Quick update for those of you who care:

After spending weeks trying to configure a replacement for Ask Antimoon, I’ve convinced myself that the project is not really worth the effort. I’ve got to face the facts here: the site never took off the way I hoped it would. The number of visitors was minuscule next to the total number of Antimoon visitors and, while there was an upward trend, it was barely detectable. I know there was a small group of people who really liked Ask Antimoon (I still get enquiries from former users). There were also some insightful discussions there and I’m sorry they’re no longer accessible. Still, setting up, maintaining and administering Ask Antimoon takes really unpleasant work. Since I suck at making money on the Interwebs, there would be zero financial payoff to that work. Of course I like doing stuff for the community, but I think my time is better spent on things other than providing and policing a discussion board.

I apologize to those of you who were waiting for the site to come back up. And no, there will be no revival of the old forum. No way I’m going back to that level of discussion.

I spent a week improving the pronunciation section of How to learn English. The main pronunciation page now contains more concrete advice.

I plan to make several updates to the pronunciation section in the near future. Here’s the first one: Learn to pronounce English words as soon as possible. The gist of the article is that you shouldn’t put off studying English pronunciation because doing so puts you at risk of developing fossilized mistakes (bad habits). The article also explains the concept of “getting it right in your head” when pronouncing English words.

I needed to find an online vowel chart for English, but I couldn’t find one I liked, so I made one myself. Here it is: English vowel chart

Danilo writes:

I was raised and spent my whole childhood and school years in Serbia where I graduated from the faculty of Pharmacy. Six moths ago I moved to Germany. I am looking for job opportunities here.

All of a sudden everyone expects me to be fluent in German because they heard that immersion is going to do wonders. My wife is also here and she came a year and a half ago but she is still not fluent in German. We both understand a lot of things but we make mistakes when we speak and we have problems to “find the words” during conversation.

No one is forcing us to speak in German and we speak mostly English at home because we have a roommate from Netherlands.

What really bugs me is the pressure from language schools (where I had 28 classes with 20 people who can barely say anything normal or without a lot of mistakes) and my family. Somehow, everyone thinks that we should magically pick up phrases and start talking effortlessly and correctly only because we are in Germany. (…)

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Dan writes:

I’m trying to use your method to better learn Spanish. I speak some Spanish having lived abroad for a couple years, but I can’t watch a movie, read a book, or participate in a conversation without getting lost very quickly. I have tried to start “getting input” – reading a book, watching a movie, or playing a videogame in Spanish, however it’s very difficult and confusing and like I said – I  get lost pretty quick. And this is with enough skill with the language that I can “get by” (ask questions, order food, etc.) in Spanish already.

I’m sure you’ve counseled people in the past who’ve started out with a language at the very beginning or at least earlier than me. What am I missing? Is it just patience to pore through movies and books and make whatever sense of them I can for much more time? Or is there some other method I should be supplementing at the very beginning (e.g. Pimsleur) until I am able to get through a movie & use a Spanish-Spanish dictionary?

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