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Can you get “brain freeze” when speaking a new language?

In other words, sometimes we know the word, we know what we want to say, but we just can’t remember the word. We can’t say it and the more we try to remember it, of course, the more we ensure that we won’t be able to remember it. It happens to all of us. It happens to me at my age. Sometimes I think it’s because I’m older now, but I think it happened to me when I was younger, as well. The more pressure we put on ourselves, if we’re at a party and someone comes in and we’re trying to remember that person’s name, the harder we try to remember the name, the harder it is to remember.

If I find that I can’t think of a word or I can’t express what I want to express, I’ll talk about something else. I’ll move into a direction where I have the words and gradually then come back to what I wanted to say. In any case, I don’t let it upset me because it’s normal. The more confident and comfortable we are, the less pressure we put on ourselves, the less likely it is to occur.

How would you go about learning Farsi?

Well, when I started learning Romanian there were no resources, so I went on the Internet, I wrote up 200 sentences in English and I asked someone to translate these into Romanian and record them for me. I paid them for that and the resulting lessons were imported into LingQ. So if there are no Farsi resources, you may have to create your own.

How do you use Assimil?

A lot of people like Assimil. Personally, to me it’s just another beginner book like Teach Yourself or Colloquial. What I get out of it is strictly the lessons, the content. I listen, I read. I used it for Russian. I started using the Korean one and I found it particularly uninteresting. The Russian Assimil has actually some interesting content and to that extent is better.

What I don’t like about Assimil is that they don’t give you the glossary, in other words, the translations of the new words. They give you a full translation, which I find very distracting. I find it distracting to read in the target language and then go reading through English to see the particular word I’m looking for. So I don’t use Assimil a lot, but I know that a lot of people do like Assimil.

 

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