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Ah ha moment

 Language Learning Forum : General discussion Post Reply
15 messages over 2 pages: 1 2  Next >>
psy88
Senior Member
United States
Joined 5590 days ago

469 posts - 882 votes 
Studies: Spanish*, Japanese, Latin, French

 
 Message 1 of 15
25 October 2014 at 11:31pm | IP Logged 
To encourage others about what to look forward to as they progress in their studies,what is/was an "ah ha" moment for you in your studying? That is, what made you think "ah ha, finally I am getting it" ? For me, one ah ha moment came when, without conscious thought or effort,a sentence in my target language came to me in a situation when I was not trying to study or practice. Something had happened and my first reaction was to respond in one of my target languages. Please share some of your ah ha moments.
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jamesleecoleman
Newbie
United States
Joined 4486 days ago

38 posts - 52 votes 
Studies: Russian, Persian

 
 Message 2 of 15
26 October 2014 at 2:18am | IP Logged 
For me it'll have to be Russian. Every time I went to take a course, my questions were answered and then I had many many many "ah ha" moments. For example, prepositions and where to apply them. Sometimes the rules can be tricky just because of history.
1 person has voted this message useful



Lakeseayesno
Tetraglot
Senior Member
Mexico
thepolyglotist.com
Joined 4333 days ago

280 posts - 488 votes 
Speaks: English, Spanish*, Japanese, Italian
Studies: Esperanto, French

 
 Message 3 of 15
26 October 2014 at 3:38am | IP Logged 
My first "ah-ha" moment with Japanese was very similar to psy88's: a sentence came to me in an incredibly natural way, in an unexpected, non-study related environment, and I realized that for the first time I wasn't having to think actively about the rules of sentence making.
1 person has voted this message useful



Chung
Diglot
Senior Member
Joined 7155 days ago

4228 posts - 8259 votes 
20 sounds
Speaks: English*, French
Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish

 
 Message 4 of 15
26 October 2014 at 4:27am | IP Logged 
Despite my groaning over the title (I now hear the voices of Oprah and management consultants repeating this cliché), it did feel really good when I realized that I had put down a caption for one of my photos in idiomatic Slovak without looking anything up. I saw that I had at last assimilated a certain syntactic pattern involving clitics and personal pronouns.
2 persons have voted this message useful



eyðimörk
Triglot
Senior Member
France
goo.gl/aT4FY7
Joined 4098 days ago

490 posts - 1158 votes 
Speaks: Swedish*, English, French
Studies: Breton, Italian

 
 Message 5 of 15
26 October 2014 at 8:59am | IP Logged 
I don't think I've ever had an aha moment that is so profound that I remember it two days later.

I did have a moment yesterday, though, while mowing the lawn. I was thinking about something else when a French phrase popped into my head. It wasn't a phrase I've actively learnt, nor one that I've thought about when I've encountered it, but I knew perfectly well that it was grammatically correct even if I couldn't necessarily tell you why and it is certainly not the way I would express myself naturally. That's when I realised that, despite feeling immune to progress for a long time now, extensive reading and listening is actually doing something more than simply making it easier for me to read and listen extensively.
1 person has voted this message useful



Serpent
Octoglot
Senior Member
Russian Federation
serpent-849.livejour
Joined 6596 days ago

9753 posts - 15779 votes 
4 sounds
Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese
Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish

 
 Message 6 of 15
26 October 2014 at 2:06pm | IP Logged 
Nowadays mine are mostly about etymology.
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shk00design
Triglot
Senior Member
Canada
Joined 4443 days ago

747 posts - 1123 votes 
Speaks: Cantonese*, English, Mandarin
Studies: French

 
 Message 7 of 15
26 October 2014 at 5:50pm | IP Logged 
The Ah ha moment in language learning is a personal thing. A lot of people go to language classes
expecting the best but do next to nothing outside class to maintain their exposure to the language (TV &
radio broadcasts, reading books & newspapers, etc). These people would never find get to their Ah ha
moments.

The Ah ha moment came when I found a systematic way of learning that would work for me and figured
out the basic sounds of a language and can pick up new words & phrases easily. I may not be able to pick
up everything in a news broadcast or a newspaper but can get the context of what is said.
1 person has voted this message useful



Serpent
Octoglot
Senior Member
Russian Federation
serpent-849.livejour
Joined 6596 days ago

9753 posts - 15779 votes 
4 sounds
Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese
Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish

 
 Message 8 of 15
26 October 2014 at 8:14pm | IP Logged 
I agree that most classes are very inefficient, but why would they prevent people from having aha moments?


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