I have spoken about my life time language goal, but as the cliché goes, every journey begins with a single step. So my current single step is to focus on learning Spanish.
I did little bit of Spanish last year, and I loved it. So now, I'm back at it, and beginning from the beginning again. I will talk about methods and resources I use on this blog, and also what works for me and what doesn't.
When you are teaching yourself a language, it is a trial and error method until you figure out what works best for you, because there are tons of ways to learn a new language, and different things suit different people.
I started with Spanish again on August 20.
First thing I'm doing is Michel Thomas Foundation Course. It's 8 discs audio course, and very handy during commuting time. While I'm enjoying the course, I'm getting bit antsy for some variety, and especially to get some visual idea of how words are spelt before I get them embedded incorrectly in my brain, so I'm also going to start reading a book. But currently trying to decide whether to L-R method, or read through bilingual text (I will do posts about both of these separately, as they deserve quite a bit of space).
At this stage, the plan looks like this (to be modified as necessary)
- Michel Thomas Foundation Spanish
- Michel Thomas Advance Spanish
- Pimsleur I & Linguaphone OR Assimil (If you have experience of using these, then I'm happy to hear suggestions as to which order they should be used in).
- Pimsleur II & Linguaphone / Assimil
- Pimsleur III & Linguaphone / Assimil
Each step to be combined with some sort of L-R/Bilingual Text + Spanish Word Games or Vocab practice, journaling, Practice Makes Perfect workbook, watch TV in Spanish, listen to audio book, Scriptorium Exericses etc
I took two years of French in highschool and though my marks would good it was because all the tests were written - I could read it, write it, and translate it, but I couldn't speak it. I found Spanish easier, but unfortunately I didn't keep it up.
ReplyDelete