Saturday, February 7, 2015

Language - slow passive learning or accelerated learning?

How do you learn a language, your own and a foreign language? How do you want to learn, how fast do you need to learn?

You can learn passively, just by listening. Does that help with pronunciation? For most people, yes. But some older people change countries and still can't pronounce words correctly, nor lose their accent from the beth country. Others have trouble conquering a lisp, pronouncing certain letters, such as g and t.  I have trouble with rolling the letter r in Spanish and Scottish words.

I work on the principle that anything is better than nothing, when it comes to learning another language.

We are very lucky to be living in an era when we can see how words are pronounced. On websites you can often click on the word to hear how it is pronounced.

Many language courses come with a disc you can play whilst reading the book. I have enjoyed the Berlitz beginners language courses, Earworms. They have the usual basic European languages, French, German, Spanish, as well as the increasingly popular ones for those of us who travel further, physically and mentally. You can listen at home, or in the car, especially on your way to a foreign destination.

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