Saturday, June 28, 2008

Helpful Links for Learning a Language

Today I was looking at a bunch of websites, looking for tips on learning languages. I just posted a good website about the process of deconstructing a language to find out how hard the language learning process is going to be. I've also added the site to the links section to the right.

But these links are helpful for actually learning a language.

My Happy Planet
With MyHappyPlanet, you can practice speaking with a native speaker, learn more about other cultures, and make friends with people anywhere in the world. We’ve built in great features so you can teach and learn from each other through live chat, messaging, videos, and fun lessons.

MyHappyPlanet.com


Wikibooks - How to Learn a Language

This website touches upon the various methods of learning a new language, and gives examples. A great place to check into if you're in a slump, or need a new method to try learning your target language. It also has it's complement website, how to TEACH a language.

How to Learn a Language
How to Teach a Language


Omniglot

Omniglot.com is a great website with a wealth of information on languages, how to learn languages, and the history of language.

Omniglot Language Learning Page


Pick the Brain - How to Learn a Foreign Language

Pickthebrain.com has a good blog post by Steve Kaufmann about learning a foreign language. He just lays down some good rules to follow, and some more advice. It's short and sweet.
1) Spend the time!
2) Listen and read every day!
3) Focus on words and phrases!
4) Take responsibility for your own learning!
5) Relax and enjoy yourself!
At this site, I looked up Steve Kaufmann and found out more about him. He has his own language learning site called LingQ.com, and a language learning blog.

Pickthebrain.com - Learn a Foreign Language
LingQ - Language Learning Website
Steve Kaufmann's Language Learning Blog

Mindtools

Mindtools.com is a website devoted to teaching memory techniques. This is a good article on their website about language, since vocabulary acquisition is just memorizing new strings of syllables and connecting them to meaning. One thing I like is the "100 words" list they post--it's a list of the 100 most used words that account for around 50% of the daily words spoken. Of course it's words spoken in English, but the idea is still a good one. If you can find the most used words in a language, and an effective way to memorize new words quickly, you can learn a language pretty quickly.

Mindtools article

What to think about before learning a language

Today I came across an interesting blog post by a man named Tim Ferriss. He wrote a detailed account about what to think about before choosing a language, and how to assess the language's difficulty. He broke it down into 8 basic sentences. Each sentence tells you something about the target language's use of case, gender, etc.

The apple is red.
It is John’s apple.
I give John the apple.
We give him the apple.
He gives it to John.
She gives it to him.


and

I must give it to him.
I want to give it to her.


By looking at how these sentences are said in a language, you can tell a lot of things. You can tell the way the language shows ownership of objects and the use of modals. These might be big words for some people, but they are not that hard to understand once you learn the words of learning words. I suggest you check it out. He is on to something! He de-constructed Arabic in 45 minutes. I've been looking at ways to "cut the fat" of language learning for some time, and this guy has made a career out of doing it for all facets of his life.

Here's a snippet of what he said:
Before you invest (or waste) hundreds and thousands of hours on a language, you should deconstruct it. During my thesis research at Princeton, which focused on neuroscience and unorthodox acquisition of Japanese by native English speakers, as well as when redesigning curricula for Berlitz, this neglected deconstruction step surfaced as one of the distinguishing habits of the fastest language learners


Link
How to learn (but not master) any language in under one hour

Noun Flashcards

Today at work I've been making flashcards. Whenever I learn a language, I seem to have the best vocabulary growth with flashcards and steady, daily practice. I can learn 20 words a day without much effort via flashcards.

Of course, the more grammatically complex words and uses don't really work with simple flashcards, it does help build my noun repertoire; most words people use are nouns. Even with no understanding of a language, you can point and say a noun. So I'll use the flashcards this summer to build my list of nouns.

I'm using the Hippocrene Concise Dictionary "Farsi-English English-Farsi (Persian)" which has 8,400 total entries. At least with American books, I know they use word frequency lists--lists of the most common words used in a language, and then take the X-amount of most used words and put them in the dictionary. I'm just going to go down the list starting at A, and make a flashcard for whatever word I don't already know. I'll skip the grammar and "guts" of the language, and focus on only Nouns.

Dictionary I use

Online Dictionary I use

L2 - Second Language Acquisition

This fall I begin LING438 at PSU ~ Second Language Acquisition, or L2 in linguistic terms. The course details and maps out the progress people make in various methods as they learn a second language.

Language learning has always been a joy and mystery to me. I’ve only recently learned what I was doing when I was learning. I tried learning Japanese in high school, via grade school texts and ingenious use of flashcards by my teacher. I learned Pashto in Afghanistan really quickly, though I’ve since forgotten it due to lack of use, and now have about 1500 words at the tip of my tongue every time I see an Afghan, but only able to repeat the same initial conversation you have with an Afghan who knows you speak Pashto:

“Pashto khabari kawil shi?”
“Wo. Ama zuh faghat lugh lugh Pukhto pohegum”
“wow! De cherta Pukhto zda kre?”
“Pu Khost ke zhwend kro.”
“Dera Pukhto heir khro :(”


Basically saying I speak Pashto, but only a little. I lived in the city of Khost, and I have forgotten most of it.

Learn by Flashcard

Hi,

My name is Dan. I'm 25. This is my blog about learning language. I'm currently an Applied Linguistics ( + Business supply & logistics) major, and finishing my second year of Persian (Farsi, فارسی) at Portland State University.

At one point I was conversational in Pashto--one of the two chief languages of Afghanistan. At another point I was studying Japanese, and Spanish.

My goal with this blog is to record effective methods to learn foreign languages, highlight and review current language learning methods, mark my progress with the various languages--and linguistic methods--and offer any insights I have along the way.

I would appreciate as much feedback as possible, and hope to eventually create my own language learning system, which I'll then test on whatever language I'm trying to learn at that time. Every time I try learning a new language, the mothods being employed don't seem to work. So I'm going to be stubborn and find a better way to learn a new language. It's a gradual progress, so here I go...