Comment on That escalated quickly đŹ
Scraft161@iusearchlinux.fyi â¨6⊠â¨months⊠agoThe best course of action is to consume as much content in the target language as possible, tv shows, music, YouTube videos⌠Your brain will eventually pick up on certain parts of the language naturally. Also the best thing you can do is to not force yourself to speak or write in that language until you are comfortable doing so (this is one of the biggest things doulingo does wrong).
I can attest to this method working as I went from barely knowing a couple of English words to speaking it in about 4 months (you could probably do less if you stick to what I outlined above). To back up this method I suggest you look at antimoon which is written by people who have used this to learn English as well.
justlookingfordragon@lemmy.world â¨6⊠â¨months⊠ago
Exactly this worked best for me back in the day ;) Iâm German and while we have some mandatory English classes, theyâre âŚwell ⌠not good. Blunt, boring, 1:1 translations of German sentences, and at least the teacher I had first also had a VERY thick German accent, pronouncing stuff WAY too harsh (âZis is nott how yoo shoold zound when zpeeking inglish for forks zake!â) so other than learning a few basics, the lessons werenât at all useful to me.
âŚbut Iâve been an avid fan of the Zelda franchise even back then so I decided to play Ocarina of Time in English after a first German playthrough. Barely understood the dialogue at first, started to recognize certain keywords after a few days, and once I was halfway through the game my brain kinda switched to âEnglish modeâ and I actually learned words and grammar in a natural way instead of trying to force myself to understand what the hell a âsingular past tense adverbâ is.
Long story short, school tried to teach me how to translate German thoughts into English sentences before speaking them out loud. Games, movies, books and music taught me to THINK in English so I wouldnât need to translate my thoughts first.
The same way Iâm currently trying to learn Spanish by the way, which already works way better than any classes ever did.
Scraft161@iusearchlinux.fyi â¨6⊠â¨months⊠ago
Not just you, your brain is wired to pick up language, how did you learn your first one?
I can attest that English classes here arenât great either (although most people here do speak English as a second or third language)
This is a known side effect of premature output (writing/speaking before you feel comfortable doing so), you donât just listen to whatâs around you, you primarily listen to yourself and pronunciation differs between languages, this premature output becomes toxic input for your brain which then uses that from then on (you can try and get rid of it; but it is really hard to do)
Yup, thatâs natural understanding for you. When you speak a language you donât care about the rules; you should instinctively know them.
As for my issue with Duolingo: it ignores the amount of time it takes to properly acquire a language, if I were to split up all the time I spent watching english youtube into 5 minute chunks itâd take me well over 15 years (and thatâs just accounting for the initial 4 month span; Iâve learned more things after as I naturally used the language). Combine that with the fact it throws established research on this topic to the wayside to push the school-based one which we know goes against the natural way in which we learn. I found a great blog post online about this, while it mostly revolves around learning Japanese; the core principles apply to learning pretty much any language. The beginning of the post does sum the entire thing up pretty well though:
There are some really good parts in that blog that apply to any language; but a lot of it is geared towards Japanese specifically.