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Re:tips for on your own
The one thing that's helped me most is literally immersing myself in the language. Talking to other people, etc. you can't do so much about, but for the most part you have control over what you read, listen to, and watch at home: Use that to your advantage. Get CDs or audio tapes in Gaelic. Find radio stations that play songs or talk shows in it; I'm sure there are at least one or two if you look around long enough and are willing to listen in at bizarre hours of the night. Find books or websites - particularly small news organizations - written in Gaelic. You'll find yourself picking up vocabularly amazingly quickly, and since the more you understand the more you'll be able to read/listen to, the more you'll end up learning. This tends to work especially well if you're trying to learn from a teach-yourself textbook or something similar, as it will force you to learn to use grammar and vocabulary instead of just memorize it. And of course, exactly this: Find someone who speaks the language to some degree and start chatting. Become spontaneous. If your friends can stand it, use as much Gaelic in your everyday speech as possible; you might try to get them into it as well so that you can talk conveniently and more at random than you would with someone you don't know very well.
Best of luck!
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Language pair: English; Gaelic (Irish)
This is a reply to message # 32655
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| 33743 |
Re:tips for on your own
Hi Sean:
I've studied Italian and Portuguese by myself and now I'm studying greek too.
Here are some good tips I've used and that have helped me a lot:
Concentrate on Grammar: If you really want to master or at least to well understand any language, you must focus on grammar. What I've done is to get as much information as possible from internet (there are many free webpages where you can find grammar information about almost any language online) and I concentrate and edit it in only one word file and print it. I carry my "grammar book" everyday when traveling from home to work and vicecersa, and I am able to study it every day. I follow the same language structure I learned when studying english and french: Verb to be, common expressions, plural formation rules, verbs conjugation in all the simple and compound tenses, adjectives (comparative, superlative) nouns, reported speech, etc. Obviously it may vary according to every language, but we have the advantage that our indoeuropean languages (spanish, italian, portuguese, french, english, german) have almost the same structure. German and Russian for exaple, follow the same structure of Greek one.
Develop your memory techiques: I use a very simple techique to learn new vocabulary, you can verify them in a previous message I added in this "tips sections", I've used it to learn, for example, about 129 countries and its capitals in only 2 days, with 95% of effectiveness after a month!
Get music and lyrics: It's easier to remember a grammatical structure when you learn it from a song you like, and the more you like the song the more you'll find it easier to remember also new vocabulary. You can also get free online radiostations with the language you're studying, and it's more effective if you listen and read the lyrics at the same time, so that you get used to heard the pronunciation of that language.
Read: Try to read news in the language you're learning,it helps you to understand and learn up-today vocabulary, topics, etc. You cand do it online.
Regards,
Rafael Palafox
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Language pair: English; Gaelic (Irish)
This is a reply to message # 32655
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