Aardbei
New Member
Posts: 8
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Age: 23
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Post by Aardbei on Jan 26, 2018 12:15:48 GMT
For those of you who learn/have learned (a) language(s) in your life, how do/did you go about it? Share your language learning methodology! I'm very interested in different ways of language learning and have spent a lot of time exploring them. I personally have been fascinated with the general idea of using aligned texts and audio for study and practice. One form of this is parallel books + audio. I've been really interested in the ideas associated with a method known as "Listening Reading". The main idea as I understand it and have have applied it is that you develop listening comprehension by listening while reading ahead a translation and/or transcription of what you are about to hear in order to prime your mind to parse what it's about to hear. I've tried it with with a few languages and I've had mostly positive experiences with it! I get the sense that it's most effective with languages for which you have a basic mental schema already in place, such as a language reasonably related to one you are already familiar with, or otherwise a language that you've already developed basic familiarity with. In practice though, I've actually spent most of time with a slowed down, more "intensive" style version of it, where I will listen to selected chunks of audio repeatedly while trying my darndest to comprehend what I'm hearing. One of the things I find fascinating about it is the natural occurence of spaced repetition. Simply by extensive exposure to language words and phrases are presented to you at a rate proportional to their frequency (and therefore importance). Along these lines, another thing I find interesting is that, by the idiolect of the author of the text, certain words and phrases naturally repeat themselves in your specific text, so before long you'll become well aquainted with the language is it's used by that author and/or as it's used in that genre. And in being mentally overwhelmed by the amount of new words and phrases that you are exposed to given a text that is well above your natural comprehension level, your attention will naturally be first allocated to the words that occur most frequently (and therefore which are most important to learn first in order to develop your general ability to understand the language as used by the text, the idiom). Another form of aligned text that I think is *super* convenient is movies and TV with captions and subtitles! It's fairly easy to find subtitles for videos in multiple languages and pair the languages together for a rough multilingual translation matched up with the audio from the video! I've tried using this using programs such as Subs2Srs and Substudy in order to do the pairing, and the well known SRS software Anki for practicing listening to them. Sometimes I'll "mine" vocabulary words from any ol' text I can find and make a list and memorize their meanings and then go back and read the text in order to put the vocabulary back in context. In general, my interest in language learning is focused on listening comprehension. I find it a very thrilling experience being able to understand things through the sounds of other languages. So I find myself spending less time learning to speak and write. Although I do find that given the ability to understand what I hear, that speaking and writing become more natural on their own. I always feel like my writing/speaking ability in German for example gets a nice short-term boost after listening to German I can understand for a while. While it doesn't make all my mistakes go away, it does make it feel more intuitive to do. A long time ago I drew these diagrams demonstrating language learning as I had conceived of it at the time:
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Shazouzu
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Meta-Ethnicity: Austronesian-Daic
Ethnicity: 1/2 Ilocano 1/2 Tagalog
Y-DNA: C-M130
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Religion: Solipsism
Hero: René Descartes
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Post by Shazouzu on Mar 13, 2018 4:16:30 GMT
Immersion..live in the country where said language is primarily spoken. And being exposed to said language at a very young age.
Or an intense language course with persistent study often works.
Personally I find learning in stride often helps...for instance if the language you want to pursue learning is Spanish then surf websites where the language is used and learn as you go along; read posts on social media from people who speak the language and try to deciper text which may seem cryptic at first.
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falconh
Junior Member
Posts: 83
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Post by falconh on Jun 4, 2018 13:42:42 GMT
I can speak like 5+ Languages. If I'm interested to learn any language I would Prefer to get in contact with those persons who are able to speak that language just by interacting with those guys became of the best source to learn any language and this method helped for me all the time.
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