My only motivation is to level up as a human being. I took lots of Latin in high school which I now regret, and I have some low-level resentment towards my mother for not making any effort to pass on her second language (French). I’ve tried a couple times to learn Spanish; the first was some audio CDs that I absolutely could not maintain focus on while driving, and then I tried a student version of Rosetta Stone, which lost the competition against whatever was on TV at the time.
I’ve been thinking about taking classes at a community college; the idea being that if I’m paying for a class and leaving the house, I might work harder at it. But I don’t know if the real problem is a lack of motivation. There’s nobody in particular I want to talk to in another language, there’s no vacations I feel I can’t take because of my mono-linguism, and I don’t even particularly care which language I want to learn.
Dopers who have learned a second language - how did you do it? Should I focus on methodology or goals?
In retrospect, and with a better understanding of my own personality, I do better in subjects that have a direct application to my life. I prefer engineering to physics; computer programming to computer science; and I would have done better (I think) learning to speak a language I could use rather than the finer details of Latin grammar.
Assuming you are not going to relocate for the sake of learning a second language, a college course is better that self-study or any of the CD language systems. Better yet is if you have access to native speakers of the language you are learning. I started studying Spanish because there was this really cute Mexican maid at the hospital I worked at, and she didn’t speak English and I thought it was really cool to speak Spanish with her. Plus, the entire housekeeping crew of the hospital were Mexican, so I could practice Spanish with any of them, and they were nice people I enjoyed getting to know.
When I started learning Chinese I did a study abroad program in China through my university. Immersion will build your language skills post haste.
Your Latin background should make learning Spanish much easier. I had to learn a lot of Latin based medical terminology to do my hospital work, and it definitely eased the way for Spanish.
There are different types of language learners. Some people can sit down with a grammar book and a set of flashcards and learn a language. Most people can’t. Personally, through the three languages I’ve learned I’ve found I can’t learn a single thing that is more than I need to know for whatever task is at hand. Without that immediate application, it’s extremely hard to make it stick.
And there is nothing wrong with that. While language can be a fun mental exercise, ultimately it is a tool for communication and for most cases that’s where it comes naturally.
If you are like me, I’d focus on my goals more than the methods. There are plenty of opportunities for language swaps, online chat through language communities, etc. I’d try to develop a set of applicable goals and work towards them.
You’ve tried tapes, classes, and computer language programs to learn a language and it hasn’t stuck…Practically, what other ways are there, short of just being dropped into the country and trying to survive?
As **Arrendajo **alluded above, self study of a language should be used to supplement live, instructor-led teaching, never as the primary method. As even sven mentioned above, very few people can learn a language on their own, especially without constant reinforcement and a reason to use the language. So you have a decision to make. Do you want to learn a language, or are you playing around? If you’re playing around, that’s fine. Languages can be interesting even if you don’t actually learn to speak them. If you’re serious about learning a language, however, your best bet is to seek guidance from a professional.
Another recommendation is immersion, total immersion if you can swing it. By this I mean get all of your news and entertainment from sources in the language you’re studying, e.g., watch TV shows in that language, listen to radio programs in that language, listen to music in that language, read news, literature, and all printed matter that you usually read in English in that language. Try to surround yourself exclusively with media in the language you’re learning. If you’re successful in doing this, in a remarkably short period of time, you will realize a marked increase in your comprehension.
You might try memrise.com. They are an online learning site with a special focus on languages. I’m taking a course there called Partial Polyglot. It teaches seven basic, useful phrases in a whole slew of different languages.
Check the iTunes Store to see if they have any free podcasts available. You can’t rely on podcasts or any single learning vector, but multiple learning vectors should be beneficial.
And in case you haven’t already decided, I’d suggest trying a language that doesn’t conjugate its verbs, such as Thai or Vietnamese. Although you’ll have tones to worry about.
IMHO, you must have a native speaker or fluent teacher to assist you. You need to speak it with a real, live human daily. I also did best when I had paragraph-length transcripts that I could listen to and study until I understood every word of the paragraph.
I learned Korean in the Army, which involved sitting in a classroom learning nothing but Korean for eight hours a day, and then going home and studying it as homework. There were a few weeks where I had no free time at all. I was cramming Korean before class and then doing homework from the moment I got home to the moment I went to sleep. It took two years to get to the point where I could make myself reasonably understood, as long as other party spoke slowly and used lots of hand gestures. It took two years of this, mostly because Korean is very difficult for a native English speaker to learn. People who took European languages, for instance, reached the same proficiency in six months to a year.
I’ve tried learning European languages using Rosetta Stone. I’ve never made much progress. Rosetta Stone is nice for practice exercises, but even with the assistance of various books and stuff I never made as much progress without a fluent tutor to assist me.
As a Spanish teacher I can tell you it’s all about the methodology. It’s impossible to keep motivated if you don’t feel you’re making progress. I get my students to use the free audiovisual lessons on www.prospanish.co.uk . What I like about them is that after just a few minutes you feel you can say things.