Why do you study a foreign language? To make money? As a hobby? Or do you have another reason? No matter what the reason is your goal is getting skills to express your thoughts the way you express it in your native language. When study a foreign language it is important to remember that the language is a tool.
Here is an example. You are going to a store. When you walk you don't think of every step, how to walk, how you move your legs. You just walk towards your destination.
Sometimes I see loud commercials promising you will learn languages without efforts. Besides that the “methods” blame the textbooks of being boring and useless. Well, yes the textbooks may be boring, may be not depending on the author but the most depends of the person who studies the language too. If the person doesn’t want to study every textbook will be boring and useless.
If fact it isn’t easy to develop a new method of studying a foreign language. I can’t say for sure but I suspect that most of the “new” methods are based on guessing the words translation and learning by heart ready-made phrases. Well, if this is the person’s purpose then go for it but I would prefer to speak the live language and express my thoughts the way I do it in my native language. So learning many phrases won’t help me with that.
All these new “methods” say “We’ve been studying languages at school but didn’t succeed! They didn’t teach us anything! Their methods are wrong! etc.”. But let’s be honest, do children study at school? Do they do their homework instead of playing with friends or the computer and so on? Don’t they try to do the homework right before the lesson or even cheat?
After years of unsuccessful studying the language at school most of people think they are not good at it. But I am sure everyone can learn another language if they find the most suitable method. Whether you memory is good or bad we still learn something new all the time, get new skills, we get the second and third education, etc. For example, my grandpa learnt how to play chess with the computer though he is already 85. Of course he mostly loses but it doesn't matter. Now he is asking about connecting to the Internet but I am not going to let him do it because I will get tired of coming to him every certain time to get rid of the viruses.
So Where To Start Learning A Language?
If you ever studied a foreign language you possibly noticed that although you composed sentences and wrote texts correctly, understood the text-book records but when you started talking to the native speaker you found out you didn't understand anything, or understood only some words that didn't make any sense. The you start thinking you didn't study well enough or you are not good at learning languages. How not to give up?
1. The Language Isn’t As Scaring As It Seems
I have a site dedicated to the Japanese language self-studying and often it is found by the request “Is it hard to learn Japanese?”. Sometimes I follow that request and see many people (most of them) say it is hard. Actually I think you shouldn't judge about the language by what others say. Most of those people have never started studying and even if they did they most definitely applied the “revolutionary method” – studying the language just listening and learning by heart phrasebook, with no grammar, which doesn't allow one to learn anything. And if you ask people why Asian languages (Chinese, Japanese) are hard, they'll roll their eyes and say “there are hieroglyphs”. For some reason it is the most scaring. Though I think hieroglyphs are cool, they make one genius. For example if you write anything in Japanese or Chinese with hieroglyphs, something not complicated but also not too short, for example 
(o-tanjoubi omedetou gozaimasu) or 
(shengri kuaile), which means “Happy birthday” in Japanese and Chinese, your friends will look at you as at a genius.
1. Find a good text-book. I am very picky about that.
2. When I work with the text-book I write down all the lessons in my notepad shortly as a conspectus. I have the notepad in my bag wherever I go and look into it from time to time when I can, for example in trains or the subway. I write down the examples mostly because this is how I understand the subject the best. When I started to study Japanese I used an old Soviet text-book. It was OK and contained the modern Japanese but it also had many texts and exercises about the October revolution, Lenin and so on. And it’s not the vocabulary I normally use and phrases about that are usually hard to understand hence to remember. And they are always long. Sentences like that also sound pretty officially though my goal is to talk the normal language, not slogans. So I pay more attention to examples talking about weather, people, animals, etc. because I can understand what they are saying thus they are easier to remember.
It takes a lot of time to study a foreign language. At least one year if you want to speak more or less properly and at least three years if you want to speak well enough. But one and especially three year study is too long and people try to find a way to do it faster, get suspicious courses that promise and swear you will learn the language in a month without efforts or while sleeping. Personally I don’t believe ads like that and 25 frame thing. If all that was effective would institutes teach their students languages for 3-5 years?
One man I knew wanted to learn a foreign language. He bought many text-books but started to study from listening to the phrase-book records. Thus all he learnt was “yes” and “no” but tried to persuade me his method was effective, that it was right to remember the phrases and then study the grammar and it sounded like studying the grammar was something elective.
 |  |  |  |  |  |  |
 |  |  |  |  |  |  |
 |  |  |  |  |  |  |
 |  |  |  |  |  |  |
 |  |  |  |  |  |  |
 |  |  |  |  |  |  |
| By N2H | ||||||
RSS Feed
Twitter
Posted in 
Tags: 
