Dopers - what tricks, systems, etc. have you come up with to learn other languages?

In My Humble Opinion
1

This is a thread that was inspired by this one in ‘General Questions’. I’m wondering what Dopers have done to facilitate fluency in their language learning. No ideas too odd, at least not as far as I’m concerned.

I’ve found working on the homework just before going to sleep helps - something about having those ideas fresh in your head encourages you to sort through the target language in your dreams.

Listening to recordings of lectures or tutorials while doing something physical (Brisk walk, ski machine, stairmaster…) helps with learning. Something about accessing kinetic memory, maybe? I dunno, seems to help me.

Working on French & Italian, I decided all the masculine words would be right hand words, and all the feminine words would be left hand words. I’d write them on the right and left side of the page, respectively, and I’d whisper them into the right or left hand. German and Russian require talking to the floor for the neuter.

I used to write my exercises on fancy paper with a calligraphy pen - it forced me to slow my writing down.

TV, videos, movies never did that much for me until I was well along. Books, magazines & newspapers worked better because I could look up unfamiliar words, or re-read sentences. Music was a mixed bag - sometimes a poem was clearer when sung, sometimes not. Trying to sing along was great, though Og knows what horrific Mondegreens I’ve created.

Those Barron’s 501 *** verbs books, and 1001 *** idioms are great.

And I’d force myself on any poor, unsuspecting victim that I found who spoke the language - I’m sure some of the shops in Montréal still have my picture up with the caption ‘Do not admit to this man that you speak French!’

What other things have the Dopers done to accelerate language learning?

2

With whatever language I’m learning, I talk to the cat a lot in it. She’s picking up a lot of Russian.

3

an odd little trick i picked up learning french was the little tic tac toe board approach to verb endings

je nous
tu vous
il, elle, on ils

sort of works for changing latin to greek chemical endings:

ic ide
ic ate
ous ite
although a german friend of mine had no idea that you could actually tic tac toe a little diagram for verb endings … to get the correspondence between singular and plural…

4

Find your favorite children’s books (ones you read a lot) translated into language-of-choice. I usually go for the Narnia books, something at just-beyond-picture-book stage. It works well because it’s fairly simple language, and you already have a mental picture of what’s going on, and you can read it in small doses until you’re up to speed. PS: Harry Potter is also good because you get some odd vocabulary to impress native speakers with.

Popular music is good, as well, esp. if it comes with the lyrics! You listen to it enough and then you have a couple of set phrases you can use at speed and with a decent accent.

Don’t be afraid to annotate your dictionary. Invest in a good one for reference, but get a portable one to mark up and take it everywhere. Browse during minor downtime: five minutes in line, on hold on the phone.

5

All good advice, I believe. I found that watching movies and listening to music helped immensely, though more in the later stages as you say (or perhaps not so much the later stages, but after getting familiar with a fairly broad range of words and grammar, which I would put at the beginning of the middle).

Another tip is find situations where you actually need the word you are trying to learn. I’ve never really managed to intentionally create this situation, but when I was in Italy I learned quite a few words that I would have forgotten had I not really needed them to communicate.

6

What really helped me when learning ENGLISH were the Tintin and Asterix comic books. It helped that they were quite entertaining besides. Since they are well know for being translated into a dozen languages, I imagine it would be helpful for learning another European language. Come to think of it, I might go and check them out to see if it helps with my on-again-off-again efforts to learn French.

7

Find music you like in the target language. I am not ashamed to admit that while my Spanish prof taught me the basics of conjugation and grammar, Shakira is far more responsible for my day-to-day Spanish usage. I learned the subjunctive from her music, and a lot of vocabulary that I wouldn’t have from a book.

After I got comfortable, I expanded my interests into a lot of other Spanish-language artists, and now almost all the new music I buy is in Spanish. Helps keep the knowledge in my head.

8

Find a group that speaks it (e.g in meetup.com). For most people, language is acoustic, not intellectual. Here’s a link to Stephen Krashen’s research:

http://www.sk.com.br/sk-krash.html

9

Media in the target language, IMO, is essential. Ditto Bambi’s love of Shakira – she has goddesslike writing ability in her own language. Now that I’m in the later stages of language learning, I find that rather than memorizing rote grammatical rules, I learn things in little packages of sound–music is lovely for catching and holding onto recurring patterns in language.

For example, Julieta Vinegas (who sings slowly and clearly, Og bless her) sings Te voy a mostrar (I’m going to show you). Now I would have understood that, been able to parse it out, without Vinegas’ help. But once you’ve got that little earworm in your head, ‘‘Te voy a…’’ you find it’s much easier to substitute other indirect objects in many other contexts. Because I know te voy a mostrar, I also know Les voy a hablar or Le van a devolver la llamada… learning one simple construction by pattern really opens the door to using it in a variety of contexts and with a ton of variations. When you hear it in music, it becomes more natural, an instinct rather than something you have to think your way through.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been struggling for a way to say something, and a song I know in the target language suddenly makes it abundantly clear what the language rule is.

Another fun thing… I watch Simpsons and Futurama in Spanish. Comedy keeps things fresh and interesting (you never know the way they might spin a joke for the target culture), and if it becomes too easy I just close my eyes and try to see if I can figure out what’s going on based on purely auditory input.

10

I found that, once I had a certain level of knowledge, IMing with someone in the new language was extremely useful.

11

If you can, visit the country where the language is spoken and take a class–even just a short one-- at a language school there. I learned so much Spanish in one semester in Mexico i was close to fluency by the time I left.

12

ladyfoxfyre I have to ask - has the cat started speaking back, and does the conversation centre on anything other than the quality of what’s in the food dish?

When last I took any Russian, I had the pleasure of rocking my son to sleep for his naps in the afternoon. As soon as he’d dropped off, I’d start conjugating verbs out loud. He doesn’t remember any of it. I don’t remember that much, either.

13

Another vote for comics and/or children’s books in the other language. They’re usually pretty simple, often repetitive, and the pictures help a lot.

Also, just listen to the other language. If you can get a newscast in it, or if you can find a talk show in it, or (best of all) if you can find a group of native speakers who will let you sit in and just listen to the way the language is used, you’ve found a good thing. You start to hear the language itself, not the separate words that you hear in formal study. When the time comes for you to interact in the other language, your accent will improve, you will be able to listen better, and you will likely have picked up one or two idioms that you would never get from the classroom or the language lab.

14

Ditto the “listen to native speakers” approach. Automaticity–the quick recall of words and phrases–is the key to mastering any language: A wide range of automatic words/phrases opens the door to conversation–allowing you to learn usage like a native speaker–and once you learn the meta-process of making a word automatic it becomes far easier to expand your vocabulary.

I myself deal with dead languages, and I tell my students to keep a notebook. When you read and find you need to look up a word, write it down with a quick definition in the notebook. That’s any word, even if you “already knew it” (you clearly didn’t). Then every few days or so, go thru and read that notebook. I can recall in studying Latin that I never ever remembered the verb adipiscor - “gain, acquire, secure”. After writing it five times in my notebook, I soon picked it up, and remembered it enough to use it as an example in this post.

15

I moved to the country in question, but I doubt that this would be an option for most people.

16

Does that mean I can come stay with you when I finally get round to working on Japanese? :cool:

For me, personally, I find immersion works best after a couple of months of working on it. Of course, others will have a different experience and timeline, but I don’t know how much good it would have done me to be starting on Io sono, tu sei, lei/lui è, in Italy…

That being said, like most Anglophone Canadians, I started on French in Grade 7, and toughed it out until the end of Grade 11. (They’d dropped the 2nd language requirement to get into university by that time, so when I had a massive conflict between Biology, Music, Drama and French in Grade 12 (pick any 2, there’s no way to accommodate all 4 in the timetable.), the French had to go.

Our first French class, there was Madame Barnes, looking like Bea Arthur, only bigger and butcher, with an English accent that you could cut with a knife, and telling us ‘Whatever you do, don’t speak with the Franco-Manitobains, because they speak French wrong.’ Uh-huh. I’m ever so sorry I wasn’t on either of the two tours when her French class went to Montréal, and then later to Paris. Apparently, she got frosted off by the Francophones at every turn because her accent was so Anglo, they’d just start speaking back to her in English, even if she could construct sentences of Proustian complexity in casual conversation.

Anyway, I always thought it was stupid, when we had a community living among us who spoke it as a living language, to ignore them and try and speak with a Parisian accent that even our teacher couldn’t remotely approximate. My French was appalling until I got myself to the corner of Maisonneuve and St. Denis and just had to cope.

Many thanks for all the tips, gang - keep 'em coming if you have any more.

17

Worked for me and French. I’ve managed in the space of just over a year to go from very basic almost non-existent French to something approaching fluency, by simple expedient of living and working in France. Its amazing what happens when you’re thrown in at the deep end and just have to cope. Friends of mine also reccomend getting a SO who’s native language is the one you wish to learn. You get more than just the standard textbook phrases that way too… :wink:

18

Don’t overlook the Oxford-Duden Pictorial Dictionaries. I believe they’re available for most languages. I’ve got the Spanish and the German versions, and they’re incredibly handy references.

19

Well, I have to say that her pronunciation is a bit crap but seeing how I don’t have a lot of people around to converse with in Russian, it’s good for practicing basic conversation.
I don’t get any Russian news channels, but I watch Spanish news channels as often as I can, even though my Spanish is definitely waning.

Besides that, my suggestion is to go to a country where the language is spoken. Quickest way to become fluent is to be forced.

20

Rent and watch movies in foreign languages. First with subtitles in your own language, then with subtitles in the foreign language, then without subtitles.

As for me and my favourite foreign language, English, I joined an US based messageboard. :slight_smile: