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20 hour technique | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
 jeff_lindqvist Diglot Moderator SwedenRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6689 days ago 4250 posts - 5710 votes  Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: German, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Irish, French Personal Language Map | Message 9 of 15 13 May 2014 at 12:36am | IP Logged | |||||
Go through an Assimil course the way AML desribed it in this thread: Assimil Hebrew in two weeks I'm more than one week into this experiment (a review of Chinese with ease) and will post a summary by the end of this week. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| rdearman Senior Member United Kingdom rdearman.orgRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5016 days ago 881 posts - 1812 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian, French, Mandarin | Message 10 of 15 25 April 2015 at 2:32pm | IP Logged | |||||
Did it work? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| jeff_lindqvist Diglot Moderator SwedenRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6689 days ago 4250 posts - 5710 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: German, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Irish, French Personal Language Map | Message 11 of 15 25 April 2015 at 4:13pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Oops, I thought I had posted a summary in my Mandarin log, but since I tried it out for German as well, I'll copy/paste that one:
It was definitely an interesting experiment, and although I already had enough German to begin with I'd still say that I peeled another layer of onion. One-two hours per day for two weeks is something I can handle (at least with some planning ahead), and I'd like to try it with another language, preferably one that is totally alien to me. (Source) Could this work as an intensive course for Mandarin? Maybe. Did it (for me)? Not really. I've been studying Mandarin on and off for some years now, and maybe this was a combination of an "excuse" to do something with the language and to try a new method. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| shk00design Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4224 days ago 747 posts - 1123 votes Speaks: Cantonese*, English, Mandarin Studies: French | Message 12 of 15 25 April 2015 at 8:10pm | IP Logged | |||||
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The first 20 hours of intensive study into anything builds the foundation for you to advance further. No
matter what you are learning, you will never be able pick up everything there is to know about a skill in 20 hours. But you would have learned enough to be able to decipher new concepts along the way. The other day I was watching a documentary online from Taiwan on space travel. There were concepts like: 光 年 and 黑洞 that were mentioned. These are not terms you would use in everyday conversations but nonetheless easy to figure out. 光 is the Chinese for light and 年 is for year so the term was "light year". The other was 黑 for black and 洞 for hole so the term was "black hole". Another term that came out of a news article recently: 被駭 from a news article. The character 駭 is pronounced (hài) has a different meaning originally than what was in the article which talked about somebody clicking on a link and opened a page full of porn images unintentionally. The article was referring to somebody's computer being "hacked" to open a webpage automatically. This is a term that came about not more than 40 years ago since the Internet have become common. You learn basic phrases in Chinese and read all sorts of Chinese classic literature (the Chinese equivalent of Shakespeare). You may even come across the character 駭 but not used in the modern context. On Christmas our family had a dinner gathering. There was 4 people in the room who supposedly learned to play piano and passed their Gr. 6 level conservatory exams. Yet none of them felt comfortable enough to play a song on a keyboard. Learning a language is the same idea. There is the reading and writing aspect (like learning to read music notations) and the conversation aspect (like performing a song in front of an audience). A lot of people who studied French probably have enough vocabulary to read a paragraph out of a magazine but being able to carry on a conversation is another matter. For someone who learned to play piano would have enough basic knowledge to tackle a Beethoven concerto but this doesn't mean the person actually played one. There are different styles of music like Jazz, Classical, etc. you can go into. After you mastered a language, you can pick up all sorts of new terms used for science, engineering, medicine, etc. that is not used in everyday speech. If you learn to do things properly, you can master a new skill in a short time to be able to do things on your own but you wouldn't be picking up everything there is to know. Edited by shk00design on 26 April 2015 at 6:33am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5210 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 13 of 15 26 April 2015 at 4:05pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Out of curiosity, I looked at the video and I think it's a lot of hype about a very simple idea. As a matter of fact,
towards the end, the speaker says that this is all common sense. And this is exactly what it is: plain common sense. What you do is take any task, break it down into subtasks and systematically devote an amount of time, let's say 20 hours, to this subtask and then repeat as necessary or move on to the next subtask. Who can be against that? What is a bit untruthful about the video presentation is the impression that you can learn anything in 20 hours, i.e. you can learn to play the ukelele and sing the way the presenter does in 20 hours. This is not true, Neither can you learn a language in 20 hours. Should you break down your language learning strategy into 20-hour chunks? Why not? Or maybe 10-hour or 25-hour segments? I see the value of concentrating on specific goals. Let's say I want to spend some time on the difficult sounds of the target language. So, I decide to spend an hour a day for five days working specifically on the difficult phonology. Then once I feel comfortable with that, I move on to something else. They key idea in all this is to work systematically and in a disciplined fashion. That's all there is to it. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| shk00design Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4224 days ago 747 posts - 1123 votes Speaks: Cantonese*, English, Mandarin Studies: French | Message 14 of 15 27 April 2015 at 1:54am | IP Logged | |||||
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A few years back Scott Houston who teaches adults to play piano made a TV series: "Piano in a Flash" on
PBS TV in the US. He sometimes goes by the nickname "Scott the Piano Guy" makes piano playing fun for those who had never taken piano lessons before. He would tell older individuals who get into piano playing they would never be playing technical Classical pieces by Chopin, Beethoven or Tchaikovsky. But playing gospel songs in church, folk songs can be achieved as adults. I don't consider an artificial number like 20- hour or even 10,000-hour as the absolute magic number required to achieve success if you do everything the right way. According to Scott the Piano Guy, a lot of people took piano lessons at a conservatory level before but they are only able to play "Minuet in G". 1 thing a lot of people agreed on is that learning in a traditional (classroom) environment whether you are into languages or playing music is not working. Saying that it would only take 20 hours to learn a new language may be exaggerated. On the other hand, there are those who spent years in a language class and they are unable to carry on a simple conversation beyond the basic greetings: "Bonjour, comment ça va?" is a waste of time. The first phase of learning is to build the fundamentals. Once you learn enough on a language, you can go further into learning history, science, politics, etc. using a new language and picking up new words & phrases along the way. Although TV can be a distraction in learning but when it comes to languages, TV programs and videos should be part of the equation. The more you listen to the sounds of a language, the easier for you to pick up new words & phrases. Edited by shk00design on 27 April 2015 at 3:40am 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| schoenewaelder Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 5340 days ago 759 posts - 1197 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: German, Spanish, Dutch | Message 15 of 15 29 April 2015 at 8:14pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Yearlyglot, learn a language in 6 months, fi3m and the 6WC have been usurped. The
goal is now, learn a language in 5 weeks. He mentions 20hours. 5 weeks I assumed Tampere Uni was somewhere in America, but apparently it's in Finnland Edited by schoenewaelder on 29 April 2015 at 8:15pm 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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