One of the reasons why we don’t always progress with a second language in the way we would like to is that we don’t always talk enough. This is a vital part of the process but one which can be difficult to start. You might be worried about making a mistake but mistakes are part of the learning process and simply can’t be avoided. At some point you need to pluck up the courage to start talking more. The sooner you do this the better and you will find that working with a native speaking teacher from Language Trainers helps you build up your confidence quickly in this respect. Once you get into the habit of speaking a lot in your second language nothing will stop you from improving your linguistic skills.
Try a Different Approach
If what you are doing isn’t working then it might be time to try something else. This sounds like a fairly obvious piece of reasoning but it is something which can really hold back your progress if you don’t consider it early on enough. Maybe you need to adopt a more hands on approach, for instance. It might be that you are learning on your own with a book or on the internet and need to think about taking at least a few more formal classes to get started. If this is the case then you could get started by asking something like; where can I take Chinese classes in Toronto? You might be surprised to see how easy it is to get classes on just about language in just about any city in North America.
When they plan to learn a foreign language most people probably don’t fully appreciate that this is the start of a lifetime of learning. One of the great things about studying a second language is that you can carry on picking up new words and phrases while having fun long after you have learned the basics.
However, the hardest part of all may be at the very beginning, when you might get frustrated at what you see to be a lack of progress on your part. If this is the case then here are some tips to see if you can increase your learning speed.
Take a Trip
Ideally, you will have the chance to take a trip somewhere you can speak your new language with the locals. Clearly the language you are studying and where you live are the two factors which are most going to influence whether this is possible or now. Having said that, a bit of lateral thinking might help you come up with interesting solutions even when this appears to be impossible. For example, if you can’t go to Latin America then you could practice your Spanish taking classes in Miami!
Following on from an earlier blog post about learning to read and write Korean in 15 minutes, I recently found this entry on software programmer and keen traveler Martin Amor’s blog about learning to read Thai script in 24 hours (over a period of a week).
Martin, who describes himself as “the direct opposite of a language buff”, was originally overwhelmed with the thought of learning Thai, but was pleasantly surprised to find that he made very fast progress once he set his mind to it.
Though it’s generally known as the “Thai alphabet”, the language is in fact an abugida: which is a writing system in which every consonant may invoke an inherent or implied vowel sound.
Martin’s technique for learning to read and write Thai script involves learning the consonants – of which there are 44 – in groups of 7. Once he was comfortable with reading and writing those, he moved on to the 8 vowels in the Thai script, taking great care to learn how to pronounce them properly.
Like several Asian languages like Mandarin, Thai is a tonal language, so Martin’s next step was to practice what he had learned so far and combine that with the correct intonations, learning each of the 5 tones.
This sounds like a lot of work, but Martin – a self-confessed beginner with little to no language aptitude – achieved it in less than 24 hours over a period of a week. The end of the week involved him being able to read through a children’s book in Thai – a very satisfying experience for somebody so new to such an unfamiliar script!
For the full story on Martin’s first week of learning Thai, check out his blog.
My own experience of learning to read Mandarin is a different case – it takes a long time to learn to read and write Chinese characters, as each one represents its own object, concept or thought, and you also need to learn how to pronounce it along with the character, as the character itself gives no clue. I took Chinese lessons in Toronto and found them very useful. Canadians considering going through the same experience should take a look at some of the Chinese lessons Vancouver has to offer!
September 28, 2012 at 8:21 am
· Filed under languages, learning advice · Posted by Matthew Fallon
As somebody trying to increase my fluency in another language, people like this simultaneously gain my unbridled respect as well as pure jealousy. British polyglot Richard Simcott speaks 16 (yes, 16 languages), most of which are at a near-fluent level.
For me, the most impressive thing is not so much the number of languages, but the linguistic diversity of them. Many polyglots can bolster their numbers by gaining fluency in languages closely related to one another (e.g. Spanish, Italian and French), but Simcott’s expertise is impressively far-reaching. His spoken languages include Romance languages like Italian, Spanish, French and Romanian, but he has also gained mastery of Slavic tongues like Czech, Serbian and Russian, Germanic languages like Dutch and German, Scandinavian languages such as Swedish, and even Welsh, a Celtic tongue.
Watch the video above (make sure to turn annotations on for closed captions!) to hear him seamlessly switch between languages and deliver an incredibly proficient blurb in each language, with his accent switching effortlessly to accommodate the phonemes of the different tongues.
It seems that his undying passion (and considerable talent) for learning languages isn’t the only thing that has helped Simcott reach such an impressive spoken level in all these languages – a variety of studying abroad and job placements around Europe, a Macedonian wife, a Welsh heritage… all of these factors has encouraged him to gain proficiency in a wide variety of languages, and his achievements are certainly inspirational to anybody who is trying to improve their language skills, even if like me it’s only in one language!
I discovered this fascinating infographic this morning, which was created by Kaplan International but for some reason has since been removed from their site. The subject matter is how non-native English speakers learn English.
Unsurprisingly, immersion learning is the most popular form of learning English – 65% of people asked said that the best way to learn English is to move to an English-speaking country and take lessons there.
It’s interesting how much the media helps non-native English speakers improve their English – a large percentage of English learners are aided by popular sitcoms like Friends and How I Met Your Mother, and movies like the Harry Potter series. It just goes to show that most media in your target language – TV shows, movies, radio, and even comic books and video games – can really help improve your day-to-day comprehension.
Here’s the full infographic – hope you all find it as interesting as I did!
I read this fascinating article recently on how our current method of learning languages is essentially ‘broken’, in that it focuses way too much on learning grammar and not enough on actually immersing yourself in the language.
There are plenty of parts of the article I could quote, but the one that really stuck with me is this sentence:
Grammar rules are what fluent speakers use to describe what they already know.
Think about it: how many native English speakers actually have a good knowledge of grammar, unless they have learned a foreign language to a reasonably high level at some point? How many would be able to describe the difference between the active and passive voice, or the indicative or subjunctive mood? When you learn a language natively, you learn the grammar afterwards, and it gives context to the framework you have already learned. Learning grammar helps with reading and writing, but if you’re learning a language with the primary focus of speaking and listening, the importance of grammar falls by the wayside.
So there it is – don’t get caught up in all the grammar – it’ll help with your all round linguistic knowledge and help you contextualize what you’ve already learned; but if you want to learn the language, you should get practicing your speaking, listening, reading and writing.
One of the most boring parts of learning a new language is expanding your vocabulary beyond the standard, basic words that you use daily. However, without having a good, all-rounded vocabulary, improving your general fluency is next to impossible, and you’ll always be limited in your range of conversational topics.
Language resource site transparent.com aims to help people improve their vocabulary by giving you a new word in your target language every day, along with a pronunciation guide, its meaning, and an example of its usage.
The site supports a wide variety of foreign languages, and while one word per day doesn’t seem like much, it all adds up. You’re not going to learn a language overnight, so it pays to have something like this helping you to slowly increase your overall vocabulary.
Artist and traveller Ryan Estrada recently created a comic that claims to teach readers how to read the Korean alphabet – known to Koreans as Hangul – in around 15 minutes. Obviously practice will help you remember what you’ve learned, but the basis for the ease of learning is that Korean’s alphabet is actually extremely simple.
Though users of the Roman alphabet tend to freak out when they see a different writing system – for example Chinese characters, Thai script, or the Cyrillic alphabet – the Korean alphabet has one thing other writing systems don’t: 100% logic.
As opposed to every other writing system, the Korean alphabet was thought up by a single person, who had simplicity in mind. Thanks to this, the Korean alphabet is not only simple and logical, but is very regular: that is to say, if you know that a character is pronounced a certain way, you know that it will always be pronounced that way.
Head over to Ryan Estrada’s Tumblr page to read the comic. Of course, being able to read Korean doesn’t mean you can understand what any of it says, but for those of us interested in learning different alphabets it’s a great find.
For those learning to speak a new language, pronunciation can often be a hurdle. For example, stress is very important in Italian, and learners need to be very clear on which syllable(s) they stress. While most words follow the rules, there are always exceptions, and getting the stress right may be the difference between being understood by a native speaker and being greeted with a look of incomprehension.
While the claim of “all the words in the world, pronounced” is a pretty bold claim, forvo.com is undeniably a pretty impressive achievement. It’s an excellent idea for a website: a crowd-sourced pronunciation guide. Users ask for words they are not sure about to be pronounced, and other users provide recordings demonstrating exactly how they should be said. The recordings are then saved to the site’s database, so if anybody else searches for the same word, they’re taken to the entries that already exist. It’s rather ingenious, and using the site is simple as pie.
In the case of multiple dialects or versions of a language (for example, US vs UK English), the user’s nationality is listed along with the recording, so you can easily distinguish them.
Sometimes great ideas are born, and sometimes they are just clever combinations of existing great ideas. The Language Immersion plugin for Chrome is in the latter category, combining the existing technology of Google Translate and the individual user’s browsing habits to aid language learners.
So, how does it work? The method is actually extremely simple: you tell it what language you want to learn (of the 64 currently supported by Google Translate) and your current familiarity with that language. In turn, when you browse your regular websites the plugin will take specific words or phrases and translate them into the language that you’re learning. This way, you’re learning vocabulary while you browse. If you don’t know the translated word, you can click it to translate it back to English. You can also change the level of immersion on the fly.
While it works better for some languages than for others, this is still a wonderful idea, and a very simple (almost effortless) implementation.
Here’s a video demonstrating the plugin in a little more detail. Download it here. You’ll need to be using Google Chrome as your browser.
Rose Ramraj languagetrainers.com
Rose is a Blogger of all things fascinating. Her educational background is in writing and business studies. She currently lives in New York City with her husband and two mischievous toy poodles.
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