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Learn a Language – Naturally Posted by on Mar 29, 2012 in Archived Posts

Have you ever been bored? You don’t want to be where you are, or you’re watching a movie seems to take forever to end? The brain is like a child. It likes things that are relevant and interesting, things that will keep its attention for hours. Of course, when a language is new, it’s interesting and keeps your focus in the beginning. You will gladly learn by means of repetitive listening, speaking, and reading. But as you progress, you’re going to find that rules and facts get pretty boring and can actually stop your progress. (Remember that blog post about reaching a plateau?) Why is that? Well, the constant “this is what to do, how to do it, and why it’s done that way” can eventually start sounding too repetitious. We learn better from reading stories, listening to real conversations, exploring real world examples and episodes, and mastering content that can actually be used.

Learning Is Forever

The human brain is designed to learn and never stops learning. Throughout our lives, the brain learns by observation, drawing its own conclusions from the input it receives, and creates its own rules, rather than trying to understand logical explanations. It is always at work, consuming over 20% of the body’s calories. The fact is, we can learn languages right into old age.

While the brain is creating rules, it may miss a detail or two, thus causing the confusion that pops up in learning. What to do? Once in a while, you may need to go back to the past lessons and review those grammar rules and tables, focus on mistakes made, or study specific words and phrases that you may need to work on. These activities, which normally dominate traditional language learning, are actually minor activities in a natural language learning system.

Learning a language is actually fun, if it is done in line with how the brain learns. Unfortunately, the traditional way to teach a second language has been turned into a complex classroom ceremony, consisting of difficult grammar rules, annoying drills, rote memory, and tests. These reasons are why many people are discouraged from learning a new language. Learning takes place in the brain through meaningful input, not at school or through deliberate instruction

M.S.P. – The Best Foundation To Have

Motivation, success, and praise make up a solid learning foundation. Many people around the world want to learn another language, but are skeptical of their ability to do so, because they haven’t done it before. Give the language a chance. Once you start to acquire meaning through listening and reading, the brain feels a sense of reward at this new and unexpected experience. This is highly motivating and brings you success. Any teaching method or activity which creates confusion or frustration, however, tears down that motivation and makes you want to give up. In a natural learning environment, the teacher is there to help the learner become independent, rather than depending on imposing tasks or explanations.

Change Is Good

When we learn a new language, we adopt some of the behavior patterns of another culture, which in turn changes our personalities and perceptions. Many of the difficulties that grown-ups face in language learning come from a resistance to this kind of change. It is often more comfortable to follow the patterns and pronunciation of our own language, rather than to commit to fully imitating the new language, because as adults, we have a stronger vested interested in our own identity, and in what we already know. In order to overcome these learning barriers, adults need to benefit from the help of an encouraging tutor and an enthusiastic group of fellow learners.

Learning Naturally Online

The Internet offers a wide range of content in many languages. It becomes the ultimate classroom, the library, the source of content, the language laboratory, and the support community. Plus, it’s available whenever we want, at no, or little, cost. As a result, the Internet is the home of the language learning revolution, the natural language learning revolution.

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About the Author: Sean Young

Learning languages since 1978 and studying over 50 (achieving fluency in 10). Sean L. Young loves giving tips, advice and the secrets you need to learn a language successfully no matter what language you're learning. Currently studying Hindi and blogging his progress right here at Transparent Language - https://blogs.transparent.com/language-news.


Comments:

  1. Rainer:

    For me the best ways of learning a new language is spending time in that country, having friends from that country or whatching movies in that language with subtitles. I learned actually a few languages this way AND you will never get bored of learning!


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