Results tagged “language” from theInput.net

Whenever people learn that I can speak 5 languages (Spanish is my native, English my second, Italian, French, and Japanese, as well as learning Arabic, Chinese and Greek) they inevitably ask how I can do it.

I always feebly try to explain language deconstruction and pattern recognition to those who have never thought deeply about their language (or only speak one language, in which case the concepts are very difficult for them to understand.) Tim Ferriss; however, manages to explain this language deconstruction in his article entitled "How to Learn (But Not Master) Any Language in 1 Hour."

The title is misleading in that it actually teaches you how to evaluate basic structures of the language you are trying to learn, and estimate how much effort it will take for you to learn the language fully:

Before you invest (or waste) hundreds and thousands of hours on a language, you should deconstruct it. During my thesis research at Princeton, which focused on neuroscience and unorthodox acquisition of Japanese by native English speakers, as well as when redesigning curricula for Berlitz, this neglected deconstruction step surfaced as one of the distinguishing habits of the fastest language learners.

So far, I’ve deconstructed Japanese, Mandarin Chinese, Spanish, Italian, Brazilian Portuguese, German, Norwegian, Irish Gaelic, Korean, and perhaps a dozen others. I’m far from perfect in these languages, and I’m terrible at some, but I can converse in quite a few with no problems whatsoever—just ask the MIT students who came up to me last night and spoke in multiple languages.

How is it possible to become conversationally fluent in one of these languages in 2-12 months? It starts with deconstructing them, choosing wisely, and abandoning all but a few of them.

That's the thrust: identifying languages that you can acquire more easily (for example: for a native Spanish speaker like me, French and Italian are easy languages to acquire due to shared roots and some similar grammar structures, and Japanese is easier due to shared basic sounds) and working with those. As you acquire these "easy" languages, you open up other languages close to those that now become easier to learn due to shared attributes and so on. The more languages you know, the easier it gets, in a way.

There's a personal tip that I also like to add to discussions of language acquisition, and it's something most polyglots do without thinking about it: when learning vocabulary do not translate!

What do I mean by not translating? This means that when you learn the word for "car" in Japanese (for example), do not think "ok, the word for car is 車 (kuruma)" and repeat that to yourself. This is the wrong way of doing it, and it will make it harder for you to really learn the word.

The better way to learn vocabulary is to actually picture and think of the concept of a car... visualise it, and then think "車 (kuruma)." In this manner you're not placing a link between the Japanese word "車 (kuruma)" and the English word "car," but you're actually placing the link between the Japanese word, and your concept of a car. This way, when you think of a car, you will naturally be able to name it in Japanese, without first having to think of the English word for it.

Why is this approach better? Think about it. How did you learn your native language? You didn't have another language to translate to and link the new vocabulary to. You had to learn what words went with what concepts. By using the visualisation model that I've explained, you're forcing yourself to learn the new vocabulary like you learned your native language, and it'll lead to much better results.