If you go the AI page, you'll notice that we've revamped it once again! The new page comes with the ability to have multiple passages at once so that, while our AI generates or grades one passage, you can be translating another passage instead of just having to wait. It also comes with a new and improved algorithm that's more natural in its language, less dogmatic in its corrections, better at sticking to your vocabulary, and far faster. Give it a try!
Tongue of Fire is all about giving you control over your own learning: what we call a "trust the user" mentality. Most other language sites are built with a "one size fits all" mentality, teaching exactly the same content to everybody and having everybody complete the same drills in one linear path. At Tongue of Fire, we believe that one size does not fit all, so we strive to return power over your education back to you.
Here, you can learn literally any word you want, whenever you want. We have a recommended curriculum of words, but you are free to skip around it as much as you like and design a vocabulary that's tailor-made for your life.
Also, we've split practice sessions up into individual skills so that you can focus on whichever one you need. Do you need to improve your listening? You can practice that on the AI page for as long as you'd like. Does your conjugation need work? You have unlimited access to those drills on the Conjugation page. Do you want to explore the details of every Chinese character in your words? You can visit the Characters page to learn the written form, pronunciation, or meaning (your choice) of any or all of them.
We're not the only website that gives AI feedback, but we are the only one that does it for free. You never need to spend a dime to get unlimited access to the detailed, thoughtful, and personalized fine-tuning that's possible with AI on Tongue of Fire.
While the other language learning sites are constantly deciding what you need and what you don't, we at Tongue of Fire trust you to make that decision for yourself. We've provided the tools: now it's your choice what to make of them. Whatever you may choose to learn with us, we know it will be spectacular.
Our name is a reference to the Bible in the book of Acts, chapter 2. That passage describes the day of Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit descended on every one of the apostles in the form of a tongue of fire and miraculously enabled them to speak foreign languages that they had never learned. That ability changed their lives and the lives of thousands of others as they traveled the world and spread the good news of Jesus.
We strive to help you discover your own tongue of fire: your God-given capacity to learn and speak whatever language you choose with fluency (regardless of how old you are). While it won't be instantaneous like it was for the apostles, we're convinced that, if you put in regular effort, you can master your language more quickly than you think and use it to travel the world.
As Christians, we also hope that this site can help our Christian users better glorify God by connecting with His children who don't speak English. With your language abilities, you'll be able to be a friend to a lonely exchange student or forge transformative relationships with international communities on mission trips. Language barriers were put in place by humanity's rebellion against God (Genesis 11), but you can help us break them down and replace those barriers with the love of Jesus.
Typing in your target language usually requires you to install a keyboard for that language: not a physical keyboard, but a different digital system for mapping your physical keys to characters. Even if your language uses the Latin alphabet (the same alphabet as English), if it has accent marks, you may still need to install another keyboard to type them. Here's how to do that:
For Windows users:
There are lots of great, psychologically based strategies to memorize vocabulary more quickly. Here are a few:
Just like all skills, your memory will improve as you use it, so don’t be discouraged if it doesn’t come naturally to you. If you combine these four strategies with regular practice, soon you’ll find yourself learning words way faster than you thought you could!
You probably don’t see your words because they’re stored in a different status from the one you’re looking at. Change the value of “Status” in the top right corner and see if they appear. There’s an explanation of what status is in the following question.
Status refers to how well you’ve learned a word. For each language, you have four lists of words, one for each status: To Learn, New, Familiar, and Learned. The status system is designed for you to add words to To Learn, then move words from New to Familiar to Learned as you practice them (click the button on the Word Drills page to do this) to help you stay organized. Here’s an explanation of each status:
You can change your preferences by going to the Preferences page, changing whatever preferences you want, and clicking Save at the bottom of the screen.
To add or archive a language, visit the Preferences page. To add or remove a tense or case, visit the Words page, select your language and type (type should be “conjugation” or “case”), and click Add Tense or Add Case.