They have to learn in on and at for their preposition en. Thats all well and good for European languages, but what about more distant ones?. Along the lines of virtual immersion Benny talked about, one fun way for me to explore foreign languages has been singing along to songs in the target language. The nice thing is, you really dont need any background in the language at all, so you could start doing this immediately. Would such a blog be monetizable Is the idea of making money off a spiritual blog distasteful? Han ger det till John. Want to find a native speaker to help you for $5 per hour? Have fun and thanks for adding to the conversation! 200-2232 Marine Drive, West Vancouver, BC, Canada V7V 1K4, Website For Tim Ferriss' 12 Sentences To Deconstruct A New Language. Really appreciated . Biological Foundations of Language , New York: Wiley and Sons. They focus on the most important components of grammar first to save I just downloaded it to my phone with some flashcards and love it. I thought being dyslexic meant I might not be able to learn it but I learnt English so I must be able to. Are Saunas the Next Big Performance-Enhancing "Drug"? I tried to unsubscribe but was unsuccessful. Even if not perfect, people may know what you are saying and I am sure appreciate it. For this, I suggest coming up withmnemonicsabout your target word, which helps glue the word to your memory way more effectively. Comment Rules: Remember what Fonzie was like? Tip #2: As my father used to say, use it or lose it. Sentences like 'I give John the apple' - to help learn grammar I put together a resource for deconstructing foreign language grammar using Tim Ferriss golden sentences method, that some of you might be familiar with. This is the first program that has all of the major pieces needed for success. Then we might text back and forth developing my kanji reading and basic writing skills. (this is quite old but Lenneberg was one of the first to suggest that language learning ability decreases with age. Great article, so much information to absorb. My favorite site for finding natives is italki.com (connect with my profile here), where Ive gotten both Chinese and Japanese one-on-one Skype-based lessons for just $5 an hour. [4] Tim Ferris' 12 Golden Sentences - Improved (Mindkraft W02 Recap Part A) Stuart Jay Raj. Austin K Wood wrote this helpful post on his blog about how to get started on the italki system, increase his prices, and make more money faster: http://austinkwood.com/make-money-on-skype, Even better, italki supports this! Tim, thank you for a fun and interesting article. For example, Google is almost useless in some languages (Im learning Lithuanian and am Finnish native). Do this for a few hours, and then set up an exchange with a native speakersomeone who has spoken that language their whole life. Anki is great, but recently I have been using http://www.memomash.com/ I think it has the best usability and I can easily use the same cards with my phone and my laptop. As a language teacher I did not understand how he thinks with 40 hours you can have a 15 minute conversation. The main page of lingq espouses: Learn like a child. Since I didnt think more of the same would work, I went to the library to see what the academics had to say. This very detailed post should give you everything you need to know. To provide the best experiences, we use technologies like cookies to store and/or access device information. In other words, they do not have a language whose grammar and vocabulary interferes with the new one. I have an apple. Congratulations on your book launch as well! 7. Japanese is a mixed boat because it has three phonetic scripts (one of which is Romanized), so you learn Kana first to give you a huge boost in the language. But I like the idea as a sort of grammar cheat sheet. DuoLingo is great as it gives you a sense of the language, so that after a time you find yourself hitting the right answer without much consideration. You can get further completely free language help on: The possibilities for free practice are endless. Ive been studying Chinese for some time and used this to jump start my communication compare this to a word Ive been asked to learn today for a class Im taking: acute enteritis! As a Polish speaker that is rather impressive. Learning languages will be relevant for the lifetime of every person reading this post. Vague end goals like this are endless pits (e.g. Matt will help you out a lot. Its really cool for learning! Ones mindset has to switch to speak it right. This is ignoring all the non-verbal queues that are an essential part of communication, so this theoretical bablefish device would need to read the context, and visually analyse the person its translating to get the whole picture. I found the work of Dr Krashen and then Dr Brown. Dont know if this can be my muse someday, but I definitely want to spread some love through the platform. After trying to learn French for a previous trip I was feeling a little defeated before even tackling Italian. They look so complicated. La pomme, est-elle rouge ? Definitely agree there! You can even reference Google Translate or a dictionary for that language while you chat, so you can learn new words as you go, when you need them. This effectively means that you have social equivalency with your native language, which means that you can live in your target language insocial situations in much the same way that you would in your native language, such as casual chats with friends in a bar, asking what people did over the weekend, sharing your aspirations and relating to people. You can join the Lift plan for language learning that I wrote for their users here. Great breakdown Benny. Lots of them. .spoken from a guy who has insulted America (and thus American) on multiple occasions, and never had the decency to apologize for thoughtless, ignorant comments. I find I understand the grammar much better once Im already speaking the language. (I have 19 tabs open!). There are loads of online communities were you can practise your language skills by writing. So his theory of "it's okay to make mistakes" was definitely something I needed to hear. One of the best things you can do in the initial stages is not to try to get everything perfect, but to embrace making mistakes. Io do la mela a John. They will start using this information as soon as possible. The technical storage or access is required to create user profiles to send advertising, or to track the user on a website or across several websites for similar marketing purposes. very uplifting. Just wanted to add that for example the first-rank American sinologist Victor Mair at Penn is against learning/teaching Hanji at the beginning: http://chronicle.com/blogs/linguafranca/2012/03/02/more-on-how-to-argue-for-foreign-language-instruction/, Its a tragedy that so many young Americans spend years stuffing their heads with hundreds of Chinese characters, gaining no usable proficiency, and then forgetting them all by the time theyre 25. Mair thinks that if the Chinese would wake up and permit pinyin to function as part of a genuine digraphia, then I would say it might make sense for maybe 2 percent of the population to learn up to third-year level of Mandarinstrictly romanized, mind you. Benny, I took ample notes and am gonna overhaul what Im doing right now. Oh and great to know that Arabic and Thai scripts are fairly easy. But Ive never heard of some of the other resources like Anki. At C2, you are as good as a native speaker in how you can work and interact in the language, but you may still have an accent and make the odd mistake. There are so many straightforward compound words like perfume hajuvesi (smell water) that you can often guess a new word by just making it up. Ich werde es morgen wissen. What I like the most about Benny is that he is so genuine in his approach. BUT my experience as a teacher showed and proved clearly to me that there are basically two conditions to learn or master a second language. In this clip, I go over some of the key 'gotchas' and how you might tweak them to get the most out of language deconstruction. Ive met countless expats who lived abroad for years without learning the local language. I bet that this post is gonna get 700+ comments , 700+ comments? Hey, great article! Now Im excited to get started! Additionally, because they do not control the database they pull the words, reporting individual sentences will not help that much. Referencing one article is not going to outweigh decades of peer-reviewed research that say the exact opposite of what youre proposing. Con No grammar Pro Huge vocabulary To be fair, Tims original sentences were The apple is red (La pomme est rouge) and It is Johns apple (Cest la pomme de Jean), but if youre a teacher receiving Help! Since we are being specific, its also important to point out that this does not require that you can work professionally in a language (in my case, as an engineer or public speaker, for instance). Learning this alphabet and knowing it well helped me so much while in Japan. Tip #1: Identifying patterns is a big one. I think the distinction worth noting here (without putting words in Bennys mouth) is that people generally recognize the fact that there is a sensitive period of language development and then use that as an excuse to not learn a new language. Most of the time, just target B2. Last year I read an intriguing article by the author and self-proclaimed life hacker Tim Ferris titled How to Learn (But Not Master) Any Language in 1 Hour. I worked as a salesperson for an english online course and people sometimes doesnt learn english in an effective way. At last my two people who inspired my language learning meet in one blog ^^. To watch the language consistently, see whats trending on Youtube in that country right now. For example, a child at age 5 will, more or less, have acquired all of the syntactic and phonetic structures in their L1. And thanks for the book well wishes! While you may think that (mathematically) learning 2 languages over a year is about the same as learning each one for six months each, the truth is that FOCUS will get you so much more. I agree that a smartphone app will have a very very hard time replacing the human connection, if you cant hear someones tone of voice and only hear a computer synthesized voice it will be hard to make an emotional connection. However I did not expect it to have so much impact on the rest of my life, I ended up buying your books simply because they are worth every cent! Im recommending your book to everyone here in Tokyo who feels stuck. Your "Benny Experience" was exactly mine with Spanish as well. Hopefully after this year-long book tour I can finally check it out! 12 sentences is not enough to allow me to see the patterns. And they were happy to speak to me in French. 66.1K subscribers. The idea is simple sentences like 'I give him the apple' can give clues about how a language fits together. Also given that Mandarin is one of the harder languages to learn (hard as in virtually impossible if you want to read as well as speak it) I am not expecting an easy ride. Ill be back in Berlin in June. I've been following Benny and Shannon for a while now, and I'd say they're both experienced language learners and teachers, so they know their stuff! So youve been listening to, watching, and even reading in your target languageand all in the comfort of your own home. With a language like German Id recommend focusing on speaking and only polishing your grammar when you are already at a conversational stage. You CANNOT WRITE Cantonese or Mandarin, period. I have a Masters in linguistics and second language acquisition and have read a lot about the effects of age on language acquisition, either L1 or L2 or L3etc. An excellent post. Glad you got to see me and Tim join forces again! Something my friend Khatzumoto (alljapaneseallthetime.com) once said that I liked was, Babies arent better language learners than you; they just have no escape routes.. I am receiving individual emails each containing one comment on the 12 rules for learning language. Having said that, I do use Google Translate myself when in a live Skype conversation to give me some help, but I presume its going to be incorrect most of the time, and am always very glad when I am at the stage when I can discard it, and use a GOOD dictionary for individual words I dont know. If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid. (Epictetus) Another way to phrase For instance, lets say you are learning Spanish and cant seem to remember that caber means to fit, no matter how many times you see it. LIngQ was the ultimate at home immersion re-creation, and I see the 90 Day Challenges as achieving the same as "Fluent in 3 Months": to make a true "breakthrough.". Ive been wanting to start working on a new language and this sounds like its the best way to go, especially with how spread thin I am. If you make people smile, it will make you popular, which will make you enthusiastic to continue.]. We give him the apple. Hey guys, I put together a resource for deconstructing foreign language grammar using Tim Ferriss golden sentences method, that some of you might be familiar with. No, this is just a very basic conversation that can give learners a boost on their language learning journey. Aujourdhui, 9ans aprs ma dernire leon de Jap, les Kanji sont quasiment tous oublis (jtais cens en connatre quasiment 350), par contre quand je les vois je sais que je les ai appris autrefois. recently I changed holiday plans from Paris to Rome, put learning French on one side (specifically, changed its Evernote tag from Active Projects to Inactive Projects!) Tim Ferriss has a list of I think nine or 12 sentences that he uses in order to deconstruct a language. I have an apple. I give you an apple. They said to stop trying to produce language and just listen. be cool. I did a lot of hichhiking there and one trip was going all the way to Germany to meet my friend who came there from USA. Jai pu tester un peu mon Japonais lors dun voyage au Japon un an aprs et le rsultat ntait pas si mal mme si jaurais pu faire mieux! Another failing of most learning approaches is a poorly defined end-goal. The best of luck to you Benny and THANK YOU Tim for all the gold you keep delivering in your blog posts. OP has a valid point. Fortunately thats changing with the new generation and how they learn. Your 12 points are right on. Thank you so much for sharing that with us, this is exactly what learning & speaking foreign languages is about! Ive also covered my experiments with German, Indonesian, Arabic, Norwegian, Turkish, and perhaps a dozen others. Another thing that helped me when actually being in a country to learn a language: P&P. Lol. I also learned a lot about other cultures and made lots of friends. Ive been trying to learn Spanish, because my husband is Colombian, and after almost 2 years living there my Spanish still sucks. I tell the whole story here: http://bradonomics.com/stupid-learn-second-language/. etc.). Cuidate, Thank you, this is great. Ive made friends on a train in China through Mandarin, discussed politics with a desert dweller in Egyptian Arabic, discovered the wonders of deaf culture through ASL, invited the (female) president of Ireland to dance in Irish (Gaeilge) and talked about it on live Irish radio, interviewed Peruvian fabric makers about how they work in Quechua, interpreted between Hungarian and Portuguese at a social event and well, had an extremely interesting decade traveling the world. So to make my life easy when I start learning a language, one of the first word lists I try to consume is a list of cognates, or English loan words, which can be found quickly for pretty much any language. Plain and simple. Then I will share something that is on my mind lately and attempt to express my opinion on it, or allow the native speaker to introduce a new topic. It inspired and motivated me to (try to) learn Spanish before were heading off to South America later this year. Finding out the most commonly used words and nailing those puts you way ahead of the game. It is John's apple. Enjoy the book! Its a LOT of work, mind you! Every single person for the rest of my time in Egypt would start speaking to me in Arabic, including in touristy parts of town where they spoke excellent English and would be well used to spotting tourists. As a native Polish speaker I must say that you are awesome. See More I would be really surprised if he, a) came up with it himself, and b) ever actually used it to "deconstruct a language" himself. These are load verbs from English, and other languages. No one realizes that English is my second language until I share it with them. Was really fun adventure that I would have never been able to have if I did not speak Polish. http://lingohut.com/ is my personal project, if your native language is not English click on the I speak English button to find your native language. A wonderful and completely free course that keeps getting better is DuoLingo which I highly recommend for its selection of European languages currently on offer, with more on the way. WebAfter completed a sentence, it is read out loud by a native speaker of your target language (some sentences will allow you to hear it spoken by multiple speakers). I am rather shocked you would publish anything from him. I used four methods, all recommended here and/or in 4HC. Do you have any tips for learning foreign languages for hearing impaired people, as listening to audio tapes, or TV shows would not be helpful? In this podcast, I had the rare opportunity to interview three men in Level 4 maximum security at Kern Valley State Prison. And what do words like fluency and mastery mean on a practical level? For proof of how quickly an adult can learn a language and sound native check out the actress Noomi Rapace and how she learnt English in her twenties. Tim himself likes to use color-coded physical flashcards; some he purchases from Vis-Ed, others he makes himself. They had passes the age at which they could learn their L1 properly. Ive read many of his posts and taken much of his advice. This transformation allowed me to walk from the Nile to the Pyramids without any hassle from touts and make the experience all about the fascinating people I met. All that people want to read here is you can learn to do anything in under 6 weeks and be perfect at it, yeah, woooo. The ability of the childs brain to learn language is just breathtaking. Cool. Thanks for teaming up and bringing us all these great language tips! 1.9K views 1 year ago #polyglot #neuroplasticity Spaced repetition is also popular learning system in med school where I live. Thank you for the great guest post Benny! This concept is not limited to songs. It requires a little creativity at times but the best part is, if you get it wrong, you have something to laugh with people about . Ive used the above shortcuts myself, and after learning Polish for just one hour for a trip to Warsaw to speak at TEDxabout language learning, I was able to hold up a conversation (incredibly basic as it was) in Polish for an entire half hour. Age changes in the ability to replicate foreign pronunciation and intonation. la mela di John. Im a Spanish teacher, and have learned several other languages as well. Today I watched your Skype interview with Benny and thought: how cool would it be to see some of his stuff on the blog. This post is fantastic. Its a biological endowment that we lose. This is a great post, Benny is very impressive and an inspiration. It seems logical enough, right? Ive been wanting to learn Russian and to improve my Spanish for some time now. For example, on italki, if youre a native speaker, or proficient in a language, you can also apply to be a teacher. His recommendation of italki has really got me on the right track. Having fun should be a more popular goal while learning. Consider an L1 Spanish speaker learning English prepositions. Age, Rate and Eventual Attainment in Second Language Acquisition. Id also used it before effectively to get some basic holiday Greek and learn the Greek alphabet. A learner has to distinguish the 13 or so different meanings of over, for example the picture is over the wall, the cat jumped over the gate, the class is over, you have to be over 18 to buy alcohol, you were driving over the speed limit, the fence fell over. Great article! For instance, if you really listen to it, the word France sounds different in I want to go to France (downward intonation) and France is a beautiful country (intonation raising upwards). Its pure nonsense and is the exact opposite to what the research literature tells us. However that I have to add that rules 2 and 5 dont work with Finnish, the language Im currently learning.