Share your Language learning experience

[Kristi]

Hi,

I thought this would be a useful topic. So how about sharing some of our experiences in learning a foreign language? Can be both negative or positive.

What techniques, ways or materials helped you the most?

For me reading and watching movies boosted really quickly my skills.

[linguaholic]

For me the most effective way to learn ANY language is to actually live in the country where this language is spoken. I know that this somehow sounds trivial but it is not. If you really want to master a language, go and life there for some time. You may have a family and two kids and you can obviously not just leave home and life in a different country..but if you are single and have some time and some courage, DO IT. People spend thousands of dollars for language courses and stuff and try to learn difficult languages in their own country. Better invest that time and money in a trip abroad. I have some friends that can speak about 5-8 languages. How did they do it? Well, they were simply living in different countries. A year will do for most of the languages (at least you will be able to speak the language pretty fluently). It is also good to have a boyfriend / girlfriend that speaks one of your target languages. This is, of course, not always possible, but if it does happen, it will definitely boost your skills in that language !

[Damien]

I agree about living in the country of the language. I learned this way and it helped me boost the pronounciationg and the slang also.

[dcprecy]

Here in the Philippines, language learning is vital for occupational purposes. I am currently teaching language skills like reading, writing, speaking and listening to tertiary students. Primarily, college students learn a foreign language for occupational or professional pursuits. The university that I am currently employed offers Mandarin, French and Nihonggo lessons. In my case, I had an attempt to learn Mandarin by purchasing booklets and CDs on the basic of Mandarin. It was hard to learn by myself because Mandarin is a new language to me. The sounds are kind of awkward and it feels like 'alien'  I never succeeded actually in learning it because I need more help.

Mandarin and other foreign languages are useful for professional growth. We get jobs, one because of our capability to communicate with a particular language of the community. It is an edge for applicants to be knowledgeable and verbiage on the preferred language of his workplace.

[linguaholic]

Hey dcprecy, welcome to linguaholic.com!  :angel:

If you need any help in studying Mandarin Chinese, let me know. I studied it for many years and I will be glad to help you out  :grin:

[Medza]

As others have pointed out, the best way to learn the language is to basically live it.  For example with English, go to England for the duration of your summer holidays and find a job. You can learn so much more just by having day to day conversations with people than you would by having lessons once or twice a week. You will also pick up an authentic accent. After coming to England from Poland, I found that the accent that we were taught to speak in is nothing like what English people speak like. The worst pet peeve is pronouncing 'u' as 'a' so fun becomes fan , but becomes bat run becomes ran and it's it's extremely cringeworthy to someone that can actually speak the language.

[sos]

Well learning language for me was not hard for me. The reason is it is something that I loved to do. I read alot and made sure that I was always learning new words.The experience was just so good for me.

[kitkat0124]

I agree that by living in the country that uses the language you are learning can be very helpful. I can speak english. I started learning since I was a kid. But I didn't use it very often. When I moved to US I became more confident in speaking. My pronunciation improved.