Reading out loud and speaking!
Hello
My friend who speaks English like a native speaker. He never visisted any English speaking country. Absolutely fluent. Never stumbles for words. He is 23 years old. I have asked about his method.
He does these things almost on a daily basis.
1. Listen to BBC for 30 minutes daily.
2. Watch two movies a week.
3. Read out loud newspaper articles for 30 minutes daily.
He does not spend so much time on learning the language yet he speaks the language fluently like a native speaker. Spending one hour per day daily is nada or sometimes 2-3 hours a day when he watches movies.
That's what he does but he does it regularly.
Its not hard to learn a foreign language, it's a myth.
How long has he learnt it for?
3 years with that method but no native speakers at his disposal for speaking the language.
Learning a language is one of the HARDEST and more difficult task for a person to undertake, who says the contrary says bullshit
Ha! your overestimating language learning.
Contrary to common perception. It does not require great intelligence. All it requires is patience and perseverence, but you can be REALLY STUPID!
It is much harder to become a doctor, psychologist, quantum physicist, surgeon, mathematician than learn a language. Mark my word!
It's not very hard to learn another language. It does take a lot of time, patience, study, and practice, but that isn't hard, it's just work. For example, I can understand almost any grammar rule that is to be found in the Spanish language. The only problem is I can't actually remember them all at the same time, and there's an easy solution to that: practice! The only hard thing about that is staying motivated.
Now, if we were talking about learning written Chinese or written Japanese, THAT is hard. For whatever reason, it's much easier to forget the meaning of a common kanji than it is to forget how to say an uncommon word like "honeycomb" in Spanish.
- Kef
<<Learning a language is one of the HARDEST and more difficult task for a person to undertake, who says the contrary says bullshit>>
I'd have to agree 100%. Back in my younger days, I always found math and physics to be much easier than foreign languages.
My theory is that once you learn English as your native language, it's sheer simplicity spoils you for anything else. You get turned off by all the complex gender, case, tense, mood, number, aspect, tones, difficult sounds, agglutination, and other elaborate grammar found in most foreign languages.
<<My theory is that once you learn English as your native language, it's sheer simplicity spoils you for anything else.>>
Ha ha! You make me laugh! I wish you good luck as a clown.
<<Now, if we were talking about learning written Chinese or written Japanese, THAT is hard. For whatever reason, it's much easier to forget the meaning of a common kanji than it is to forget how to say an uncommon word like "honeycomb" in Spanish. >>
I think it is the same but requires even MORE work, it's still not hard though. It is simply memory. It doesn't take intelligence, just memory.
Guest
Thanks for your post about your friend's English learning methods.
That's why I keep reading the Antimoon forums--one can still learn something useful about learning languages, if you avoid the flame wars, anti-Americanism, anti-non-Americans, anti-Latino, anti-French, people practicing their swear words, etc.
<<Ha ha! You make me laugh! I wish you good luck as a clown. >>
I'm glad you liked it.
BTW, maybe I should have written: "... you're native language, it's shear simplicity ..."
<< <<Now, if we were talking about learning written Chinese or written Japanese, THAT is hard. For whatever reason, it's much easier to forget the meaning of a common kanji than it is to forget how to say an uncommon word like "honeycomb" in Spanish. >>
I think it is the same but requires even MORE work, it's still not hard though. It is simply memory. It doesn't take intelligence, just memory. >>
The problem is a little more complicated than that... to memorize vocabulary for a language like Spanish, French, etc. is fairly straightfoward. But I think it takes a little creativity to memorize Chinese/Japanese characters. Having at least some mnemonics is a must, and the mnemonics you can come up with often don't even make sense because there is often so little correlation between a character and its meaning. That's where the creativity comes in... figuring out mnemonics that will work for you.
- Kef
Yes. I studied "panal" in two seconds (Spanish). I need two days to study "honeycomb" in Chinese character, and other two days to pronounce it well.
I guess you are right. To be literate in such languages is not so easy... Is it true that reasonably uneducated (people which dropped out of school the earliest possible) are not very literate, because charecters are learned till end of school? Are literacy indeces in Asian countries lower than non-character countries?
Japan claims 99.9% literacy.