The biggest thing in a study plan is that you want to develop new habits. I’ve said many times that language learning is a matter of attitude and spending the time with the language. So we want to have habits that reinforce a positive attitude that give us a sense of success.
*** 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. Hi there, Steve Kaufmann…
People learning all kinds of languages find them selves in a situation where they feel frustrated that they aren’t able to say more. And they feel that their comprehension is better than their ability to speak. So I want to talk a little bit about what we can do to improve our speaking skills with specific reference to English.
*** 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. It doesn’t really matter…
Let me share a little bit about what I would like to see in the year 2021. First of all, in so far as learning languages, I’m going to continue with Persian and Arabic. And at some point I will refresh and try to get back into Turkish.
I’ve started reading about the history of Iran. Also at LingQ we have Sahra in Iran who has created a series of 26 episodes which I’m now going through. I’ve gone to episode seven of the history of Iran with circling questions.
I often get asked the question, how do I maintain my languages? You know, I’ve learned so many languages, more or less up to 21. I don’t know them all equally well, obviously. So how do I maintain them?
In my opinion, the best way to memorize vocabulary is NOT to memorize vocabulary. I have always found that trying to memorize vocabulary is an extremely low-efficiency activity. No matter how hard you try, some words are going to stick and some words will not stick until much, much later.
I may not be aware of having changed, but then if I go back to when I started with Arabic, it was just noise to me. The writing system was meaningless to me, and now I’m able to read, I’m able to hear and understand a lot. So there is this gradual, almost imperceptible change.
So how do we get to good pronunciation in the language? Well, I think there are three elements. One is the attitude towards the pronunciation and I’ll explain that. The second thing is the most important things that we can do that will give us good pronunciation and the third thing is remedial things. If we have what we consider to be poor pronunciation, what can we do?
