wander_n_wonder

Most of the languages I have studied I did it alone at home with my books and tapes. I think it is a good method up to a point when you really need to start talking with other people or else you cannot progress.

Are you a self-learner or are you at a school?

I think it should be a combination of both self-learning and school.  Practice is very important.  You really have to converse with someone else in order for your learning to stick.  You may not be able to do this at home, if you study alone.  Some interaction with others in school would be very useful.

This concept of learning a language by learning 10 words per day is something I studied at the university (in English lingusistics). I like the concept, however, to cram 10 words just to be forgotten a few days later is not really the way to go. For me, as I am now in a country which language I want to learn, I go by this concept, but not to the full extent. I try to learn at least one new word every day, but what I focus on is listening to the conversations around me, and as I have heard a word or phrase many times, I ask what it means. I have learned mostly from this. Remembering and learning by repetition is in my opinion better than learning a list of 10 random words. At least for me.

I totally agree with you.  It's the power of context and situation that will make you learn the language fast.  Random words without any context will be easy to forget.  Unlike if the word is relevant to your current situation, it's something that you can easily associate with something else in your brain. 

I was in a class of maybe 20 or so people when I decided to become proficient in Spanish. Then, I moved to working alone and with my tutors. What did you do that worked for you?

For me, I would normally attend a class first so that my learning will be a bit structured and then when I have learned the basics already, that's when I will endeavor to study alone during my own time.  There has to be some sort of diligence however, when you study alone.  You really have to push yourself.

When I first started learning a foreign language at school , there was a lot of emphasis put on getting the right grammar, and it would take up so long that after a couple of lessons you could say one sentence, and you could say it properly in all tenses and so on, but at the end of the day you only knew one sentence. I think that conversational skills are much more important than getting the grammar right the first time. I think that you should learn to talk the language , and then all the pieces will fall in place. I think that this is something of a controversial opinion so I was wondering, what do you guys think about this?

I learned the English language since I was a young child.  Naturally from this, there is a very high expectation that you will be able to write and speak in correct grammar mainly because you've known the language for such a long time.  In my country, poor grammar is linked to lack of intelligence or laziness to learn.

Yes, it's best to start with your mind fresh every time you try to learn a foreign language.  It's true that sometimes there are similarities (example: Bahasa and Filipino) but if you stick on looking for these similarities, it might get you more confused later on.

This link is very cool.  I think it's really useful.  I also like searching for resources like this online.  I have personally found some useful information before.  It was also in a blog like this that I learned about the Pimsleur approach to foreign language learning.

Speaking is the most difficult, especially if the language is too accentuated.  My mother tongue is a very flat language, so there's not much need to learn accents and phonetics  When learning other languages such as Mandarin or even French, the emphasis on certain syllables is really difficult to get used to.

My French teacher in the university was very very strict that I literally had to prevent myself from sleeping at night just to make sure that I know what to say during the class next day.  I think it was a good strategy from him because I really learned a lot in his class and I pushed myself to the limit.

I've always wanted to learn Mandarin because I think it's very useful in business.  You would find Chinese anywhere in business.  Even tasks like sourcing suppliers, you would need to understand Mandarin because a good number of those manufacturers are in China.

Yeah, I also get annoyed with those shortcuts in texts and emails.  It leads to a lot of misunderstanding.  I think it's still better to type the whole word instead of letting the receiver guess what you're really trying to say.