Knowledge of a language means being able to communicate – being able to say things and being able to understand what other people are saying. For example, if you can say a few words in English, it doesn’t mean you can speak it fluently, but at least you can say something. Your ability to communicate will get better as your vocabulary gets larger. So how many words do you need to speak a foreign language? Most everyday conversations involve words…
Having language skills means being able to both understand and produce language by writing and speaking. In this third part of our blog series, we will focus our attention on writing. Even though I definitely encourage you to actually start speaking the language you are learning from day one, it might feel too scary. Writing might seem like a safer option, and that’s completely okay. In fact, it can be a really good idea to write down some simple scripts…
Today we will continue with our blog series “The four cornerstones of language learning”. The previous part of the series focused on improving listening comprehension, and today we will dig into reading. Reading helps you to comprehend many aspects of language. You will learn different sentence structures and typical expressions from different texts. This happens unconsciously, and will also help you with listening and writing skills as the structures of the language become second nature. If you want to improve your…
You are now reading the first part of our “The four cornerstones of language learning” blog series. In this series, you will learn how to improve your language skills through four basic areas of language learning: listening, reading, writing and speaking. The topic of the first part is listening skills. Listening skills are one of the main cornerstones of your language skills. If you want to be able to have a conversation with people, you need to understand what they…
WordDive’s handy English and Spanish grammar pages have received fantastic feedback from users. Now we are proud to present WordDive’s free-to-use Finnish grammar page. You might have heard a few jokes about how complicated Finnish grammar is, but don’t be scared by the several cases or different verb forms. WordDive has selected 10 important grammar topics for you and put together easy-to-understand Finnish grammar instructions. It’s important to know some basic grammar rules when you start learning a new language,…
Francisco Pelluz, 29, first ended up coming to Finland in 2010 as an exchange student because it was “really far” from his home, Seville in southern Spain. Finland’s reputation as an IT country and the fact that Finns speak good English were the other motivators. First he decided to concentrate on improving his English. “It wasn’t difficult to understand people but it was difficult to express my ideas. I understood everything but had a feeling that I’d like to say…
