Sometimes someone uses a bad method of language learning and succeeds anyway, while someone else uses a great method and fails. Why?
How can some people use very ineffective methods (and still make them work) while others can take great methods and fail miserably.
Your Emotional Response to Your Learning Method Determines if You Will Succeed or Fail
When I looked at the emotional responses of language students to their language learning opportunities, I think I found the answer.
Did the student get excited about learning grammar with only a dry textbook? If so, she probably went on to succeed.
If she felt neutral, bored, or stressed with great learning software like this web site, she probably failed.
Good Emotions Lead to Success
Do your emotions really affect how much you learn? Absolutely. But you still have to be using a method that really works. A lot of so called “learning” games are a lot of fun, but there isn’t much learning.
Once you have a method that really works, anything that you can do that helps you feel better will make it 10 times more effective.
Stressful Emotions Lead to Failure
Everyone who stresses out or worries about learning will either eventually get over their stress or fail. It’s that simple. There are no exceptions.
That’s why we put so much emphasis on feeling good whether you get the answer right or wrong.
If today’s study didn’t make you feel good, you probably won’t come back again and do it tomorrow!
So relax, take a deep breath, and learn to enjoy your mistakes.
I want to learn ….for sure Spanish, and maybe othere…if, IF I am successful. I met a young woman from Finland recently that could speak 5 languages (including English) very well. I had studied French in high school and cant remember much of it. There are some Spanish speakers around here so maybe I will actually use it and therefore remember it. Are you my best bet? Our family homeschools and I want the kids to learn it too. But I don’t want them to struggle and forget like I did with French! Help! Give me some advice, please. I did enjoy your free demo…and remember some of it!
Judy -
The best bet for learning ANY language is regular use of it. Use it or lose it they say – that goes for muscles and brain alike!
As for getting right into learning a new language it is the general consensus of users on this system that it works, and well. Many homeschool parents and groups have recommended the software for use to other homeschool families. One of the benefits of the license is that each paid license is valid for four family accounts! This allows two adults and two children access to the software – more ability to communicate, more ability to use the language every day, more likelihood that memories will be permanently engaged.
Day 1 just started I want it to speak to my spanish friends. Its not easy to retain each word as they come up on the screen. I”LL stay with it no matter what happens to the retain part of this learning.
Study faster! If you aren’t remembering what you see from one time to the next the problem is almost always that you aren’t studying fast enough. Our new speed bar timer should help you a lot with this.
I agree that good emotions lead to success, but I would argue that the emotions that matter are not the ones toward the language learning method, but rather ones toward the language being learned. (Like, do I really want to learn Spanish? Is there a strong motivating factor behind this? Or am I just doing it to try it out, or because I need it to graduate?) Once I am strongly motivated to learn a language, then I will be able to find/create methods that work for me and learn it well (I am quadrilingual).
Victoria -
As emotional beings it is challenging for us to start differentiating what emotional trigger is more important. For me there needs to be a strong emotional connection to my learning as a whole. I might find a horticulturist that has a strong emotional teaching method who cannot keep my attention for any reason because I am not interested in flower gardens. Contrarily I have been in many a class I was really excited about the subject and the teaching method was so dry I could barely fin joy in the material being presented and soon lost interest in learning any more. The best way for me to learn is to be excited about the presentation AND be passionate about the subject. If those two things don’t align it doesn’t matter what I want or what is happening, something more inspiring, such as looking at the beautiful scenery outside, will certainly take my attention and draw me away from the dryness of the learning situation.
i agree with you totally about finding and creating methods that work well for the individual. A lot of people need a structure to work within for their creativity to be sparked. That is why Language101.com has designed the software to be a more interactive tool than attractively presented dry information. It feels good to watch your own grading go up each study time, it feels empowering to be able to choose the next lessons or skip a seemingly inapplicable lesson (such as the Spanish lesson Tequila! for me).
Hi,
I’ve been living in Prague for almost 1 1/2 years and am trying to learn Czech. To say it is hard for an English speaker is an understatement. I can understand the majority of basic speech, understand the sense of most newspaper articles, etc. so I’m far from a beginner, but the constant manipulation of the language in my head (like a pick ‘n’ mix of genders and cases) means that any speech is so stilted and, naturally, riddled with errors. Just a quick example of what I face: Coffee = Káva
But it can also be Kávu, Kávy, Kávě, Kávou and (possibly) Kávo, depending on what you want to say. This constant alteration of the endings of words happens with EVERY noun and adjective, and also with pronouns.
I know I’m not alone, almost every speaker of a Germanic language struggles with Czech.
Do you have any plans to start Czech?
Regards,
Brian
Brian -
Language101.com is currently very busy finishing up Italian and developing Mandarin Chinese and Japanese. Czech is currently off the radar. I undertand your struggle with learning how nouns and adjectives are modified. Each language has a unique way in which it handles syntax. Here’s a little information that I came across which you may find useful:
Czech nouns, adjectives, and pronouns show “case”; that is, they take different endings depending on how they’re used in a sentence. There are seven cases: nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, prepositional, instrumental, vocative. Each case can be used under a variety of circumstances, but as a rule of thumb nominative is used for the subject of a sentence; accusative for the direct object; dative for the indirect object; genitive shows possession; prepositional follows the prepositions “in” “at” “about” (though other prepositions can be followed by other cases); instrumental shows the thing “by means of which” something is done; and vocative is used for calling out to someone.
Nouns in Czech can be masculine, feminine, or neuter. The gender of nouns is either “natural”— they represent a person or animal (“father”, “sister”, “tomcat”) and the gender reflects their actual sex— or “grammatical”— they represent an object or an abstraction (“table”, “dignity”) and their gender is simply a matter of grammatical endings. Adjectives and the past tense forms of verbs agree in gender with the nouns they modify.
Pronouns in Czech are categorized according to “person” and “number”. First person singular is “I/já”, plural is “we/my” ; second person singular is “you/ty”, plural is “you/vy”; third person singular is “he, she, it/on, ona, ono”, plural is “they/oni, ony, ona”. Present-tense verbs agree with their subjects in person and number.
So, for instance, Kávy appears to be the plural, several coffees where Kávě is referring to the entire cup with the coffee in it (cup of coffee). I’ll bet you’ve already got that much figured out.
Hope I was able to help!
I read somewhere that the biggest determining factor in whether a person can learn another language is his willingness to make a fool out of himself – to laugh at his mistakes and just keep trying. I try to remember that often.
Absolutely! Making a fool has been such a misconstrued term. It really just means accepting our own folly and moving forwards guiltless and shame free.
Thomas