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Viewing Listen, Listen, Listen, (and repeat, repeat, repeat)Listen, Listen, Listen, (and repeat, repeat, repeat)
By Kathy Steinemann
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A handicap faced by many (if not most of us) when trying to learn a foreign language is lack of daily exposure. How can we overcome this? A handicap faced by many (if not most of us) when trying to learn a foreign language is lack of daily exposure. Our brains are marvellous tools for language learning. As children, we listen to Mom and Dad speaking, we hear our language on the television or radio, from our friends, at the shopping mall ... Hours daily of constant exposure. We watch, hear, and make connections in our brains that last throughout our lives. As adults, we must try to simulate at least some of this childhood learning process. Technology has made this easy. There are a multitude of online radio stations (free of charge). Try a search like: ‘listen radio online German’ or 'listen radio online French’ or 'listen radio online Portuguese’. Spend a little time browsing the search results and bookmark some favourite sites. Even if you don’t understand the language, you will hear the unique sounds that distinguish your new language from English. Software tools can also be very useful! Transparent Language and similar companies have software programs in many languages that allow you to speak into your computer microphone. The software compares what you are saying with the proper pronunciation, and lets you know how close you are to making the correct sounds. Transparent Language also has some free resources. Spend some time browsing - there are many nooks and crannies on their website. Pimsleur programs are incomparable. A computer search for ‘Pimsleur Dutch’, ‘Pimsleur Spanish’, ‘Pimsleur Japanese’ (you get the idea) will take you to a plethora of resources. The Pimsleur programs seem expensive - but they are excellent - well worth the cost. Level 1 Pimsleur starts you at the beginners’ level - assuming that you don’t know a single word of the language. They lead you through everyday conversations via an all-audio listen and repeat approach, very carefully demonstrating how to pronounce the words. I converted my German Pimsleur programs to MP3, and listen to them on a pocket MP3 player while I work out, etc. If you listen to the programs while driving, make sure that you do not use headphones or earbuds, and do not listen while you are navigating city traffic! After you have progressed to the end of the program, make some little scraps of paper with the program level names - for example, many Pimsleur programs have a total of 100 lessons in 4 levels. So, make slips of paper as follows: Then draw slips at random and go through the audio lessons again. It is amazing how your current learning will connect to what you learned previously. You will then make new word associations, relearn pronunciations that you may have misunderstood at first, and so on. Another way we can expose ourselves to new languages is via movies on DVD. However, due to different formats used throughout the world, your DVD player may not be able to cope with foreign language DVDs. Stay tuned, and I’ll help to steer you through this process. (c) Copyright Kathy Steinemann: This article is free to publish only if this copyright notice, the byline, and the author's note below (with active links) are included. About the Author: Kathy Steinemann is a busy webmaster and author who enjoys writing German-English stories in parallel translation. She works behind the scenes at several websites, including A-Language-Guide dot com. Article Source: A Language Guide - http://www.a-language-guide.com More free articles: 1st Rate Articles - 1stRateArticles.com |
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