I heartily recommend that language learners get a hold of good quality audio books, narrated by people whose style and voice they like, as I pointed out in an earlier post. Listen to them over and over if necessary. Even if you do not understand it all, or even much of it, I believe a well narrated audio book can be a short cut to fluency in another language. I don’t know that for a fact, but I suspect it is true and am going to test this out in Czech.
When I studied Chinese, I listened repeatedly to comic dialogues featuring renowned XiangSheng artist Hou Baolin. I listened tens of times to the same comic dialogues and at first did not understand much, but the voices, rhythm and cadence captivated me. People were laughing, and I did not know why. This content connected with my brain in a way that no lessons or classes could. I attribute much of my success in learning Mandarin to listening to these tapes. My only regret is that I had no access to the transcripts.
Now I have started listening to an audio book, in Czech, of The Good Soldier Svejk narrated by Pavel Landovsky. I am doing one chapter at a time. I import the text to LingQ and go through the text, saving words and phrases for review. I have even found a Russian translation online that I refer to when I get stuck.
I have read and listened to chapter one many times and am now starting chapter two. I do not understand much unless I have the text in front of me, but I am captivated by the power of the narrator. I know that this is creating new circuitry in my brain and that before too long, I will start to get used to this new language, while at the same time I am accumulating lots of words at LingQ.
Maybe humour is the key to rapid language learning.
