Learning a new language

[Mike Fleming]

I have recently decided I am going to put in a full effort to attempt to learn another language.  It's something I've wanted to do for many years, but the time investment is substantial and there were always nagging concerns in the back of my head saying that it's just too hard or takes too long or whatever.

 

However, I've now approached it in an experimental fashion.  I have said that I am going to learn for roughly an hour or 2 every 1-2 days on average and see how far I can get in one year.  At the end of the year I'll evaluate the whole experience and decide if I want to continue and even if want to try to become multi-lingual.  I like the idea of being able to go to many places in the world and just be able to read and talk to people.  And even potentially to increase the number of potential countries I could comfortably live in without too much effort.

 

For my test language I'm using Spanish (partly because it is spoken in so many countries).   A European language with pretty much the same alphabet was a requirement, nothing too difficult on the first try because I don't want to end up completely discouraged.

 

I am using this site 

www.babbel.com

 

and am doing the exercises on my Ipad.  It's been about a month and I'm quite encouraged so far and feeling optimistic.   The app is friendly and I feel like I'm picking things up.

 

I'm assuming there are many others with more than one language here.  Is 1 year a reasonable timeframe to get to a good level of competency?  I'm not expecting fluency but am hopeful that I can at least go to a Spanish news site and get a good gist of the articles I am reading and maybe watch movies and pick up some of what is being said.

[Miramiss]

Awesome on learning a new language!My husband learned my native language in about 2 years and is on year 3 as bilingual. He is still not fluent, but speaks well enough for eating out, asking for directions, daily conversations and learning new skills. We do not discuss philosophy, argue or explain difficult technical stuff in my language, but stick to English for that. We do have dinner conversations, express love and do grocery shopping in norwegian tho.I assume from your post that you only speak one language (english) now. Correct me if I am wrong.It all depends on what language you start with for learning a new one. How closely are spanish related to your native tongue? Which spanish are you learning? (seems like no issue right now, but when you get deeper into it you will see differences from where you are.) For an example, my native tongue is norwegian, which means the easiest language for me to learn (outside from other scandinavian languages) is dutch. Dutch and norwegian have many similar pronunciations and grammar. The hardest is polish, where we have almost nothing in common. I could probably be really good in dutch in a year, but would need several years to get to the same level in polish. Also people are different, some are learning quicker than other. I am a slow learning in language and spent many years mastering english and I STILL have tons of mistakes. 

An other side of the aspect is: are you learning to read it or speak it? If you are sitting home by yourself you can be badass at reading spanish! But the moment you get out and talk to native speaking people you might mess it up.My tips are:

 

1. Get out there. Use the basic language programs like babbel to get you trough the start-up but after that, go be social. Really. Be social! Connect with people on skype, make friends and say you want to learn their language. Learn all the cursing right away, then you know when you meet people who just want to mess with you. This does not mean use the cursing, just recognize it.2. Be brave and do not be afraid to be the clown. People will laugh. You will be an adult speaking like a 5 year old for a looong time. My husband said (and still say) so many funny things in norwegian we made his own dictionary and book of quotes. We pull it out from time to time, read it out loud for people, laugh, and remind him of how much he learned since that time. When people laugh, think that you probably made their day a little brighter and you got better in spanish. Do ask what you did wrong so they can help you correct it.

 

3. Learn the culture. A language is so much more than the words spoken. Some phrases will not make any sense if you do not know the cultural references. Culture takes as long time to learn as a language. exampel: in english you say: "speak of the devil" and translated into norwegian it is "speak of the sun". If you do not know the back story, you are likely to directly translate from english and use phrases that do not exist in spanish. Which will give people a good laugh :)4. When you learn something new. Attach a hand sign to it. Like the word "cat" make whiskers or ears with your hands while you say it. Then you remember it easier and you can get rid of the hand signs after a while. And over use your new words and phrases. When hubby learned a word in norwegian that I can only translate into "royal awesome", absolutely everything for 3 days was royal awesome.

 

5. Have fun, laugh of yourself and embrace every victory. Fist bump people and cheer when you get a new word or phrase. Get people to cheer with you. Be the person who is really enthusiastic about learning spanish, then native speakers will be more enthusiastic to teach it to you.

 

This is such a cool adventure! From just being the one standing there listening to gibberish, to understand some words, to understand sentences to participate in conversations to having long complicated conversations on technical stuff, philosophy and even start studying! the feeling can not be described :DI do not intend to discourage you with this long post, but give you a somewhat realistic picture of how it is to learn a new language. It can be frustrating, but believe me, it is so worth it. And when it is is fun, it is really fun! Oh, and remember to give your brain a break for the evening if it is too much.Good luck! *fistbump* Yeah!!

[shirgall]

Let me add to the excellent advice above... find a native speaker that is willing to coach you. I worked with a team in Taiwan and it helped me with Mandarin a great deal! They were tickled I was trying to learn.

[Dylan Lawrence Moore]

As someone who attempted to learn three different languages and failing miserably (Japanese, classical Greek, and Sanskrit) then finally learning a fourth (German), here is the simplest pieces of advice I can give:

 

Actually having the words come out of your mouth is more important than you understanding them. If you try to understand before forming your mouth around the words, you will teach yourself to hesitate before speaking. Speak first, understanding will come later.

 

Speaking how people speak is more important than speaking how it is written. If you learn to speak from how things are written, you won't understand anyone and you will contribute to your hesitation before speaking (thus no one will understand you). Just say what people are saying, the grammar will come later.

 

Remember phrases and words by thinking of similar nonsense phrases in English. This is the best way to remember vocabulary. For example, a well-known way to remember the Japanese word douitashimashite ("you're welcome") is don't touch my mustache.

 

If you feel like an idiot when speaking, that means you're making progress. Seek these moments out instead of shying away from them.

 

Good luck!

-Dylan

[wdiaz03]

Congrats Mike,

 

I second all the advice, a friend of mine bought the Rosetta Stone software for Spanish, She just needs your motivation to continue with it. She told me it was good. They have a number where you can call in and talk to a Spanish speaker. I hope she picks it back up with a little encouragement, she is lucky that in this town Spanish is spoken everywhere and she can take advantage of that. And she has close friends like me and at work that can provide advice.

 

My advise is to watch Spanish TV if you don't have a Spanish community to listen and practice with.

 

Do you have anyone you can go for questions? You are welcome to PM me if you have questions. Best of luck.

[Tyler Durden]

As someone who successfully learned two completely different foreign languages, English and Mandarin, I have to say that I disagree with most of the advice given so far.

 

Let me start off by answering your initial question:

 

One year can be a very long time in language learning land, but you should really count in hours, not years. Your plan equals an average of 1 hour a day, which equals 365 hours a year. Someone who completely immerses himself spends 16 waking hours a day on it, which equals 5840 hours a year.

 

You don't have to choose between 1 and 16 of course, it's a sliding scale, but it's important to look at it this way, because native speakers are immersed in their language all the time. So your plan for a year only equals about 3 weeks of regular living for them. Definitely enough to learn some words and phrases, but Spanish toddlers will still pwn the shit out of you.

 

Now let's get to the actual language learning:

 

My problem with most of the advice above is that it's focused way too much on output and way too little on input. My advice to you is to forget about output completely. It will come later, not now, not even close to now. Later. For now you can just leave all the speaking and writing to the Mexicans, the Spaniards, the Puerto Ricans and whoever else you decide to listen to.

 

I really want to emphasize this because this is such a big misconception among adult learners of foreign languages. Children listen to thousands of hours of their native language before they even attempt to speak a complete sentence, but adults somehow think they should start right away. They mistake incompetence for shyness, so they think it's something they just need to get over and they force themselves to speak. And it does work, partly, but they usually just get stuck in a very confined section of the chitchat zone, feeling lost whenever they try to step out of it.

 

So my advice to you is to start listening to actual Spanish, no learning materials, only the real deal. Just find a Spanish channel on your TV and leave it on, if you don't have Spanish channels find an online TV or radio channel, Spanish music channels are fine too. In the beginning you won't understand any of it, that's normal, don't worry about it. You just need to make hours, so the more hours a day you can leave it on the better. Even if you don't listen to it actively.

 

As for reading I recommend you get yourself a pile of children's books. These can be translated books that you know are good, like those of Roald Dahl or whatever you were into as a child, or completely new books. Obviously it helps when you already know the story, but even if it's harder, reading a book that was written specifically for kids in Guatemala can be a lot more fun. My first Chinese book looked like this: http://www.96192.com/uploadfile/bigpic2731/9193752.jpg and it was AWESOME.

 

When you start reading a children's book you'll quickly realize two things. One, that children's books are freaking hard and contain words like "invisible", "garlic" and "minivan". Two, that it was a wise decision to start with children's books because they're fun and give you a great foundation.

 

Obviously you'll need to translate stuff and you want to remember what you learned. That's where Spaced Repetition Software comes into play, more commonly known as SRS. An SRS is a program that allows you to create and review digital flash cards. It's extremely effective because it knows when you need to review what you learned. So if you learn something today, it will show it to you again tomorrow, if you get it right it will show it again 3 days later, if you get it right again it will wait a week, then a month, then 3 months, etc.

 

I recommend the free SRS called Anki (http://www.ankisrs.net) and I recommend you only add sentences. So if you read a sentence in your children's book that you like and contains a word that you want to remember you create a flashcard with that sentence. Add it so that it shows you the Spanish sentence first, when you review you just read the sentence and see if you understand, you don't have to translate it but you use English on the other side of the card to see if you understood it correctly. Eventually you may even switch to a monolingual dictionary and do away with English completely.

 

There are also ready-made decks that you can download, but I would advise against them. If you add your own sentences you can pick sentences that you like and are at the right level, besides that it is also much easier to remember them because you'll remember the parts of the stories where you got them from.

 

You don't need to worry about grammar, because you'll pick it up as you go, it's just a matter of exposure. If you find regular children's books too daunting I recommend comic books, anything is good basically as long as it was made for native speakers. Adding sentences to your SRS is easiest when you read stuff online, but I personally like real books better, so I rarely did that. It's also possible to learn without an SRS of course, but I've found it to be insanely efficient and I would definitely give it a shot if I were you.

 

That's all you need to know basically. Listen and read yourself to fluency. After a couple of children's books you can move on to the grown up stuff, make sure you don't forget to have fun though, reading the Spanish Da Vinci Code is a lot more enjoyable than the Spanish Financial Times. Once you notice yourself becoming a decent reader and listener you can find yourself some Spanish speaking amigos and practice speaking with them, it's still something you'll need to practice but it will be so much easier because you already understand them and you know all the words.

 

Best of luck senor. If you found this post helpful and want to get inspired some more I also recommend you check out this website run by a multilingual Kenyan guy who goes by the name of Khatzumoto: http://www.ajatt.com. The website is focused on learning Japanese but most of the articles can be applied to any language, and the guy knows what he's talking about.

[Psychophant]

I am at a slow pace, bro. I started learning anglo saxon language in 1995 and still am far behind a native speaker. Concluding from a spoken word to vacabulary is not that easy, even with experience. I could conclude from spoken language to vocabulary in almost all cases in Stef's presentations. English is so rich in words that you almost cannot make any ambiguous jokes.

[Mike Fleming]

Wow, thanks for all the advice.  And thanks for offers of help.  Way more than I expected.  I don't know if I have any great aspirations to true fluency yet.  Like I said that will be decided after I've gone through the trial period.  After all it's only one aspect of my life and, I may be wrong, but true fluency seems like it takes some serious immersion and many, many hours and well ,we all have limited time. 

 

I do speak only one language (English). I studied German in high school for about 3 years.  It's funny, because even now I can rattle off the numbers from 1 -100 in German as if speaking English.  I don't even need to consciously think about them they just come as automatically as English numbers.  Beyond that a few phrases, greetings, how are you, that kind of stuff, but only early beginner stage stuff.  This was 20 years ago now and there has been no progress since.  I was going to try and restart German, figuring that I would have a little bit of a headstart, and also because I think it is more similar to English than many other languages but I wanted to try something that was spoken a bit more widely. 

 

Watching films, TV shows and reading books etc, was something I was planning to do a bit further down the track but I may try to give that more of a try now.  I also liked the idea of the children's books, I hadn't thought of that but it makes perfect sense to me considering that was one of the ways I learnt English.

 

 

So my advice to you is to start listening to actual Spanish, no learning materials, only the real deal. Just find a Spanish channel on your TV and leave it on, if you don't have Spanish channels find an online TV or radio channel, Spanish music channels are fine too. In the beginning you won't understand any of it, that's normal, don't worry about it. You just need to make hours, so the more hours a day you can leave it on the better. Even if you don't listen to it actively.

 

I'm very curious about this.  I've started doing what you have suggested because I can still do other things while listening to the radio.  Of course, as you say, I understand virtually nothing.  The speech just goes by so fast I can't even lock onto individual words for the most part.  It feels frustrating.   How does this work exactly?  Does your brain start to just pick things up over time?  Is it kind of an unconscious thing?  How long before you start to notice that you recognize things?  If that's how it works?  I don't feel enthused at the moment because I can do exercises and actually end up with a few words in my vocabulary whereas listening to Spanish radio kind of "seems" like a waste of time atm.  Yet, I have the feeling you may be correct considering how the brain works and I'm very willing to give this a try.  I guess I just would like to know how the progression works.   Thanks.

[Tyler Durden]

I'm very curious about this.  I've started doing what you have suggested because I can still do other things while listening to the radio.  Of course, as you say, I understand virtually nothing.  The speech just goes by so fast I can't even lock onto individual words for the most part.  It feels frustrating.   How does this work exactly?  Does your brain start to just pick things up over time?  Is it kind of an unconscious thing?  How long before you start to notice that you recognize things?  If that's how it works?  I don't feel enthused at the moment because I can do exercises and actually end up with a few words in my vocabulary whereas listening to Spanish radio kind of "seems" like a waste of time atm.  Yet, I have the feeling you may be correct considering how the brain works and I'm very willing to give this a try.  I guess I just would like to know how the progression works.   Thanks.

 

Cool that you've started doing it already!

 

I understand your frustration, I've experienced it too. But hang in there, it will pass.

 

Let me explain the phases:

 

At first it is kind of an unconscious thing. Like you say, it's hard to even lock onto individual words and it barely makes a difference whether you listen actively or passively. This is by far the hardest phase because it feels like you're not making any progress and you'll stay there forever. You'll get frustrated with it, and that's okay, as long as you don't turn it off.

 

Then comes the phase where they still speak way too fast, but you'll pick up reaaaaally simple stuff. Like when the host says "welcome" to a new radio guest or when someone says "thank you", stuff like that. Words that are simple, are said in isolation, and come back at very predictable times.

 

The next phase is basically more of that. You'll start to pick up the stuff that gets repeated all the time, like certain commercials and sound bites. You may not understand it all but you'll be like "oh there's that commercial again" it sounds familiar.

 

After that you'll start to pick up chunks of words that are repeated a lot but are completely ordinary. Stuff like "and last but not least", "back to the studio" and "give it up for". In that phase you can listen to an interview and hear something like: "************************** what is your opinion on that?" "well, I think **************************** and last but not least **************************" "thank you, back to the studio!"

 

It's an interesting phase because that's the first time that you know for sure that you're picking up things that you didn't pick up before, even though you still don't really have a clue of what they're actually saying to each other. You know that you're making progress. Also, after you've figured out a phrase like "last but not least" you start hearing it all the fucking time and it will really be a mystery to you why you didn't hear it before.

 

From that point on the process starts to become more enjoyable. You'll be like "I don't know what they're saying but I know they're talking about that plane crash again" and you'll feel connected to the language enough that it just feels familiar, you don't even care how much you understand and how much you don't understand, you just want to keep listening because listening to Spanish feels good.

 

You'll stay in that phase for quite some time. But then, all of a sudden (that's one of those chunks too btw, "all of a sudden" is in the same category as "last but not least", and "by the way" is too) you're watching a soap and you're like "what the hell, I know exactly what's going on! is this soap for retards or did I just get really good?!" Usually it is kind of a soap for retards and you only understood like 60% of a certain section of that soap. But it feels like an amazing accomplishment. And it is, because you came all the way from 0%.

 

When you switch the channel you realize that nothing magical happened, you're still at 30% when you watch the news. But things just got a lot more interesting now that you've seen what the future has in store for you. After that it just gets easier and easier. And more enjoyable.

 

So how long does this all take, you ask. I'd say a few hundred hours before you start picking up simple "last but not least" chunks. If you listen non-stop every week is 112 waking hours, so you should be able to get there in 1-2 months. If you do it like that you'll probably reach the "wow did i just get really good?!" point in under 6 months. But that also depends on how much you read.

 

I remember when I switched from listening a couple of hours a day to non-stop Mandarin. It seemed insane at first, and it felt insane too, for maybe about 3 days, then it just became the new normal. From that point on it just felt good, because I knew I needed a couple of thousand hours at least to reach a decent level, and I knew I was going at maximum speed.

 

You're in a different situation with different goals, so maybe that's not an option for you. But I hope that you'll at least listen yourself out of your current phase so that you'll hear the sound of progress with your own ears.

 

Also, you should check out this article.

[John CEFD]

First time here, taking a look around the place and i've already found this really helpful topic. What Tyler said is really accurate, as it worked for me with English, i try to immerse myself as much as i can in the new language (German, in my case). I switched my computer and Steam settings to German; i try as most as i can to listen to german bands (good thing i enjoy Rammstein) and watching german movies; and now i'm gonna look for kid books and watch more Deutsche welle.By the way, i was thinking about using Pimsleur (pimsleurdigital.com), does anyone here know if it is any good? 

[Dylan Lawrence Moore]

Hey John, have you found any interested podcasts in German? I can't seem to find any for the life of me.

[John CEFD]

No i haven't, Dylan, unfortunately. And now i'm lacking the time for it, just being able to focus on books exercises; but if i somehow stumble onto a good one, i'll tell you.

[ebrink06]

First time here, taking a look around the place and i've already found this really helpful topic. What Tyler said is really accurate, as it worked for me with English, i try to immerse myself as much as i can in the new language (German, in my case). I switched my computer and Steam settings to German; i try as most as i can to listen to german bands (good thing i enjoy Rammstein) and watching german movies; and now i'm gonna look for kid books and watch more Deutsche welle.By the way, i was thinking about using Pimsleur (pimsleurdigital.com), does anyone here know if it is any good? 

 

Pimsleur is a great program for certain types of people. The reasons I it like are the reasons other people do not. It's very repetitive, prompts you to repeat and respond rapidly, it's purely audio, and doesn't progress very fast. I consider it an almost a passive programming of your brain. Once the rhythm and sentence structures are "programmed" in your mind it's easy to supplement with additional vocabulary and recognize the written language. Since it's audio you can do it during mindless activities like commuting or doing housework.

 

To comment on immersion techniques other than moving to a native speaking country, I too recommend movies. Again, repetitiveness not for everybody, but I like picking just one movie and watching it over and over and over and over (with subtitles). Each time you watch it you understand more of the words and it's really exciting!!!! Movies are the best in my opinion because you can have the subtitles to always be referencing, and you're also getting the emotions and meanings visually. The visual aspect is important for many reasons other than just understanding the verbal language. It also helps in learning body language/gestures/facial expressions as well as other general cultural relevancies- what are they eating? how do they get around? what happens in the background? what people/ideas/events are they referencing? what's funny? Communicating in a language well is more than just understanding the words, it's understanding a whole culture.

 

P.S. Babble is a great program too.

P.S.S. I've learned one other language fluently, dabble in a few others, and taught a 2nd language for 5 years to teenagers.

[John CEFD]

Pimsleur is a great program for certain types of people. The reasons I it like are the reasons other people do not. It's very repetitive, prompts you to repeat and respond rapidly, it's purely audio, and doesn't progress very fast. I consider it an almost a passive programming of your brain. Once the rhythm and sentence structures are "programmed" in your mind it's easy to supplement with additional vocabulary and recognize the written language. Since it's audio you can do it during mindless activities like commuting or doing housework.

 

To comment on immersion techniques other than moving to a native speaking country, I too recommend movies. Again, repetitiveness not for everybody, but I like picking just one movie and watching it over and over and over and over (with subtitles). Each time you watch it you understand more of the words and it's really exciting!!!! Movies are the best in my opinion because you can have the subtitles to always be referencing, and you're also getting the emotions and meanings visually. The visual aspect is important for many reasons other than just understanding the verbal language. It also helps in learning body language/gestures/facial expressions as well as other general cultural relevancies- what are they eating? how do they get around? what happens in the background? what people/ideas/events are they referencing? what's funny? Communicating in a language well is more than just understanding the words, it's understanding a whole culture.

 

P.S. Babble is a great program too.

P.S.S. I've learned one other language fluently, dabble in a few others, and taught a 2nd language for 5 years to teenagers.

Thanks for the answer, gonna take this in consideration on my next decision regarding my German studies.

[TheHomeless]

Hey Tyler, I'm interested in learning Mandarin, could you post a link to some children's book and other materials that you found to be helpful? Thanks.

[shirgall]

Hey Tyler, I'm interested in learning Mandarin, could you post a link to some children's book and other materials that you found to be helpful? Thanks.

 

[J-William]

nice ressurected thread.

 

How's that language learning going?

 

I'm going to go ahead and call everyone here wrong and run away without offering solutions :-D

 

actually I just want to offer arguments against everything and then run away without giving aswers...

 

so first off, I agree with Tyler. You can zip your mouth and never speak a word and still learn a language. That's because a language is entirely constructed by other people and practicing saying it helps you become a speaker as much as repeating "e=mc^2" helps make you a physicist.

 

I also disagree with Tyler. Turning on the radio or TV in a foreign language doesn't do much good because you aren't going to understand anything. We don't turn on our radio voice to talk to children, we simplify and make things easier to understand. An adult can relate to abstract concepts better than a child but that won't help with making input from TV or radio more comprehensible. listening to years of advanced physics lessons will make a complete layman very bored and won't make him a physicist.

 

Oh and the thing I have to say for vocabulary studying with things like Anki SRS, If you used that method to memorize all 50 states and their capitols, would that make you better able to speak english? I can imagine the conversation... "Albany!" "what did you say?" "Austin, Texas" "oh, have you been to Austin?" "Sacramento!!!"

 

Now that I'm done telling you that it's impossible and you're going to fail... How can you learn a language? Well you need interesting comprehensible input. How do you get that in a foreign language? Kid's book can provide comprehensible input, but often fail to be interesting to an adult. Teachers can, and textbooks can, but usually they provide very little comprehensible input and almost certainly fail to provide anythin interesting.

But there is hope! The internet provides many avenues for one to meet native speakers who can provide interesting comprehensible input. Some are tutors or regular people that you can meet online or through an app... You can talk with them via skype or chat via text...

 

There are many ways to get started... even if it's just a class at a local community college, you can at least ask the teacher to spend time chatting with you in the target laguage, even if the class is focussed mostly on traditional grammar and vocab drilling.

[TheHomeless]

For anyone interested in Mandarin I found two good sources:

A kid's reader:
http://flash.78baby.com/list/zhuanti/zt-11_1.html
A concise grammar:
http://chinesenotes.com/grammar.php#parts

[Withanametocome]

Hey John, have you found any interested podcasts in German? I can't seem to find any for the life of me.

 

 

No i haven't, Dylan, unfortunately. And now i'm lacking the time for it, just being able to focus on books exercises; but if i somehow stumble onto a good one, i'll tell you.

 

 

Not just "any", but hundreds of quality podcasts you may find here (be patient, it takes a while to load):

 

http://www.br-online.de/podcast/radiowissen/cast.xml

 

I recommend using cltr+f there to mine the topics you may be the most interested in.

[Guest Gee]

I can't remember where I heard this (it may be mentioned in this post even? if not, must be a podcast) but seeing the words spoken (the movement of the mouth) is important for comprehension.

[J-William]

I can't remember where I heard this (it may be mentioned in this post even? if not, must be a podcast) but seeing the words spoken (the movement of the mouth) is important for comprehension.

If there's any truth to this claim I have not come across it in my eight years as an ESL teacher or many hours of reading on the topic of language acquisition.

 

So no, it's not true... I'll even add that I have learned most of my Chinese through listening to mp3s and reading.

[Guest Gee]

If there's any truth to this claim I have not come across it in my eight years as an ESL teacher or many hours of reading on the topic of language acquisition.

 

So no, it's not true... I'll even add that I have learned most of my Chinese through listening to mp3s and reading.

 

Gestures orchestrate brain networks for language understanding.

Abstract

Although the linguistic structure of speech provides valuable communicative information, nonverbal behaviors can offer additional, often disambiguating cues. In particular, being able to see the face and hand movements of a speaker facilitates language comprehension. But how does the brain derive meaningful information from these movements? Mouth movements provide information about phonological aspects of speech......................Results also suggest that the cortical networks underlying language comprehension, rather than being fixed, are dynamically organized by the type of contextual information available to listeners during face-to-face communication.

 

Curr Biol. 2009 Apr 28;19(8):661-7. doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2009.02.051. Epub 2009 Mar 26

[J-William]

 

Gestures orchestrate brain networks for language understanding.

Abstract

Although the linguistic structure of speech provides valuable communicative information, nonverbal behaviors can offer additional, often disambiguating cues. In particular, being able to see the face and hand movements of a speaker facilitates language comprehension. But how does the brain derive meaningful information from these movements? Mouth movements provide information about phonological aspects of speech......................Results also suggest that the cortical networks underlying language comprehension, rather than being fixed, are dynamically organized by the type of contextual information available to listeners during face-to-face communication.

Curr Biol. 2009 Apr 28;19(8):661-7. doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2009.02.051. Epub 2009 Mar 26

Sorry I was overstating the case... I took you to be claiming that it was necessary.

You clearly weren't and gestures and mouth movements can be helpful, but they aren't necessary.

I have no doubt that gestures and facial expressions lend a large portion to making speech comprehensible, just watch a dude trying to buy something in a language he doesn't speak.

[Guest Gee]

Sorry I was overstating the case... I took you to be claiming that it was necessary.

You clearly weren't and gestures and mouth movements can be helpful, but they aren't necessary.

I have no doubt that gestures and facial expressions lend a large portion to making speech comprehensible, just watch a dude trying to buy something in a language he doesn't speak.

 

Thank you. I absolutely agree that they aren't necessary and for many people they might not increase learning retention and their inclusion could detract from learning.

I have no deep knowledge of learning 'styles' but perhaps it links with that somehow? 

[Diki]

Just to leap in a little bit late on this, I'm also an ESL teacher and I often notice kids focusing their gaze on my mouth as I speak to them. Maybe I have a weird mouth.....

 

Anyway with regards to learning a second language, I agree with J-William. Immersion is the key. Get yourself speaking with native speakers as often as you can. And if you're speaking with them in an informal setting make sure you ask them not to be shy about recognising that you're trying to learn the language and that you'd appreciate them helping you out and offering corrections and feedback when necessary. It can be frustrating for me even now when I'm struggling to find a certain word in Japanese and the person I'm speaking to is too shy/polite to help me out.

[Darknecrosforte]

Sidenote: Reading this entire thread has inspired me to make a product and I'm going to be rich af...

 

Tyler Durden is a beast.

Instead of children's books, I downloaded Los Juegos del Hambre. Beast mode. Telenovelas have some pretty nice eye candy and have a generally stable, proper vernacular which is good so that you can be understood in multiple countries. For Japanese, anime is NOT good (weird, huh?) but their soap operas are fine.

[brucethecollie]

I speak fluent Spanish if you ever want to practice your skills!  

 

I have a few friends who claimed this info helped them:  http://fourhourworkweek.com/2009/01/20/learning-language/