The number one goal in language learning is to acquire words. Keep that as your goal, your major activity, be conscious of the fact that you are acquiring these words. Even though at times it seems that you can’t remember them. You can’t remember when you need to use them. You keep on forgetting their meaning. None of that matters.
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…
*** 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. So many people I know listen to my…
I want to talk about history. Why history? Because history fascinates me. I realize that people watch my videos either because they’re working on improving their English or because they find my videos in some way motivating and encouraging and therefore encourages them to continue with learning languages, which in turn motivates me to make more videos.
It’s not a good idea, in my opinion, to demand grammatical accuracy from language learners in school, because so few of them end up speaking the language. What does it matter whether they are able to nail niceties of grammar at the age of 12? To me, it doesn’t matter. If there’s some way of making them enjoy the process of language learning so that they expose themselves to the language, they develop some degree of comprehension, they develop a certain level of vocabulary, that’s good enough.
What are the main problems that I see amongst language learners? First of all, most people don’t realize how long it takes to learn a language. So people get frustrated. They get particularly frustrated when they get to that first level where all of a sudden they know a bunch of words and they realize just how little they know of the whole language.
A aprendizagem de línguas depende principalmente de três fatores: a atitude do aluno, o tempo disponível e a atenção do aluno à nova língua. Se assumirmos uma atitude positiva, uma atenção razoável e crescente por parte do aluno, quanto tempo levará para aprender uma língua?
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.
