LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

       People often bring up automatic translation with me. On a few occasions, people have even suggested that they can shove their smartphones in someone’s face to figure out what that person is saying. Presto! All communication problems will be solved.

      While technology does advance at an incredible rate, I can definitely say that learning a new language will never, ever be replaced by technology. Even if in, say, fifty or a hundred years’ time the technology is there to provide accurate subtitles on your contact lens integrated computer as a person speaks, people will still want to interact with a human being through language. You can’t live through translations. You have to deal with the language directly. So much of human communication is about context, reading complex body language, and understanding the subtle meaning of pauses and volume to gauge someone’s feelings. This is incredibly hard to emulate with a computer.

      17. I Can’t Keep Up with Other People’s Progress

      There is a major problem in comparing ourselves to others – the others we think have it so easy only let us see what they decide to reveal about themselves. When they share their stories and fail to share details about any bumps they’ve encountered on their journeys, it can seem like they have it easy and are much smarter than we are, that we are puny in comparison to such immense giants.

      Every successful language learner has had many challenges, failures, and frustrations along the road to fluency and beyond. If someone ever thinks I had it easy, I like to remind that person that I barely passed German in school, couldn’t speak Spanish despite living there for six months, and could barely string together even the most basic sentences in Irish, even after ten years of schooling. Each language I’ve taken on has presented me with new challenges, and the same is true for every other successful language learner. We all face our own challenges.

      Successful language learners continue on despite the challenges. That’s the difference. When you come to a challenge, rather than thinking, I might as well give up because that successful language learner didn’t have to deal with this, ask yourself, What would that successful language learner do to get around this challenge if faced with it? You may be surprised to find out that this person faced a very similar, if not the same, challenge at some point in the past. And even if he or she didn’t, many other ultimately successful learners have.

      18. Failure Begets Failure

      If you’ve tried to learn a language before and failed, then you might have concluded you’re bad at language-learning. (I’m hoping the points I’ve made so far are emphasizing how untrue this is!) The much more logical conclusion is that you were learning the language in a way that was wrong for you.

      There is no one true or perfect approach to language-learning that is universally applicable to everyone. The traditional academic approach, which so many of us have passed through, simply does not work for many learners. Then again, there are those who have successfully learned with that approach. It’s not that there are smart and dumb learners or universally good and bad learning systems, but there are systems that may work well for particular people and (many!) systems that may work poorly for others. The trick is to experiment and see what works for you. You may try something that doesn’t produce results for you, and if that’s the case, discard it and try something else.

      Try a few of the suggestions in this book and see if they work for you. If they don’t, that’s okay. Experiment with alternative language-learning techniques online, many of which I’ll be discussing and providing links to in chapter summaries. From this you can come up with your own ways to learn. The trick is to keep trying until you find a way that produces real results for you. It’s never you who’s broken, but your current approach. Fix the approach, discard what doesn’t work, and you will be much more successful.

      However, sometimes the issue isn’t a general one with a one-size-fits-all solution, but a specific problem with the language you are learning. Should you learn an Arabic dialect or MSA (Modern Standard Arabic)? Where can you find good resources for learning the Irish language? Why does this language have to have masculine and feminine (or neuter and common, etc.) nouns? What’s the deal with putting the letter a before every person’s name or reference to them in certain Spanish sentences?

      These kinds of specific language questions are challenges that may slow you down, but there are always answers. I cover a few points about individual languages in chapter 6, though I barely scratch the surface, but if you run into an issue with your language, just ask someone about it. Not all answers are covered in books; sometimes another person with experience in the language can give you a whole new perspective on that issue.

      For instance, you can ask a question about pretty much any issue in the very active Fluent in 3 Months online forum (fi3m.com/forum), where I or another active language learner will give you some suggestions.

      Otherwise, find a helpful native speaker and ask that person directly. Most questions do have an answer. Sometimes you can find that answer quickly enough in a book- or web-based language course, but you’ll always get the best, most useful answer by asking a human being.

      19. Once I Forget a Language, I Can’t Relearn It

      People who used to speak a different language when they were young but never fully picked it up often feel they let a golden opportunity slip through their fingers. But it’s really just a case of rebooting their efforts and starting fresh with that language until they get it back.

      One of my blog readers, Anna Fodor, shared her inspirational story with us. Born and raised in England, she grew up with a Czech mother and a Slovak father. So she should have grown up trilingual, right? Not quite. She spoke Czech up until the age of four and then stopped speaking it when she started school. Her mother would speak to her in Czech and she’d reply in English, until her mother eventually stopped trying to communicate with her daughter in her native tongue.

      Finally, when Anna went to university, she decided to reboot her efforts with Czech. She really enjoyed it, and it helped her realize all the aspects of Czech she didn’t know. She had assumed the Czech part of her brain had been somehow locked away in her mind.

      After graduation, she moved to Prague with the aim of learning to speak Czech. This was a pretty vague aim for her, but soon after arriving in Prague, she found my blog and my constant nudges for people to just speak the language, despite any mistakes. She had been looking for a magic solution to her problems for years, but now she needed to put in the work.

      So one day she decided to stop overanalyzing things and just started speaking Czech with her mother. It was hard, and she was so scared that her mother would criticize her mistakes. But to her surprise, her mother exclaimed, ‘Wow, your Czech is almost perfect! This was really amazing. We’ve just had a real, fluent conversation together!’

      Anna’s Czech wasn’t quite ‘perfect’, but her mother’s words – in Czech – meant so much to her that she almost cried. It was like having a huge weight of childhood trauma lifted. She continues improving her Czech, but she’s learned that it’s never too late to get into a language, and she will strive for fluency, while being proud of the fact that she has already achieved her main goal of being able to truly converse with her mother.

      20. Disabilities Make It Impossible to Learn a New Language

      This is a rough one, because it can be frustrating when we have unfairly been dealt a real, medically confirmed disadvantage as language learners.

      When this issue comes up, I am reminded of Julie Ferguson’s story. Julie is severely deaf and partially blind. Despite this, incredibly, she has still managed to learn five languages as well as the basics of several others.

      Her parents realized that she had a hearing problem when she was two years old. She had to go to speech therapy and had difficulty producing consonants like s, h, and f. Over the years, she has learned to get around her hearing difficulties by lipreading and extrapolating from what she does hear.

      When her older brother – who has the same condition

Скачать книгу