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How to learn any language | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Thantophobia Groupie United States Joined 4961 days ago 49 posts - 66 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Japanese | Message 1 of 13 02 April 2011 at 2:38am | IP Logged |
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It's a thing that can help you in all sorts of things, something so blatantly obvious
and so underused that it's actually kind of sad. You have to try. Obvious? Perhaps not. See, that's the thing. People never get into things. You have to focus. You have to make it hard for yourself. I realized this when I was thinking about the five-pound weights we have. When I lift them, it feels like I could do so much better, lift it so much faster, but yet I can't! It's like it's impossible to fully go to your potential. It's because your arm only goes at a certain velocity, no matter how strong you are. So what do you do? You get a bigger weight. If we apply this to many areas of life, that's just it--you have to make it harder! In this case, you have to really get into it. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Spanky Senior Member Canada Joined 5755 days ago 1021 posts - 1714 votes Studies: French | Message 2 of 13 02 April 2011 at 3:39am | IP Logged |
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Okay, I'll bite. What the heck are you talking about?
10 persons have voted this message useful | |
| apparition Octoglot Senior Member United States Joined 6449 days ago 600 posts - 667 votes Speaks: English*, Arabic (Written), French, Arabic (Iraqi), Portuguese, German, Italian, Spanish Studies: Pashto | Message 3 of 13 02 April 2011 at 5:04am | IP Logged |
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I want what he's smoking.
4 persons have voted this message useful | |
| irrationale Tetraglot Senior Member China Joined 5849 days ago 669 posts - 1023 votes 2 sounds Speaks: English*, Spanish, Mandarin, Tagalog Studies: Ancient Greek, Japanese | Message 4 of 13 02 April 2011 at 6:22am | IP Logged |
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I think what you are talking about is a psychological state called "flow". It's when things are just beyond your ability, not too easy, but not too difficult, causing you to get in a flow and focus, totally absorbing yourself in an activity. I believe it has been studied by psychologists if you are interested.
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| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5565 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 5 of 13 02 April 2011 at 11:53am | IP Logged |
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1.) Yes, universal. If you try, it might be impossible, but if you don't try it is impossible for sure.
2.) Not for everyone. There are people who are really good at setting goals for themselves that they can carry out well, there are people who choose too easy goals and those that choose too difficult goals. Good goals are the ones that take you just a bit out of your comfort zone, that's where learning or training is the most effective. I am one of those people who tend to choose goals that are very difficult for them to reach and I burn myself out over it. I waste precious time and energy on it. Edited by Bao on 02 April 2011 at 3:41pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | |
| hrhenry Octoglot Senior Member United States languagehopper.blogs Joined 4929 days ago 1871 posts - 3642 votes Speaks: English*, SpanishC2, ItalianC2, Norwegian, Catalan, Galician, Turkish, Portuguese Studies: Polish, Indonesian, Ojibwe | Message 6 of 13 02 April 2011 at 4:27pm | IP Logged |
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I think this is a copy-and-paste from a recent blog entry somewhere, although I can't place which one. I have about 50 or so in Google Reader, usually pegged at 1000+ unread stories.
R. == 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| iguanamon Pentaglot Senior Member Virgin Islands Speaks: Ladino Joined 5061 days ago 2237 posts - 6731 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese, Haitian Creole, Creole (French) | Message 7 of 13 02 April 2011 at 6:21pm | IP Logged |
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I've seen some other posts from this user before that make me think, what?
This forum is a great help to people who are trying to learn a second, third, fourth, etc, language. People give useful advice about learning techniques, courses and all aspects of languages and language learning. The forum is a great resource in itself. It's a shame to see it get cluttered with time wasting, white-bread generalities bordering on spam. Edited by iguanamon on 02 April 2011 at 6:26pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | |
| BartoG Diglot Senior Member United States confession Joined 5246 days ago 292 posts - 818 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Italian, Spanish, Latin, Uzbek | Message 8 of 13 02 April 2011 at 7:23pm | IP Logged |
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I think there's something useful here, and if it seems like an obvious generality that doesn't mean that it doesn't point to a problem that plagues legions of unsuccessful language learners. So let's translate this into language learning terms:
Your five pound weight is the first two chapters of a beginners self-teaching text. How many people want to learn, say, French, so they buy a book, read a chapter or two, and put it down? A few months later, they see another book, it looks kind of fun and familiar, so they get it and, again, they do a few chapters and put it down. The third or fourth time they do this, those first two chapters are a breeze and they can introduce themselves and say a few phrases like nobody's business. And yet, they still haven't gotten anywhere. This is what it means to pump that five pound weight faster and faster, but without actually getting stronger. Pumping that five pound weight also applies to the overambitious, underthought approach to polyglottery where you do the first ten Pimsleur lessons for seven or eight languages and think you are a polyglot with a gift for languages, not from false pride but from pure and simple naivete. I don't know that I agree with the phrase "You have to make it hard for yourself." But there is no question that you have to challenge yourself, incrementally improving beyond what you could do before. I have been making use of the Assimil Alsatian course in a test to see if you really can learn a language "with ease" as the title says. My experience, unsurprisingly, is that even someone with a long history of learning languages and a background in a related language (German) can learn a lot with ease, but that you probably can't just stumble your way into fluency. For the serious learner who has spent a lot of time on these forums looking at the ideas and approaches of intelligent and dedicated polyglots and students of languages, this post may seem to contain "white bread generalities". But everybody who comes to this forum has a first time they came here. And many of those who come here are hoping that a place called "how to learn any language" will have a magical gimmick for doing so, not just a lot of advice for how to find the time, apply the necessary effort more effectively and take the next steps when the easy work is done and the initial enthusiasm wears off. I would add that this initial post has brought some nice thoughts from irrationale about getting into the language learning zone, and a warning from bao about the dangers of making things too hard on yourself. So it has served its purpose, reminding all of us - new and experienced learners alike - that the magical secret to learning languages is that there is no magical secret, only making sure that we find strategies that are right for us to gradually strengthen our language skills by doing new things that can be challenging as opposed to getting really good at the easy stuff. 8 persons have voted this message useful |
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