deutschefun

Erm, yikes! lol I think dreaming in another language would actually seriously worry me! I speak English, German, Spanish and Swahili, and I think if I ever dreamed in any of them I would wake up a little disoriented to say the least! Doesn't it worry you?

The reason your grammar is so good in Croatian is that is the language you have grown up surrounded by. If you immerse yourself completely in a language you will find that grammar becomes habitual, rather than a tedious concentration exercise. Imagine learning Arabian, which has 16 cases! And one thing I always tell my students is that grammar is secondary, communication is king. It's more important to be understood than to be grammatically perfect!

Absolutely not. The only physiological factors that can affect the speed at which a language is learned are age, or mental deficiencies. Gender has nothing to do with it. What you have witnessed is positive reinforcement of structures and words through practice and real life performance. It's much better to learn a language by immersing yourself in it and using it, than it is to just read and drill structures. Trying to commit words to memory through brute force alone is the worst way to learn a language as too many structural errors will occur this way. No, practice and performance is key to learning any language, not gender. Although I wholeheartedly accept your premise that females are the chattier of the species so in that at least they have the upper hand!

The problem with learning a language exclusively by watching a movie, is that most movies are made with slang or grammatical errors. So you find that bad habits are often rubbed off that way. For example you wouldn't want to teach a German to speak English through films like Terminator or Mad Max. Arnie's famous line "I'll be back" is horribly pronounced from a linguistic point of view: "Al be beck" is how it sounds. I guess it also depends on the genres of the movies and the way the actors speak. I found that having my advanced level students watch programs like the Sopranos was a great way of teaching them how NOT to speak, rather than trying to have them remember perfect grammatical structures from films like The Sound of Music or Driving Miss Daisy.

I think you're absolutely right. And this mechanism has been proved by many a teacher. I have even seen my little girl (she's 3) learning to count from cbeebies through their musical programs. I believe it works because people are much more willing to learn through mimicking if that mimicking is fun. And what's more fun than a song? While I was teaching English in Hamburg, I sometimes used lyrics from famous songs to infer meaning, and help build comprehension.

Hello everyone! My name is Joe and I am an English native who speaks German. I spent 5 years in Hamburg and now I'm back in Blighty to settle down with my other half and our kids. If you need any German tips or help I'm always here to help. As they say in Germany "Deutsche Sprach ist schwerer Sprach" (German language is hard language), and believe me, I know! Horror stories abound of people getting it wrong in public. But more on that later! Nice to meet you all! Schoen Euch zu treffen!