Focus Language School: Chicago & Phoenix

Learning a language is a journey. It reveals landscapes you have not yet seen.  It teaches you how to think in new ways.  It enriches your self-knowledge and helps to free you from the unreasoned assumptions of your own culture.  It is exciting and fun.  It requires preparation, endurance and humor.  It makes you face your beliefs about learning and reveals your own emotional undertones.
Learning a language most resembles learning how to dance, play a sport or practicing martial arts.  It is fundamentally a physical activity.  It involves discipline, training and perseverance.  It requires establishing good fundamental habits.  Understanding… Continue reading

I would like you to to think of  language learning as a sport for a moment.  We could have used war, dance or even the playing of a musical instrument as our example.  All require coordinated knowledge and practice.

There is a mental aspect to a sport.  The captain of a sport team must know the rules of the game and he must know the various plays his team will use.  Without that knowledge, he cannot function properly.  This is  the learning aspect.  He and his teammates must then learn to put these rules and plays dynamically into practice… Continue reading

Verbs are perhaps the most basic and powerful of all words.  They literally allow you to control time, move through space and interact with people and objects.  Knowing how to use verbs will give you the most freedom and the greatest sense of mastery of your new language.
The key elements in learning to use verbs are the following;

First learn some verbs as vocabulary words.  In other words, you want to recognize their meaning easily when you see or hear them
Understand how they work.  You might learn, for example, that in Spanish “prefiero” means “I prefer”, and… Continue reading

Once you have spent some concentrated creative time learning the sounds of a new language, you will absorb it more easily.  Focus, organize yourself and learn the sounds!  Here are some ideas on how to do this.
Listen carefully to each sound and mimic it as closely as you can.  Your neurocortical pathways or your sense of propriety may at first be surprised, but this is the quickest and best way to absorb new sounds.  Listen to the music of the new language:  it is different from the music of your mother tongue.  It has a unique way of raising and… Continue reading

When we begin a new language project, we are usually filled with energy and with our desire to complete it successfully.  As time passes, as other concerns come into our life, or as we run into obstacles, we may slow down or even  feel like stopping studying and practicing.  This is a normal ocurence, and something we want to deal with as successful language students.

The key here is to keep things going no matter what, but to do it in an enjoyable way.  You may no longer have as much time or energy to devote to your language… Continue reading

Welcome to Focus language School’s  blog.  We hope that you will find many articles to help you shine as language students and linguists.  Learning a new language is a wonderful journey, one that enriches our life experience and our ability to connect with new people and cultures. Here you will find many ideas, techniques and tricks of the trade which we have developed and encountered on our own language learning journeys.

Our school is  opening a new location in the Chicago area in 2010. We will naturally maintain our school in Phoenix.  Here is a link to