Walking into Miss Leslie’s Latin class on the first day of ninth grade was the culmination of a lifelong dream. I could actually hear Roman background music in my mind. I didn’tunderstand how the other students could be anything less than enthusiastic about the prospect of beginning Latin. Electricity coursed through me as I opened the Latin book Miss Leslie gave us. I was finally studying a foreign language! (more…)
A brief “language autobiography” may help readers whose language learning and language loving careers began only a few moments ago with the opening of these posts. My favourite word – in any language – is the English word foreign. I remember how it came to be my favourite word. At the age of four I attended a summer day camp. (more…)
Everything about you, conscious and subconscious, prefers real world to student world contact with the language. An actor knows the difference between rehearsal and opening night; the football player, between practice scrimmages and the kickoff in a crowded stadium. And you
will know the difference between your lessons in the target language and the real world newspapers, magazines, novels, movies, radio, TV, (more…)
The language learning system detailed in these posts is the result of my own continuous, laborious trial and error beginning in 1944. That which worked was kept, that which failed was dropped, that which was kept was improved. Technology undreamed of when I started studying languages, such as the audiocasette and the tape player small enough to carry while walking or jogging, was instantly and eagerly incorporated. 
The system combines:
Go to the language department of anybookstore and you’ll see language books, grammars, hardcover and paperbackworkbooks, readers, dictionaries, flash cards, and handsomely bound courses on cassette. Each one of those products sits there on the shelf and says, “Hey, Bud. You want to learn this language? Here I am. Buy me!” I say, buy them all, or at least one of each! You may feel like you’re taking four or five different courses in the same language simultaneously. That’s good. A marvellous synergistic energy sets you soaring when all those tools are set together in symphony.
Dean Martin once chided a chorus girl, who was apathetically sipping her cocktail, by saying, “I spill more than you drink!” All of us“spill” enough minutes every day to learn a whole new language a year! Just as the Dutch steal land from the sea, you will learn to steal language learning time, even from a life that seems completely filled or overflowing. What do you do, for example, while you’re waiting for an elevator, standing in line at the bank, waiting for the person you’re calling to answer the phone, holding the line, getting gas, waiting to be ushered from the waiting room into somebody’s office, waiting for your date to arrive, waiting for anything at any time?
You will learn to mobilise these precious scraps of time you’ve never even been aware you’ve been wasting. Some of your most valuable study time will come in mini lessons of fifteen, ten, and even five seconds throughout your normal (though now usually fruitful) day.
References:
Language Lesson Plans on goarticles.com
Steps To Native Language Plan on blogger.com
Foreign Language Benefits lens
Language Lesson Plans on ezinearticles.com
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Common sense tells us we can’t have dessert before we finish the meal; we can’t have a slim figure until we diet; we can’t have strong muscles until we exercise; we won’t have a fortune until we make it. So far common sense is right. (more…)
It started for me when I learned that the Norwegian word for “squirrel” was acorn. It may have been spelled ekorn, but it was pronounced acorn. Then I learned that “Mickey Mouse” in Swedish is Mussie Pig. Again, the Swedish spelling varied, but sowhat? As delights like those continued to come my way, I realised I was being locked tighter and tighter into the happy pursuit of language love and language learning.
My favourite music is the babble of strange tongues in the marketplace. No painting, no art, no photograph in the world can excite me as much as a printed page of text in a foreign language I can’t read – yet!
I embraced foreign language study as a hobby as a teenager in 1944. When I was inducted into the army in 1952, I was tested and qualified for work in fourteen different languages. Since then I’ve expanded my knowledge of those languages and taken up others. Whether fluently or fragmentally, I can now express myself in twenty-five languages.
That may sound like a boast, but it’s really a confession. Having spent so many years with no other hobby, I should today be speaking every one of those languages much better than I do. If you’re a beginner, you may be impressed to hear me order a meal in Chinese or discuss the Tito-Stalin split in Serbo-Croatian, but only I know how much time and effort I wasted over those years thinking I was doing the right thing to increase my command of those and other languages.
This book, then, does not represent the tried and true formula I’ve been using since 1944. It presents the tried and true formula I’d use if I could go back to 1944 and start all over again!
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This may be the most frequently told joke in the world – it’s repeated every day in almost every language:
“What do you call a person who speaks two languages?”
“Bilingual.”
“What do you call a person who speaks three languages?”
“Trilingual.”
“What do you call a person who speaks four languages?”
“Quadrilingual.”
“What do you call a person who speaks only one language?”
“An American!”
With your help this book can wipe that smile off the world’s face.
The reason Americans have been such notoriously poor language learners up to now is twofold:
1. We’ve never really had to learn other peoples’ languages before, and
2. Almost all foreign language instruction available to the average American has been until now (one hates to be cruel) worthless. “I took two years of high school French and four more years in college and I couldn’t even order orange juice in Marseilles” is more than a self effacing exaggeration. It’s a fact, a shameful, culturally impoverishing, economically dangerous, self defeating fact!
Modern commerce and communications have erased reason 1.
You and the method laid out in these posts, working together, will erase reason 2.
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