Learning another language

Two things I've found helpful in learning a language:

1) Buy a simple book in that language and read it with a big ass dictionary, a good one that includes words used in common expression, etc. I read a novelization of "Dead Poet's Society" in German and the first Lemony Snicket in French. I would pencil in translations of the words I didn't know and then later, while commuting maybe, would re-read the parts I'd already translated.

2) Watch movies in the original language with subtitles. You'll get a good feel for the sound of the language and learn to start recognizing spoken words. In fact, I realized that French was sticking while watching "Cyrano de Bergerac" and caught myself reading a subtitle and thinking "but that's not really what he said".

 

Has anyone use Rosetta Stone?

 

I did. It's effective for vocabulary, but it involves very repetitive work and it won't help much with pronunciation.

 

I'm not bilingual but the biggest key to learning and retaining it is using it daily. You're going to need to use it nearly every day otherwise you'll lose it fast.

I remember when I studied Mandarin in college, not the easiest language, but it was so fun and we had conversational labs 3 times a week I think, maybe every day. It was a wonderful experience, I could read signs with my mom in Chinatown. But once I stopped taking it? Gone. in a hearbeat. One of my biggest regrets.

If you're going to do it, I wish you all the best.

 

I do. The good: there is no English seen or spoken. You associate foreign words and phrases with pictures.

The bad: Doing it this way means you learn no grammar. I agree grammar tables can be tedious, but it's good to know what rule governs a noun or verb changing the way it does.

The good: Gives you continuous positive reinforcement when you associate the right phrase with the picture shown.

The bad: It's too easy. Oftentimes you will know which phrase to use simply because it begins "The man . . . " whereas the other two photos do not have a single man in them. You can understand nothing else in the sentence but still pick the right one simply by knowing what the subject is.

There are pronunciation exercises (you can adjust the flexibility of what it will accept as "correct" in your pronunciation. But some languages just have difficult consonant combinations.

To say "He's standing by the doors" in Russian you would say "On stoyeet v dveryakh". Impossible, I say. Easy, says wife.

 

I would say that any of the Romance Languages: Spanish, French, Portuguese, would be the easiest to learn. There are a lot of similarities and English has borrowed a lot of words and phrases that you would recognize.

Chinese is a tonal language and would be very difficult to learn at an older age.
I would imagine Arabic is harder because of the different alphabet.

I have started to take up some French and I just got a bunch of elementary-level books (numbers, counting, seasons) and went from there. I read websites in French and watch as much as I can in French.

Checkout meetup.com. I found a local French group there that meets twice a month where the whole evening is in French. You get to meet some interesting people as well...There are people from Quebec, Ivory Coast, France and obviously some Americans.

 

There was a cheaper version of RS at sams the other day. Picked up Italian. Doing ok right now.

 

I used to listen to the Pimsleur audio series in the car driving back and forth to work. Wasn't really dedicated to learning just one language, so I would mess around with various programs just for shits and giggles. I did various portions of Dutch, Croatian, Russian, Arabic as well as French and Spanish for refreshers. Basically I would listen to the programs until I got bored with them, but I have to say I feel confident that I retained 80 percent of what I learned (and that was years ago). As far as pronunciation is concerned, I garnered a few compliments from those native speakers who I have tried to talk to.

If you're dedicated, you might want to give Pimsleur a try. If anything, it trains you to think about learning a language in a different way. Perhaps a more natural state, but whatever it is it's probably the best verbal program I've heard. Grammar will have to be learned elsewhere though.

Also try livemocha.com. It's a free program and there's a lot of interaction with native speakers.

 

I once had a conversation with a CIA recruiter. His exact words: "If I had a hundred people in a room who spoke some dialect of Arabic, I'd give a hundred people jobs, on the spot."

 

I'll put it this way, if you want to do business with countries based in the Middle East or China, sure, you'll probably do the business in English.

If you want to business for businesses based overseas, it is a huge plus to speak the native language.

Speaking the language could help someone like Dick recruit a client, or could help him be the outside counsel to a foreign company (or government) or land a spot in-house.

 

I don't want to be discouraging, but I want to emphasize that this is *really* hard for an adult to do. You aren't just learning facts and ideas like a college subject. You are trying to rewire a part of your brain that isn't designed to be rewired past a young age.

 

As an adult who began to learn the basics of multiple languages, I disagree. Would it be easier as a child, yes. Impossible as an adult? No.