Posted: Mar 19, 2010 9:04 am
Preno wrote:Well, you have to be motivated (you should ideally be interested in the language itself, not merely from an instrumental pov) and devote time to it regularly.
Oh, I definitely agree that regularity is the most important aspect of learning a language. A couple of years back I was learning German and now, after a pretty lengthy pause, I feel like I have forgotten 90% of what I once knew. Regularity is the key to it, no doubt.
Other than that, I don't think it really matters which "method" you use, unless it's blatantly idiotic or one of those methods that claim to teach you the language in 4 weeks.
Yeah, on that note, I had a pretty heated discussion on another forum with a person who decided to learn languages through reading the Bible
His idea was that he knows more or less all the text. As far as "blatantly idiotic" methods go...Elena wrote:IMO, second best is TV. Is there any way you can view French-speaking channels? If you can, start by watching the news with captioning, so you have the correlate between the sound and the spelling.
That's a good one, of course, but (imo) it is only usable when you already possess a relatively good knowledge of the language. I use it with Italian and German, which, although far from perfect, are the languages I know enough of to be able to understand the gist of the conversation/news/story. I also try reading news on the internet in those languages (news.google.it or .de are simple enough destinations and the articles are usually available in English too). However, when it comes to starting learning a language, it's not applicable. I can watch French TV all day long and not get more than a couple of sentences right
French movies subtitled in Czech can help, too, if you can find them (but you have to remember to listen rather than read most of the time, and check the subtitles only for corroboration).
Croatian
But in this case, I agree with Saim.Saim wrote:I find that I prefer it when I watch Spanish-language movies for the subtitles to be in Spanish, then I'm not tempted to just read the English subtitles because it's easier and don't get confused by the speed at which they are speaking.
When it comes to French I find it even worse. For example, these sentences:
Le garçon court.
Les garçons courent.
sound exactly the same to me. I can't hear the difference. In such cases captions in the same language are more helpful I think.