Learning a foreign Language

I haven't been diagnosed yet but I have found language-learning both easy and hard because I can memorize hundreds of words in a day but find listening-skills really difficult. I can read French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese (obviously there are a lot of common areas here) and some German, which is the one I really need for my studies.

I have tried Danish but as Alex R says it is very unusual (read the Wikipedia entry why this is so) but the verbs are simple as can be: much more like English ones but even less variation...no I am, you are, he is..just Jeg er, Du er, Han er (from memory). I have heard Swedish is similarly easy but that it has changed a lot after World War II: it is much less formal and the tonal variation has been really toned down because the younger generations were getting embarrassed by the way they were being caricatured (for example I think the chef on the Muppets is Swedish). Having found Danish very 'mumbly', since watching The Killing it is making much more sense. If you can find a show in a foreign language that bears a lot of repeated watching then this would be a good way to go. You won't have to learn redundant phrases like the apocryphal 'my postillion has been struck by lightning' etc. but catchy common phrases everyday people use.

However, having tried so many langauges I have to say, for me anyway, getting a big vocab quickly takes alot of the dictionary drudgery away. There are some really good word frequency vocab books out there but also if you need to try a structurally sophisticated language, like German for example, buy Reading German by Waltraud Coles and Bill Dodd. It is brilliant on the structure of German sentences. Hopefully there are other good ones on languages like Arabic, Russian etc.

Back to the vocab business though. If you are a very visual thinker, there are a few language learning strategies that tie words into images to create stories that make memorising easy. The best I heard was to pick a town you know well and fill it full of images and stories but tie them memorably to your foreign language. So if it's French you are learning you might turn the verb 'aller' into an alley down which you are 'going' and this becomes a way into building a huge memorable vocab. Now 'going' is quite abstract but if you tend to use 'go' quite a lot to say I am 'going' to the shops, then you go down your alley to buy a magazine at the shop and hey presto!, from magazine, you get the word for shop 'magasin'. This can actually be a good deal of fun and a place to daydream in.

Is this making sense? I hope so because I can memorize hundreds of words this way and if I were to keep visiting my new Frenchified town a lot of these images stick quickly and so I am quickly learning my new language through learning a lot of vocab of everyday items.

Lastly I have a brilliant Russian Frequency dictionary and like many of these books, it makes the point that most language uses very small amounts of vocab. 200 basic words covers 50% of everyday conversation. If you have a 5000 word vocab and can use it fluently, then you can understand almost everything, though some idioms might be confusing. Yet Barrons do books on this subject as well....so it's all out there to get going and as every linguist says...doing a little every day is the best way. Language learning is all about reinforcing things you have learned already.

Sorry for such a long post but this is a topic I have obsessed about for years.

I haven't been diagnosed yet but I have found language-learning both easy and hard because I can memorize hundreds of words in a day but find listening-skills really difficult. I can read French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese (obviously there are a lot of common areas here) and some German, which is the one I really need for my studies.

I have tried Danish but as Alex R says it is very unusual (read the Wikipedia entry why this is so) but the verbs are simple as can be: much more like English ones but even less variation...no I am, you are, he is..just Jeg er, Du er, Han er (from memory). I have heard Swedish is similarly easy but that it has changed a lot after World War II: it is much less formal and the tonal variation has been really toned down because the younger generations were getting embarrassed by the way they were being caricatured (for example I think the chef on the Muppets is Swedish). Having found Danish very 'mumbly', since watching The Killing it is making much more sense. If you can find a show in a foreign language that bears a lot of repeated watching then this would be a good way to go. You won't have to learn redundant phrases like the apocryphal 'my postillion has been struck by lightning' etc. but catchy common phrases everyday people use.

However, having tried so many langauges I have to say, for me anyway, getting a big vocab quickly takes alot of the dictionary drudgery away. There are some really good word frequency vocab books out there but also if you need to try a structurally sophisticated language, like German for example, buy Reading German by Waltraud Coles and Bill Dodd. It is brilliant on the structure of German sentences. Hopefully there are other good ones on languages like Arabic, Russian etc.

Back to the vocab business though. If you are a very visual thinker, there are a few language learning strategies that tie words into images to create stories that make memorising easy. The best I heard was to pick a town you know well and fill it full of images and stories but tie them memorably to your foreign language. So if it's French you are learning you might turn the verb 'aller' into an alley down which you are 'going' and this becomes a way into building a huge memorable vocab. Now 'going' is quite abstract but if you tend to use 'go' quite a lot to say I am 'going' to the shops, then you go down your alley to buy a magazine at the shop and hey presto!, from magazine, you get the word for shop 'magasin'. This can actually be a good deal of fun and a place to daydream in.

Is this making sense? I hope so because I can memorize hundreds of words this way and if I were to keep visiting my new Frenchified town a lot of these images stick quickly and so I am quickly learning my new language through learning a lot of vocab of everyday items.

Lastly I have a brilliant Russian Frequency dictionary and like many of these books, it makes the point that most language uses very small amounts of vocab. 200 basic words covers 50% of everyday conversation. If you have a 5000 word vocab and can use it fluently, then you can understand almost everything, though some idioms might be confusing. Yet Barrons do books on this subject as well....so it's all out there to get going and as every linguist says...doing a little every day is the best way. Language learning is all about reinforcing things you have learned already.

Sorry for such a long post but this is a topic I have obsessed about for years.