The traditional way of learning languages is confusing and ineffective. Schools and 99% of language learning programs take the fun and naturally enjoyable process and turn it into boring work. They ignore our inherent ability to learn from context and instead force us into drills in an attempt to teach the language from the top down.
The proper path to learning a language—like the proper path to learning anything—is to start with the fundamentals. For language learning that means basic individual sounds and to build up from there.
1) Recognize and Reproduce Sounds
Any language as a contained about of basic sounds. For example, Spanish has 26 sounds for the 26 letters of the alphabet. English has 44 sounds for the 26 letters of the alphabet. Using a phonetic alphabet, you can quickly learn what the sounds associated with any language are (they will vary between dialects/regional accents).
This can be done phonetic alphabets Wikipedia, a site like forvo.com with examples of spoken words, and a basic audio editing program like Audacity.
Once you’ve collected all the sounds, you learn how to recognize and reproduce them. How to hear and speak each of the individual sounds. For example, the sound represented by R in Spanish is different than the sounds represented by R in English. If you don’t learn the actual sound, then you are left mishearing and mispronouncing, because you are not using the correct sound.
People understand that certain sounds are hard to pronounce, but overlook many sounds that are hard to hear. A classic example of this is Japanese people struggling with words that start with L, pronouncing them like they start with R. In Japanese, there is one sound that is similar to a combination of an L and R, so when they have a very hard time hearing the difference between the two. The difference is subtle, but you can train yourself to hear it if you play audio of each sound in isolation and practice guessing. [fluent forever dual pairs training]
2) Recognize and reproduce common sound combinations
The next building block once you have mastered the individual base-layer sounds, is to learn the sound combinations. This can be tricky as two and three sounds combined can be hard to identify. For example, O and A sound like wa when you put them together in Oaxaca.
In most languages, you can find a list of the most popular two and three letter combinations. Find these, find words with that combination, isolate them using Forvo and Audacity, and then practice them.
3) Associate images with 100 most common nouns/verbs.
Up to this point, you should not even trouble yourself with written language, or word meaning at all. You should be 100% focused on sounds and learning the fundamental building blocks of the language, without getting your native language mixed up into it.
But once you have all the building blocks together and the ability to hear and reproduce sounds and sound combinations, you are in a position where you can identify words and attached meanings to them.
The process for doing this is to find a list of the 100 most common words in the language you are learning and to build flashcards to start associating images of that word to the word. You don’t want to practice the translation—like associating the word cat with gato—you want to associate an image with gato, so there is no translation.
Same goes for verbs, associating the new word directly with the activity.
4) Learn basic grammar, pronouns, and conjunctions through context.
You want to get to a position where you can get into conversations as fast as possible, but to do that you need to know some of the basic rules of grammar. Learn them in the context of sentences.
El gato bebe agua —> picture of a cat drinking water.
5) Get in conversations, watch movies, listen to podcasts and music.
Don’t worry at all about knowing everything, or getting anything perfect, but get in as much time as you can building context with the language. TV shows and movies are great because you have the visual clues to help you understand what the language means. If you challenge yourself to consume all your entertainment in the new language, you will naturally and unconsciously be working on figuring out the meaning of the things you are consuming.
Talk and listen, while avoiding explicitly studying grammar rules and instead of pick rules up as you go. Don’t spend time on the written language, unless you have a specific reason to learn it. Written language is a layer up in abstraction from spoken language. Learning both at the same time will confuse you and make it harder. Especially if you are learning a language with a Latin alphabet where you will associate English sounds with the new non-English words. Written language represents sounds, so it is much easier if you know the sounds first.
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