I hear all the time that Google Translate doesn’t work. It’s not accurate. It’s this and that. I think Google Translate is a tremendous resource and not only for language learners. It’s not 100% and it’s better for some languages than others, but I find it extremely useful.
We live in an age where there are lots of distractions. The multiplicity of media has made it easy to be distracted from whatever task we are engaged with.
Why do I want to talk about perfection? First of all, I am a dilettante learner. I also recognize that there are people who need the language for professional reasons because they want to get into a school so that they’re not just dabbling in the language, exploring, having fun like I like to do, they actually need it. So how good do they need to be in the language?
*** This post is a transcript of a video on my YouTube channel. Studying English? Here’s the transcript as a lesson to study on LingQ. I have said in the past that the…
Of course, we want to speak, we eventually want to speak a lot. Our goal is to speak. We want to speak well, but the emphasis should be on listening and reading because it’s something we can do whenever we want, on our own and it really does help our brain become familiar with the language.
Part of becoming a polyglot is accepting that you’re going to be less than perfect. That means you’re going to speak with mistakes. Your pronunciation may not be perfect, but you have this sense of achievement and the intellectual stimulus of discovering a new world, yet another new world with all of the people, and as you learn another language, then the people of that language come alive, the history comes alive.
Language learning as we know is about motivation. That’s the driver. That’s the smart plug that triggers your interest, your curiosity. Content, which feeds that curiosity and those interests, is extremely important. Content that you like, content that has resonance for you.
I think very often in the standard classroom there’s a tremendous emphasis placed on producing the language, speaking the language, which is fine because that’s what people want to do. But what I think is more important is what will I be able to do with the language in a year from now? And from that perspective, I’m not tremendously motivated to speak.
First of all, obviously when you start in a language, whatever you’re listening to is not comprehensible. So you can’t begin with comprehensible input. You’ll begin with input, which is not comprehensible, but which gradually becomes more and more comprehensible. However, if you have access to the text, so you can look up words, then you have a chance. And if you can use LingQ for example, and you can review the words, then you have a chance, or even if you’re using Teach Yourself or some other starter book you can gradually get to where material that is initially not comprehensible becomes comprehensible.
Reading helps you acquire more words, but listening gets your brain used to the language. And of course listening comprehension is a tremendously important skill because if you’re speaking to someone, and we all want to speak in the language, if you can’t understand what the other person is saying, then it’s very uncomfortable and you can’t have a very meaningful conversation.
