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Learning a foreign Language

Jon

Hi,


I would like to learn a foreign language and wonder if anybody has any ideas on learning strategies they found helpful. I am not very good a rote learning.

I did French at school so that would be a good one for me to pick up again. I think that maybe learning through listening might be a good option. I know that the standard methods of teaching a foreign language at my school were not so successful with me. I was not so motivated then but now I am quite excited by the idea.

I really like doing accents and therefore trying to get a foreign accent to sound right would be very interesting. Countries within Scandinavia are  appealing, but I have never had opportunity to visit them. Has anyone  experience of learning any of these languages?

Something I read on line recently regarding learning that may be of interest to some people :

‘Other studies I looked at would also have a list of words (10, 20, or more) to read/memorize in a short period of time, then the person would be presented with a whole page of words. The goal was to identify the words from the original list – Aspie results were compared to those of their ’neurotypical’ peers.  The Aspies also did not do as well on this test as others did.  Yet, there was something that more than one researcher found quite intriguing:  for every ‘list’ word the Aspie missed, he or she was very likely to identify another word with similar meaning!  As in, they replaced some ‘list’ words with their synonyms…’

http://blog.xanthippas.com/2008/09/14/aspergers-and-memory-part-2-rote-memory-vs-reasoning/


Parents

  • Hi there,

    Posting as an individual, and not as a moderator...

    I think that research looks very interesting. In my experience, Scandinavian languages are structurally quite easy, but the accents are hard. For example, Swedish uses tone more than English-speakers are used to, and Danish is very guttural, with many endings barely pronounced. But Swedish is a very regular, orderly language, so in that respect it's easy to learn.

    Many schools these days teach languages with a great emphasis on conversation. While this can be useful in some ways, it has led to a neglect of structure. In French, and even more so in German or Latin, knowing the structure can really help. Words follow well-defined patterns, and someone's ability to use a new word depends on knowing the patterns that it uses. Some people on the spectrum certainly find the more structured approach easier, although I'm no expert and I can't say it's universal.

    I'd be keen to hear others' thoughts on this, too.

    Alex

Reply

  • Hi there,

    Posting as an individual, and not as a moderator...

    I think that research looks very interesting. In my experience, Scandinavian languages are structurally quite easy, but the accents are hard. For example, Swedish uses tone more than English-speakers are used to, and Danish is very guttural, with many endings barely pronounced. But Swedish is a very regular, orderly language, so in that respect it's easy to learn.

    Many schools these days teach languages with a great emphasis on conversation. While this can be useful in some ways, it has led to a neglect of structure. In French, and even more so in German or Latin, knowing the structure can really help. Words follow well-defined patterns, and someone's ability to use a new word depends on knowing the patterns that it uses. Some people on the spectrum certainly find the more structured approach easier, although I'm no expert and I can't say it's universal.

    I'd be keen to hear others' thoughts on this, too.

    Alex

Children
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