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Top Ten Language Learning Mistakes | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
 Fasulye Heptaglot Winner TAC 2012 Moderator Germany fasulyespolyglotblog Joined 5845 days ago 5460 posts - 6006 votes  1 sounds Speaks: German*, DutchC1, EnglishB2, French, Italian, Spanish, Esperanto Studies: Latin, Danish, Norwegian, Turkish Personal Language Map | Message 49 of 51 07 December 2009 at 11:07pm | IP Logged |
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In the 1990s I attended lots of Turkish language courses, but summa summarum my language learning at that time was inefficient.
Not mainly the languages courses were to blame, because I have attended language courses all my life and have learned quite a lot by using this system. I had to stop with Turkish in 1998 and therefore made a mistakes analysis. My main weakness seamed to be that I only very superficially treated the vocabulary without really learning it. In the lessons I had lots of vocabulary gaps, when we read texts. As the units advanced, more and more words were unknown to me and my textbook was written full of German translations to enable me to understand the texts at all. This is - of course - a very bad example of learning. From that negative experience on I decided to study the vocabulary of every language SERIOUSLY. I would never neglect my vocabulary learning again in that way. Fasulye Edited by Fasulye on 07 December 2009 at 11:35pm 7 persons have voted this message useful | |
| kaptengröt Tetraglot Groupie Sweden Joined 4336 days ago 92 posts - 163 votes Speaks: English*, Swedish, Faroese, Icelandic Studies: Japanese | Message 50 of 51 18 January 2013 at 10:52am | IP Logged |
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- Learning a more obscure, harder language before its related, larger, easier cousin (would have saved me a ton of pain, more than I actually thought, if only because the cousin would have better materials to learn the more obscure one than English does).
- I am not sure I could count "wanting to learn a tiny language with no materials and certainly no materials for people who live outside the country" as bad, but I think it should not be the first foreign language you choose, it gets really depressing when you have spent years and aren't so good just due to the difficulty/cost of finding native speakers, materials, and so on. - Feeling like I can't skip around in the textbook. For the longest time I would spent tons of time looking up things I didn't know, or trying to get this grammar point, instead of moving on to something I could get and re-visiting it later. (I also find fill-in-the-blank grammar exercises very helpful, but you have to do a lot of them, and it isn't as good as just "learning from using the language", but when you have no choice you have no choice) - Not realising to look at grammar for related languages, for concepts not properly explained in my target language. Would also have saved a lot of time and pain. Also I should have asked some friends who spoke other languages if they could find info on certain grammar topics for me, that are never talked about in English (getting a real description of what cases were was for some reason realllly difficult when I started learning Icelandic, instead of "this is what they are and when they are used" it was "these exist and we don't have them in English lol!!!" but I think the internet is better on grammar these days. - Someone definitely should have told me to never buy a bilingual dictionary for Icelandic, instead use a target-language-only dictionary and use free online dictionaries to make sense of it. I don't mean this as a "you get more used to the language", I mean this as in "the bilingual dictionaries are terrible (except for Danish-Icelandic)". I assume this must be the case for some other more minor languages as well, I really would advise it. - Getting really down about "so-and-so is better than me!" or "I am the worst in the class!". Even though logically I know that so-and-so knows a related language to my target language and I don't, or so-and-so knows five other languages and I only know my native one, or everyone in the class has native-speaking spouses and I don't, and those things make a huge difference in how fast you will learn, I still have felt pretty bad about it and judged myself on the same level. To be honest I am not sure if that is exactly good or bad, it kind of shows a good work ethic (and you need one, for a class) but at the same time you are judging yourself unfairly. - Someone really, really should have told me about how you can self-study through online stuff, not costing money (in many cases), and even sometimes being a much better method than learning in a course. I always wanted to learn Japanese as a kid, wasn't allowed to do so, for some reason didn't realise I could find materials online for free (and everyone around me always said "you can only learn anything from a course with a teacher!), and if only someone had told me! As for learning languages in school, well I am American and when living in America I didn't study a language for very long or get any good in school (meaning "I could maybe say travel phrases but probably not even then"), so I can't say much about that. When I started taking courses in foreign countries, the problem was less the fact that I was in a language class and more a problem of how the American schools had always taught me in the past messing me up. Edited by kaptengröt on 18 January 2013 at 11:03am 7 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Darklight1216 Diglot Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5098 days ago 411 posts - 639 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: German | Message 51 of 51 18 January 2013 at 4:50pm | IP Logged |
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I haven't been studying many languages for very long so I'm still a novice at this, but I know that I've made some big mistakes:
1. Thinking that formal lessons are necessary. I used to ve in the same boat that you in, Kaptengrot. I thought that because my school didn't offer French classes, that was it for me. I had never heard of people learning languages on their own. 2. Not speaking when I know that I should seize the moment. 3. Lacking short term goals. 4. Wasting time doing things that I despise. Through my experiences with Spanish and Ancient Greek I now know that trying to force lousy curriculums, boring material, and excessive rote memorization simply does not work for me. I firmly believe that different people learn differently so there might be people who greatly benefit from long vocabulary lists bereft of context, but I am simply not one of them. Live and learn... 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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