| 49463 |
Language Learning method: Part I of V
I recently sent the following message to a friend who said he found it helpful. So I'm posting it here in case any of you might get anything out of it.
Learning languages is great fun, and it does take quite a bit of work. I find it most rewarding if I can keep up with it regularly every day, or at least several times a week. Less often than that, and you're usually not going to make much progress forward.
But learning to speak a language is a huge task to take on. In order to be fluent, you need a vocabulary in the tens of thousands of words, you've got these volumes of grammar rules to learn, and literally thousands of hours of practice, both alone, and in conversation with other speakers in order to develop some facility with the language. Maybe it sounds like I'm trying to discourage you here—I’m sure this all sounds discouraging. But I swear that's not my point. My point is, you have to have a realistic view of what you're up to in order to really take it on.
Maybe you've heard the one about how you eat an elephant—one bite at a time. That's how I deal with this huge project of learning to speak a foreign language.
On one level, I divide the job up into functional parts: I need to learn vocabulary, grammar, and dialogue phrases. I also break it down into skills: I need to develop my ability to speak, to hear, to read, and to write. Each of these shifts the focus a little, and each has special considerations. It seems like it ought to be easy, you learn how to say a word right, you should have no trouble catching it when you hear it. And it does help, but the problem is, we often forget that any skill that involves physical muscles has two parts to it—the knowledge and the execution. The knowledge takes just a minute or so – we memorize the definition or the grammar rule. But then the first time we have to use it in a conversation, we do it wrong. And not just once, but time and time again, over and over. A lot of us get really impatient about that, thinking we're being stupid, hitting ourselves in the head. But there's nothing wrong with all those repeated mistakes. It's just our normal learning process. You had to fall on your butt a few times to learn to walk, to ride a bike, and you'll have to mix up your measure words, or choose the wrong prepositions a huge number of times before your brain forges the proper connections so that you can do it smoothly and easily. All it take is the willingness to be wrong a whole lot of times until you can get it right.
I don't know where you are with the Chinese writing, but if you read and write Mandarin traditional characters, you should have little trouble reading Cantonese. You will mostly need to concentrate on speaking and listening. But I'm sure you'll already know that.
Continued: See Part II of V
|
Language pair: English; All
|
|
|
