Sunshine Language School

Last post we talked about the French accent used in a popular language learning course. This time we look at why it is important to try and get the accent right! Often when you speak English to a person that speaks English with a different accent it is easy to miscommunicate with each other.

There are several families of words that can be switched from English into French or Spanish and in 90% of the cases you have the same word, easily translated. There are of course exceptions to these rules and words like this are called ‘false friends’.

An easy family to translate into Spanish or French from English is the family of words ending in the letters -ion. Like organization, termination, etc. To make it a French word it you just say it with a French accent.

Easy.

To make it a Spanish word, change the letter ‘t’ to the letter ‘c’ and pronounce it accordingly. The letter ‘i’ also takes an accent so that organization becomes organizacíon. 

At some point in your language learning quest you should get involved in some form of ‘total immersion. This is where you become totally immersed in the language. The immersion situation is usually of greatest benefit when you have reached a certain level of competence in your studies, where you can put together a great number of sentences and can understand and make a load of verbs in the different times or tenses.

Immersion is where you go to a country or community where your target language is being spoken, and you become surrounded by the language in its native environment. This way you see and hear and feel the words, phrases, expressions and culture in context. The best time to go varies with most people, but most adults may find it best to go when they have mastered a certain level of the language learning.

Going to a new country may not be too practical for your lanuage learning situation, but there are things that you can do to ‘imitate’ this.

You can actually ’simulate’ this immersion by surrounding yourself at home with the sounds of the target language by listening to the radio, TV, films etc in the target language.

So as an example of this simulated immersion, if you are learning Spanish, a very powerful technique is to watch a Spanish movie. But watch it first to get the feel of it, then watch it with your dictionary and a pen and paper, so that you write down all the words and phrases. You may get a friend along who knows the language to help you as you transcribe this movie, and a few other movies.

Now, as you go about your daily life you can have this movie, or this group of movies, playing repeatedly in the background. Repeat the words of the actors. Act them out. Copy them. Exaggerate their actions, phrases and expressions. Soon you will have lots of the Spanish phrases down pat.

Repeat the movies ten to fifteen times each! This repetition will reinforce the Spanish things that you have learned whilst transcribing. Allow a day or more between viewings as the brain likes to ‘process’ any new material and allow it to bed in. You can do the same procedure with Spanish radio shows etc.

You can listen to radio shows, but do record them, translate them, then play them again and again as you go about your daily routine. You will absorb loads of the structure of the language.

Exactly.

The FSI Learn German course, perfect for the student of German language, is now available as a free email course. This is offered by the good folk at the 200 Words a Day! accelerated language learning website… Check the link for free German learning course.

Here’s a little idiom for Spanish learners.

To drink too much is alzar de codo.

Juan alzaba de codo cuando era joven!
Juan drank too much when he was young.

Alzar means to raise, and el codo is the elbow, so literally it means one raises one’s elbow.

Learning Spanish proverbs and idioms is a great way to expand you vocab and get to know the thinking and customs of a nation.

Woweee. Here’s a bit of a bargain. 1,000 pages of French Lessons free from FSI. That includes 20 hours plus of audio in mp3 format. These are available by email from the 200 Words a Day! Accelerated Learning site. Or as they pronounced onsite - excelerated learning website. The free lessons are not the 200 Words a Day! lessons, but is the full foreign Service Institute course that was written by the US State Department’s language teaching division, the highly respected FSI. The French lessons come in a series of 7 emails for and are sent every 3 days. You really need to spend 6 to 20 hours on each lesson, and because the sound files are mp3 you can listen to them in your car, train, bus etc via your iPod (or whatever) to review and reinforce the contents of the free French lessons from FSI. The content itself may seem a bit dated because it was written in the 1960’s but it is pretty indepth, and I have not encountered a course that can be beaten on price for the amount of material. Elsewhere on the internet these same FSI French courses sell for over $200. If you can find these French courses any cheaper why not post a blog here on the Sunshine Language School blog.  Also at the same site are FSI lessons in Spanish, Italian, German language so there is a great deal of choice for learners of these languages. Here are the links for the Spanish FSI language course, the German language FSI courses. The courses’ lessons are designed to be used with a qualified teacher, and despite the advantages of online learning and CBT (computer based training) learning, a good language teacher is still a huge benefit in giving you direction, detail and in being able to point out the subtleties and nuances of the language. So while there is no problem using these lessons on a self-teaching basis, it is advisable to also have regular language lessons. Most learners who take lessons with a language teacher take about one lesson a week of one to two hours. Let me be straight. If you really want to learn a language you need to concentrate on the topic and spend 6 to 10 hours a week on the language. At least. And a great deal of that time needs to be spent talking and conversing with fluent speakers on an intense and regular basis. Or take a couple of weeks, months etc to go to a full-time intensive language school course. Because, after taking all these lessons, you then need to put all the bits and pieces together on the fly. The more you hear native speakers doing this, the more you get to learn the common recurring patterns that run through every language, and those that are unique to that language. Remember - “where there is language there is sunshine!”

A recent article in the Daily Mail newspaper in the United Kingdom said that, on average, educated men and women utter 16,000 words of speech per day. This is according to a University of Texas study which studied 4,380 volunteers of both sexes. The study also found that,

……… wait for it ……..

…. men speak more than women.

What this means for language learners is that you have one huge amount of vocabulary to learn to master a new language. Other studies show that about 1,000 base words make up over 50% of all conversation, so the first key is to learn these words. Most language courses teach you the most common words of a language first. These, with grammar, form the skeleton, the structure, the linguistic structure of the language. The vocabulary adds the detail, the colour, the variation, the nitty-gritty, the sutbleties and nuances.

Another study says that the average educated person understands the meanings of 50,000 words. Phew!! So you can see that the acquisition of fluency in a language involves, over time, a massive job to accumulate a huge vocabulary base to really gain fluency.

To crawl-read a kid’s book in a foreign language needs about 1,000 words.

To crawl read a newspaper needs about 2,000-3,000 words.

Once you have 2,000 words you will be able to understand over 80-85% of the basics of the language, because the common words appear again and again in conversation in things like ‘power-phrases’. Getting that other 15-20% is where constant study and application is needed. The easiest way to get this is to actually live in a country or community where the language is spoken. 

To assist this one should get a dictionary, just a small one, and work through 10 to 20 new words a day. That equates to learning 3,650 to 7,300 new words a year. 

Why a small dictionary?

Because it will concentrate on the more common words.

If you are in a total immersion situation you will hear, see and ‘feel’ the words. What do we mean by ‘feel’ the words  being used in context? Well you see and feel the word which gets delivered with facial expressions, hand movement, grimaces etc that come with the act of speaking it.

The Sunshine Language School is the online language learning blogspot.

Covering language learning of Spanish, German, French, Italian, Indonesian , Welsh and lots of other languages.

We cover techniques and tips on language learning. And we are big fans of language immersion techniques, that is living or working in a community where the target language spoken.