(Note: This article is quite obsolete. You should check out my newer articles: Sentence Mining and Spaced Repetition Systems. They go into much better details about the main components of how to learn a language right!)
One of Glowing Face Man's hobbies is language acquisition. That's why today I'm gonna point you in the direction you need to go to learn a language fluently. Most people who want to learn a language take classes for years and it turns out it doesn't even work. You want to be able to speak with native comfort with a native speaker. The classes prepare you to ask directions to the bathroom. In a broken accent.
First we need to disassemble some common misconceptions. First misconception is that it's impossible for adults to learn a new language fluently. This is absolute nonsense, you can learn anything you want to. Just reading my webpage long enough you'll become fluent in every language on earth. But you don't even need to employ such dramatic measures. I'll teach you how to do it on your own.
Next misconception is that there's some kind of one-one correspondence between the vocabularies of the various languages. That is to say, if you pick a random language L and a random English word w, the misconception that L has a word that means w. Or that, when a dictionary says that a certain word in L means w, that this is actually true. No, it's an approximation.
The meaning of a word is the sum of the life experiences the listener has had with that word. Communication is possible because of similar life experiences with similar words. Dictionary correspondences are purely approximations and sometimes they aren't even very great at that.
So how do you learn a word? The best way is to have lots of life experiences with it. But since this is language acquisition, we need an artificial method. Memorizing its closest English approximation isn't gonna cut it. The answer was discovered by a bunch of Polish guys who were teaching themselves English. Their project is called AntiMoon and they made some ingenious discoveries about language acquisition which I will share with you.
To learn a word, learn it in context by making flashcards with sentences using the word, in target language. Don't make these sentences up, get them from sources of native language. Dictionary example sentences are best, if that fails for a particular word, hit google in whatever the target language is.
Try to get sentences as grammatically complex as you can understand. As you suck in more sentences and words it'll get easier because you'll understand more. At first you'll hardly understand anything and your example sentences will come largely from the same sources as your knowledge of grammar. Later you'll become so good that when you encounter grammatical acrobatics youve never even seen before youll be able to just know what they mean. That takes a lot of sentences though.
The above paragraph points out something important. You can't just learn a language by learning the words, you must also learn the grammar and idioms. Depending on the language, more or less grammar will be necessary. For Spanish, you'll be able to get by on very little grammar. For Japanese, lots of grammar will be necessary. Initially (first year or so) you'll want a source on grammar so you can manually force yourself to have academic knowledge of the grammar. This is an unnatural way to acquire grammar, but it's necessary so you can understand sentences, which is necessary to upgrade your grasp on grammar to a more natural level.
So you are reading about grammar and accumulating words by using flashcards with sentences involving those words. Are paper flashcards good enough for this? NO! Here are some of the crippling drawbacks to paper flashcards when you are seriously studying a language...
...1. With the huge number of flashcards you'll end up needing, paper flashcards will be just way too expensive and bulky.
...2. With paper flashcards, once you memorize the flashcard well enough that you think you've "got it", you either discard it or put it in a different pile. In theory the 2nd pile is supposed to be reviewed, but this takes too much discipline. Especially when you start dealing with thousands of cards. In practice what happens is that 2nd pile never gets reviewed. And then you gradually start to lose the knowledge you fought so hard to gain.
...3. If you neglect the language studies for a month, it'll be impossible to easily determine which flashcards need review.
For these reasons you must use a better alternative to flashcards. You must use The Mnemosyne Project. Mnemosyne is a computer program into which you enter flashcards. It keeps the flashcards organized for you and here's the best part. When you look at a flashcard on Mnemosyne, you rate how well you know the flashcard. Mnemosyne then uses some fancy algorithms to determine which cards to show you when. No more discarding learned cards into a huge pile of cards and promising yourself youll get around to reviewing it someday. Mnemosyne takes care of review for you. Basically all your cards stay "active", but studying them doesn't take overly long, because as you go on, eventually the majority of your cards will be well-known. And hence will show up only rarely. On any particular day, almost all the cards Mnemosyne will show you will be relatively new cards you're still unfamiliar with. But cards from the very beginning will still be "alive".
Should you make flashcards for single words? Not really. At first maybe, when you're building a basic foundation of vocabulary just so you can understand more sentences. Learning a word by giving it its own flashcard is a very unnatural way to learn it. But, it's a necessary evil in the early (year 1) stage and it'll let you understand sentences involving the word, so that in time you will come to understand the word natively.
Another good thing about Mnemosyne is that you can constantly be updating your cards. For example, when you get advanced enough, you can start replacing the English translations of sentences with simple explanations in the target language. This is an idea created by a language learning genius named Khatzumoto. If Japanese happens to be your target language, go to his website, he has the whole Japanese-learning thing down to a science.
After the first year or so, you'll have some "momentum" going: you'll understand lots of sentences, and that means you can pick up new sentences easily. Which allows you to aggressively expand your vocabulary. You can add dozens or even hundreds of sentences to Mnemosyne each day at this point. It depends how much time you're putting into learning the language.
Of course, all this time it's important you have some way of hearing the language actually spoken by native speakers. You can get your "fix" of this through music, TV, movies, radio, podcasts, or best of all, native speakers. If at ALL possible, start talking to native speakers early and often. Since you're a GlowingFaceMan reader, everyone naturally loves you, so that will give you a big advantage meeting and talking to native speakers.
As you listen to native speech at first you'll understand nothing. Then you'll start recognizing individual words here and there. After studying the flashcards a long while you'll start understanding whole sentences and now things start to snowball. Because now just listening to native speech, is giving you more sentences (even if you aren't putting them in Mnemosyne). Which in turn lets you understand more sentences... so you get an exponential explosion type thing as the reaction feeds itself. Be patient though, to get there takes a whole lot of reading simple sentences in Mnemosyne.
Now you are on your way to fluency in the language of your choice. It's a fun adventure and you can feel free to share about it on this webpage in any of the comments sections.
Glowing Face Man
Here are some other things I wrote with you in mind. Read them all and you'll end up spending next Summer on a sexy romantic cruise with the one you love most.
Five Reasons To Study A Foreign Language
How to be better at apologizing (includes a nice linguistics section)
How to get faster at typing text messages on your cellphone
Voice: The Man's Best Weapon in Leadership and Attraction
One of Glowing Face Man's hobbies is language acquisition. That's why today I'm gonna point you in the direction you need to go to learn a language fluently. Most people who want to learn a language take classes for years and it turns out it doesn't even work. You want to be able to speak with native comfort with a native speaker. The classes prepare you to ask directions to the bathroom. In a broken accent.
First we need to disassemble some common misconceptions. First misconception is that it's impossible for adults to learn a new language fluently. This is absolute nonsense, you can learn anything you want to. Just reading my webpage long enough you'll become fluent in every language on earth. But you don't even need to employ such dramatic measures. I'll teach you how to do it on your own.
Next misconception is that there's some kind of one-one correspondence between the vocabularies of the various languages. That is to say, if you pick a random language L and a random English word w, the misconception that L has a word that means w. Or that, when a dictionary says that a certain word in L means w, that this is actually true. No, it's an approximation.
The meaning of a word is the sum of the life experiences the listener has had with that word. Communication is possible because of similar life experiences with similar words. Dictionary correspondences are purely approximations and sometimes they aren't even very great at that.
So how do you learn a word? The best way is to have lots of life experiences with it. But since this is language acquisition, we need an artificial method. Memorizing its closest English approximation isn't gonna cut it. The answer was discovered by a bunch of Polish guys who were teaching themselves English. Their project is called AntiMoon and they made some ingenious discoveries about language acquisition which I will share with you.
To learn a word, learn it in context by making flashcards with sentences using the word, in target language. Don't make these sentences up, get them from sources of native language. Dictionary example sentences are best, if that fails for a particular word, hit google in whatever the target language is.
Try to get sentences as grammatically complex as you can understand. As you suck in more sentences and words it'll get easier because you'll understand more. At first you'll hardly understand anything and your example sentences will come largely from the same sources as your knowledge of grammar. Later you'll become so good that when you encounter grammatical acrobatics youve never even seen before youll be able to just know what they mean. That takes a lot of sentences though.
The above paragraph points out something important. You can't just learn a language by learning the words, you must also learn the grammar and idioms. Depending on the language, more or less grammar will be necessary. For Spanish, you'll be able to get by on very little grammar. For Japanese, lots of grammar will be necessary. Initially (first year or so) you'll want a source on grammar so you can manually force yourself to have academic knowledge of the grammar. This is an unnatural way to acquire grammar, but it's necessary so you can understand sentences, which is necessary to upgrade your grasp on grammar to a more natural level.
So you are reading about grammar and accumulating words by using flashcards with sentences involving those words. Are paper flashcards good enough for this? NO! Here are some of the crippling drawbacks to paper flashcards when you are seriously studying a language...
...1. With the huge number of flashcards you'll end up needing, paper flashcards will be just way too expensive and bulky.
...2. With paper flashcards, once you memorize the flashcard well enough that you think you've "got it", you either discard it or put it in a different pile. In theory the 2nd pile is supposed to be reviewed, but this takes too much discipline. Especially when you start dealing with thousands of cards. In practice what happens is that 2nd pile never gets reviewed. And then you gradually start to lose the knowledge you fought so hard to gain.
...3. If you neglect the language studies for a month, it'll be impossible to easily determine which flashcards need review.
For these reasons you must use a better alternative to flashcards. You must use The Mnemosyne Project. Mnemosyne is a computer program into which you enter flashcards. It keeps the flashcards organized for you and here's the best part. When you look at a flashcard on Mnemosyne, you rate how well you know the flashcard. Mnemosyne then uses some fancy algorithms to determine which cards to show you when. No more discarding learned cards into a huge pile of cards and promising yourself youll get around to reviewing it someday. Mnemosyne takes care of review for you. Basically all your cards stay "active", but studying them doesn't take overly long, because as you go on, eventually the majority of your cards will be well-known. And hence will show up only rarely. On any particular day, almost all the cards Mnemosyne will show you will be relatively new cards you're still unfamiliar with. But cards from the very beginning will still be "alive".
Should you make flashcards for single words? Not really. At first maybe, when you're building a basic foundation of vocabulary just so you can understand more sentences. Learning a word by giving it its own flashcard is a very unnatural way to learn it. But, it's a necessary evil in the early (year 1) stage and it'll let you understand sentences involving the word, so that in time you will come to understand the word natively.
Another good thing about Mnemosyne is that you can constantly be updating your cards. For example, when you get advanced enough, you can start replacing the English translations of sentences with simple explanations in the target language. This is an idea created by a language learning genius named Khatzumoto. If Japanese happens to be your target language, go to his website, he has the whole Japanese-learning thing down to a science.
After the first year or so, you'll have some "momentum" going: you'll understand lots of sentences, and that means you can pick up new sentences easily. Which allows you to aggressively expand your vocabulary. You can add dozens or even hundreds of sentences to Mnemosyne each day at this point. It depends how much time you're putting into learning the language.
Of course, all this time it's important you have some way of hearing the language actually spoken by native speakers. You can get your "fix" of this through music, TV, movies, radio, podcasts, or best of all, native speakers. If at ALL possible, start talking to native speakers early and often. Since you're a GlowingFaceMan reader, everyone naturally loves you, so that will give you a big advantage meeting and talking to native speakers.
As you listen to native speech at first you'll understand nothing. Then you'll start recognizing individual words here and there. After studying the flashcards a long while you'll start understanding whole sentences and now things start to snowball. Because now just listening to native speech, is giving you more sentences (even if you aren't putting them in Mnemosyne). Which in turn lets you understand more sentences... so you get an exponential explosion type thing as the reaction feeds itself. Be patient though, to get there takes a whole lot of reading simple sentences in Mnemosyne.
Now you are on your way to fluency in the language of your choice. It's a fun adventure and you can feel free to share about it on this webpage in any of the comments sections.
Glowing Face Man
Here are some other things I wrote with you in mind. Read them all and you'll end up spending next Summer on a sexy romantic cruise with the one you love most.
Five Reasons To Study A Foreign Language
How to be better at apologizing (includes a nice linguistics section)
How to get faster at typing text messages on your cellphone
Voice: The Man's Best Weapon in Leadership and Attraction
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1 comments:
Since you're a GlowingFaceMan reader, everyone naturally loves you, so that will give you a big advantage meeting and talking to native speakers.
LOL that was funny ;__;
Nice article!! now how can I save this to an online bookmark :)
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