Today I stumbled upon yet another interesting video about language learning – 5 techniques to speak any language by Sid Efromovich (he speaks 7 languages). Well I would say it emphasizes rightly demarcation between written structures and speaking/sounds of languages and this is definitely something that you have to be consciously aware of if you aiming for success when learning new language. Structures/sounds simple model along with “your native language as a filter” example in the video highlights this symbol-sound disjunction. Also the “database analogy” for language and necessity to go beyond your database when learning language is neat/interesting one. Here is the video:
\nhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-WLHr1_EVtQ\n
Another 5 pirinciples suggested in the video are as follows:
– Make mistakes. – This is really important as I saw too many people so anxious not to make mistakes that they weren’t able to make any progress in language learning just because of that.
– Scrap the foreign alphabet. – You should avoid direct interpretation how anything written in other language should sound based on similarities of what you see in writing to your language writing. Symbols may look the same yet represent entirely different sounds/presume different rules of pronouncing them.
– Find a stickler.
– Shower conversations.
– Buddy formula.
And I guess it makes sense to watch video till the end where he demonstrates his ability to speak multiple languages so that you can decide whether Sid knows what he is talking about 🙂