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high-liters-and-tea-blog · 7 years

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Language Learning Tip!!

GREETINGS ALL! (I’m rly sorry my posts are always whole novels but like I say as much as I can to make sure you get the idea.) Idk if I’m the best person to be giving out language tips but like this is just something I personally have been doing and I found it actually helps a lot.

1. Find songs in that language or take your favourite songs and translate them to that language. I, personally, started small with like nursery rhymes and things like that because the vocabulary and syntax is at a beginner level, then I moved on until I got to my favourite songs. II’m now at a level of french where I can listen to fast, harder, heavier music (like rap/trap/real underground stuff) and I can understand and catch a lot of the idomatic expressions and play on words etc

2. Similar to the first, find movies, tv shows, or other short videos with your target language. This especially helped me for sign language since the whole thing is basically watching, body language and facial expressions make up a good chunk of it. For spoken languages, this really helps with pronounciation, common expressions, idioms, and all those other things that you dont get from just studying/reading. French is all about tone, if you don’t sound nasal and slightly exaggerated you can potentially change the meaning of the sentence and with Hausa intonation is a major key. Plus with the various dialects, it’s good to be exposed to different pronounciations of the same word. If you can I’d definitely suggest something like a talk show (think oprah or Dr. Phil, not Ellen) because there’s not so much scripting and it’s a lot more natural (?)

3. (This tip is something I’ve jsut started doing as my Hausa vocabulary is starteing to grow) Incorporate the target language into your everyday life! I’ve gone around my room labelling everyday items (phone, eggs, clock etc) and if I need to use them I repeat the word and try and construct a basic sentence. ALSO RLY HELPFUL EXAMPLE but I’ve started doing my BuJo spreads in Hausa as well. This has greatly improved some of the more common calendar-related vocabulary like days of the week, numbers, time, and that sort of thing. I still write down quotes and tasks and things in english but hopefully that will change soon

4. LISTEN, LISTEN, LISTEN, LISTEN AND LISTEN. If you can find native speakers actually speaking pls befriend them and do the most to listen to them. Listening is so important because you will again get to learn so much that books and vocab lists can’t teach you (Refer to the first two points!!). If you can do some sort of exchange program, for the first little while, just sit and blend in, listen, and observe, only speak when you are spoken to!! If that’s not an option then for sure the internet is a great place, you should be able to find a radioshow or something like that to listen to. Find something that is fairly natural so you pick up on the way people actually speak (I hope youunderstaand what I mean). This was a huge issue with me for french because the french you learn in school is like incredibly formal, only a conversation between the Queen and your great-great-grandmother would sound like that, literally the interview I had was so informal I was confused. I’m fortunate enough that my parents (obviously) speak Hausa to eachother at home still and I rly take advantage of this.

5. The last (for now) and possibly one of the most important tips I have today is DON’T WORRY ABOUT GRAMMAR AND WRITING AND ALL THAT RUBBISH, speaking and pronounciation is far more important than understanding written things. The spelling and things might confuse you and impair your speaking or pronounciation. Think of learning to speak as a baby, your parents didnt sit you down with a notebook or dictionary and write things out then have you try and read them back, they spoke to you and the writing came YEARS later! (That’s why I believe lanuages are taught so backwards in school). A lot of people learning French for the firs time pronounce things the way they would in English, forgetting that there are a lot more soft consonnants and silent letters. When I as learning spanish I got stuck in the french mode and kept things silent that should have been pronounced. When I was learning Portuguese I got stuck in Spanish mode and even tho things are spelled similarly or the same, they are said completely differently. Don’t even get me started on Russsian, I’m taking my precious time to learn how to read/write that! With Hausa I made sure to learn from these mistakes. Plus, I already knew a lot of words so when I finally saw how they were written I was a bit surprsed but I had a better understanding of pronounciation so it was easier to learn new words.

Side note; If anoyone has any apps/websites to recomend for languages that aren’t as popular to learn (such as Hausa) PLS LEAVE THEM BELOW OR SEND A MESSAGE!!!!!

***Language-Related Backstory****** ***Don’t feel obliged to read but here are my (somewhat) qualifications***

So my first language WAS NOT English and I went to french schools for the majority of my life so I’ve kinda always hated and struggled with English in school and just in life. At home we spoke exclusively in Hausa, It wasn’t until I started school (age 4-6) that I we started speaking english at home (my mom sent me to school with a list of common words in Hausa so that my teachers could communicate with me, but thats a whole other story)

From preschool to second grade (age 4-7) I actually went to french immersion schools, so in the morning we did our lessons in english and in the afternoon we repeated them in french, or we learned the concepts in english but execution and any key vocab was all in french. From third to 5th grade I went to a French school, as in native french- speakers only, I was rly lost and so were my parents (literally ALL communication was in french). So by this time we only spoke English at home and I lost all my Hausa. From then on I went to english schools and just took a lot of french classes, even in uni.

But after 15 years of constantly taking french in schoool and my teachers saying im fluent and never getting less than 96% in all things french, I applied for a bilingual job position and COULD NOT communicate fluently in french with the interviewer. It was then that I realized that I had just been taking the same grammar course for 15 years and obviously what you learn in school is not representative of what you apply in real life but with languages its REALLY much so.

SO, I’m now continuing my french studies on my own, I’ve been trying to teach myelf Sign Language for years but I get frustrated a lot easier, I’m (quite sporadically, I’ll admit) self- teaching myself Russian and Portuguese, and I’m (re-)teaching myself Hausa. Ideally, I’d love to speak at least 5 Languages fluently before I die

#me #mine #personal #studyblr #langblr #polyglot #tips #language tips #language apps

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