Language Learning Techniques | Linguists' corner | Forum

Nithin1997 said:

The only language ive learned so far is Spanish. For this one I had the advantave of learning it in School
And having a private tutor. I also tried to immserse myself in Spanish.

The same is true for me. There were also Mexican exchange students that came to my school for a semester (after I had already been in classes for a year and then had a private tutor on Skype over the Christmas holidays), and they were a great source of practice. Regarding immersion, I listened and still listen to Hispanic groups like Orishas, Molotov and Pitbull (his Armando album, the rest is mostly in English) all the time, as well as reading articles on languages endangered by Spanish (this interests me a lot, and there's a lot out there on stuff like Quechua and Nahuatl and so on) and other elements of linguistics and sociolinguistics, setting my browser to Spanish and so on.

At the moment I'm learning Dutch, and I've been taking any chance to speak I can. One of my friends is a native speaker who moved over to Australia at the age of 12, so I occassionally chat with him. I'm on break now, so I've been trying to get as much input as I can. I've been translating Dutch songs, reading posts on forums, and so on. Then, I've been popping the vocabulary I find in context into Anki. It's actually amazing how well this works! With just a few hours a day I'm now feeling that a conversational level is not too far out of reach, even though a week ago I felt like I was almost at 0.

I watched Find My Family in Dutch on SBS2 recently and although I didn't use my knowledge of the language to understand the program, the English subtitles over the Dutch dialogue allowed me to easily absorb cognates and also consolidate all the stuff I did know, seeing old words in newer contexts. I think lots and lots of comprehensible input, coupled with conversation practice and spaced repetition is working great.

In other words, media --> translation of said media --> memorization of vocabulary in Anki --> conversation practice with friends (along with Lang-8 and Livemocha, as well as making posts in Dutch on the forum Unilang) is my method. I think that if I focused just on input I would learn a lot more slowly, and would be frustrated after seeing a word 4 times and not memorizing it. But when I've used flaschards on their own (downloading flaschard packs from other people on Anki) the words have seemed almost alien and were much harder to retain. So hearing or reading the word first in context and then memorizing it seems to work wonders.

I just downloaded Google Chrome in Dutch as well,  and we'll see how much I learn from that. It definitely helped when I had my previous browser in Spanish, and now my Firefox is in Serbian. I'm going to alter between Google Chrome and Firefox so that I can maintain my passive Serbian knowledge and also develop my Dutch vocabulary.

I try to do the following four things in the target language every day:

- speak
- read
- write
- listen

Speaking, well, you already know from Benny why it might help
Reading is good for new vocab and for kind of subconsciously absorbing grammar.
Writing is good for forcing you to produce sentences, vocabulary, etc. without the "real time" pressure of speaking.
Listening is good for training your comprehension. 

I also try to do grammar excercises from a book, or memorize vocab using Anki, but those are the first things I "forget" if I don't have time, because the speaking/reading/writing/listening helps me so much more.

I did French in school for 5 years and apparently I was pretty good. But I find languages in schools are far too technical, I never liked the technique of matching the person to the the correct form of a verb and past participles and blah blah blah. Forming sentences like that didn't feel natural, it was kind of robotic and didn't like it at all. Maybe that's why, after a year of not doing French at all, I can't seem to remember how to form grammatical sentences anymore…

Now that I'm teaching myself Norwegian, I'm approaching it differently. When I read things online, I'm seeing and learning phrases then trying to apply the form I've seen there to my own sentences. So I'm learning bits of phrases then combining the pieces in different ways to say different things. Maybe this isn't a correct way of doing it because I'm not a language expert but it feels better to me!

Also, I second the person who said "sing". I seem to be learning most of my vocab, and sometimes grammar, from the band Kaizers Orchestra! It seems to work even though I find myself talking and writing in a Jæren dialect, even without meaning to.

I'm a proponent of the input method. I mostly listen to English a lot—I'm too lazy to open a book about grammar.

I listen to crazy amounts of English every day. It seems to help—I feel like my listening comprehension has improved a lot over the last months.

Kevinpost said:

Learning a language is like fighting a guerrilla war, your band of guerrilla fighters are trying to overthrow a corrupt regime (aka achieve fluency) made up of strange grammatical structures, thousands of vocabulary words armed to the teeth, pronunciation and thousands of expressions that don't take prisoners. Your band of guerrilla fighters are seriously outnumbered and outgunned knowing that it will take some time to overthrow the regime. All you are armed with starting out is passion and dedication but it's not enough; they will have to be creative to defeat the enemy. In guerrilla law anything can be used to help you achieve your mission. Turkish TV online, taking a class, immersion, conversation partners, Turkish music, newspapers, grammar books, signs at a national park or even a candy rapper can be crucial in achieving the goal of fluency.

I like this metaphor! Likening it to an army makes learning sound extreme and it's true that little insignificant things are still useful. Even if you just learn the word for 'orange' in a day, you are then able to ask for an orange. +1 point for the fluency war!

I like this too:)

It's like – don't sit and wait for the language to come to you – go out there and conquer it.

And using everything you can find to learn is much more fun than sitting with a grammar book or word list.

I think there's no one way, because there are many kinds of learners. Some find it most helpful to be in a structured class, others to go out in the street and learn directly from the immersive experience. Most of us are somewhere in between. I think the challenge for each learner is to find the best way for them, especially since on every side there are people telling us, "my method is best," "my method is the only way," "my method will magically make you fluent in no time at all."

Stephanie

Elanguest