Wie Sie jede Sprache in 12 Monaten fließend sprechen lernen können

Laut Udo Gollub, Geschäftsführer und Gründer von Sprachenlernen24.

http://www.sprachenlernen24-blog.de/sprache-lernen-in-12-monaten/

I also recommend the other posts on Mr. Gollubs blog, which can be found on the right-hand side of the page.

Foreign Language Mastery

Linguist Mr. John Fotheringham's website

'dedicated to helping you master one (or perhaps many more!) foreign tongues in the fastest and cheapest way possible',

a must-read for language enthusiasts.

http://l2mastery.com/

Watching T.V. and movies to improve your English (or any other language)

This was a recent post of mine on one of the LingQ forums:

I personally take great pleasure in watching movies and television series to aid my language learning and to keep myself interested when I don't feel like reading or just listening to audio.

It's also a nice way to really see how people talk and react in quasi real life situations, and especially to associate the meaning of what you hear with what you see, which is the most natural way the brain learns language.

However, as much as I like movies, I recommend using T.V. series more than anything because the episodes are relatively short and you can repeat them. I will usually watch each episode twice, once with subtitles and then once without.

It's also the method that gets you the most bang for your buck, as you can get roughly 18 hours of content for about 30 bucks if you buy the DVDs.

It's not important to understand everything you hear - as long as you understand at least 60% of what you're hearing, your brain is learning.

I personally never use the dictionary except on LingQ when I'm reading, and that's only very quickly just so I can understand the new words in context and then listen lots of times. If a text contains too many unknown words, it becomes boring to look them all up and I'll just read it to get out of it what I can.

I'm a highly motivated and very lazy language learner.

If you do look any words up, in your reading or when watching movies, make sure to save them on LingQ so that there's a certain amount of 'accountability' for the learning you've been doing, and so you can see those words in new contexts on LingQ.

Check out this article from Foreign Language Mastery http://l2mastery.com/methods/alg-approach-to-self-study

Improving your pronunciation

I always recommend that learners record themselves when trying to improve their pronunciation and intonation, especially when they have a lot of fossilized errors (as do most people who spend years in the grammar/translation system of language learning).

I use a rule of 5x5x5, although it could also be 3x3x3 or whatever - I just like 5.

1) Learners record themselves reading an article or a dialogue for which they have the native speaker audio as well. Audio content should not be very long, maybe 1 or 2 minutes maximum.
2) They listen to the content 5 times without reading, paying attention to the pronunciation and especially to the intonation, as intonation is more important for overall comprehensibility (I read this in Ann Cook's American Accent Training Program).
3) They listen to and read the content 5 times, once again paying special attention to the intonation.
4) Repeat step 2
5) They record themselves reading the piece again and then compare themselves to the first recording.

Do this every day with a different text, and every day listen to the text from the day before to review.

Students who've done this have noticed a definite difference in the quality of their personal reproduction of the content.

Having said all of this, I only recommend that people who have a lot of fossilized errors do it. If you've never spoken much English, just hold off a bit and give yourself time to soak up more of the language naturally so that you may never have to do 'drills' like this.

Chinese learning from scratch

This is a re-post of a response a wrote to a post on Helen's blog entitled

Learning Chinese with LingQ: No knowledge

(http://tracesofdodo.blogspot.com/2009/11/learning-chinese-with-lingq-no.html)

It's very hard to start out in Chinese from scratch on LingQ at this point - I know because I tried.

A highly recommendable book is Zhang Peng Peng's 'Intensive spoken Chinese', which will help you to understand about 1000 words over the course of 40 dialogues, each of which includes the characters and pinyin transliteration, as well as wordlists.

Following each chapter is also a relevant grammar point, but I just skipped those in my hunger for more vocabulary.

My method was
1) read (the pinyin) and listen without understanding first
2) read and listen and look at the word list on the side of the page to figure out what they are saying
3) read and listen again to see if I understand
4) listen without reading to test my comprehension

This only took about 10 minutes for each dialogue, and I found that I could learn to understand a dialogue with sometimes 30 new vocab words in that time.

Once you can understand without reading, move onto the next lesson and do the same. Then it's just a matter of listening to the dialogues every day over the course of a week or so and after that occasionally repeating, and within about a month or less you can understand 1000 words of Chinese (in context).

The Linguist on Language

You can read Steve Kaufmann's award-winning blog on language learning at

http://thelinguist.blogs.com/how_to_learn_english_and/

and see his videos at

http://www.youtube.com/user/lingosteve

both of which I subscribe to and refer to daily.

Getting started

Ok so I started this blog almost two years ago and then never ended up writing anything, but reading Steve's blog has given me incentive to pick it back up again and reach out to people...

I'll reach out as soon as I think of something to say. Till then, ta!