was started on last Monday and this week they are having 2 weeks of holiday before they come back to their class on August 4^th). So, every student is in their new class today and their “level” of English will be one level higher, yeah!!! 🙂

Well, by the way, how many methods have you applied to boost your / your student’s English skills? And, which method you enjoy most? Pardon? Watching English movies? That’s awesome! I love it too. And really, watching English movies to boost our English skills is pretty helpful. I often get new sentences for particular condition, new expressions to express feelings, and even bad languages! But really, watching English movies always give me new experience and I am sure it works on you too. Am I right?