Learning a foreign Language

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
  • Although it is expensive, Rosetta Stone is great. I am currently learning Japanese Laughing 

    It throws you into listening to full sentances right from the start, but your focus is only identifying one word. For example in the first few lessons you had to work out if they were talking about boys or girls, then men and woman.

    Within a few lessons I had written a word in Japanese, it was really amazing.

    If your anything like me though, it is a slow process. My partner seems to learn it so much quicker than me.

    I tried other methods like learning individual words from picture cards and found that didnt really work that well.

Reply
  • Although it is expensive, Rosetta Stone is great. I am currently learning Japanese Laughing 

    It throws you into listening to full sentances right from the start, but your focus is only identifying one word. For example in the first few lessons you had to work out if they were talking about boys or girls, then men and woman.

    Within a few lessons I had written a word in Japanese, it was really amazing.

    If your anything like me though, it is a slow process. My partner seems to learn it so much quicker than me.

    I tried other methods like learning individual words from picture cards and found that didnt really work that well.

Children
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