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Wellness Wednesday for April 24, 2024

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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I want to get a sense of how to grok a language (Ideally English as a non-English speaker) really well in a short amount of time, including the grammar.I want to help kids from underpirvleved backgrounds learn the language. I tried to look into how French diplomats do it and did not find anything worthwhile. Watching tv or movies and then reading a grammar book is a bit too long a journey, so I would appreciate if you could guide me to a textbook that can help someone reach good proficiency, including grammar in a short amount of time. I have ero background in linguistics and the only languages I know are those I picked from my surroundings. Even the stuff that works (duolingo) probably works on some core thought process but I want something that is more comprehensive, ideally a book or some texts. I am aware of Comprehensive Input (CI) and the English File series, I was looking at the lingq app trying to see what it is that makes them good. Would appreciate inputs.

Watching tv or movies and then reading a grammar book is a bit too long a journey

I've sometimes spoken with people who grew up in poor villages where they were the only person who could converse in English, and were thus brought to talk with me. This is what all of them did. I've heard an interest in online gaming with a voice chat component is helpful, since it's interactive. Spaced repetition software is helpful for vocabulary. I've never heard of a Best Book for Learning English. At least English is a language with a nearly inexhaustible backlog of possible inputs.