How to learn any language in 30 days?
My friend’s boss who is from England is having hard time learning Hindi. And my friend is not making it easy for him at all.
The biggest problem about learning languages is that you start with learning formal style of speaking. This has been my experience with Japanese. There’s huge difference between formal and in-formal way of speaking Japanese.
While learning Japanese I started out experimenting few things differently. I realized, unless I do things differently, I’d end up spending 3–4 years with 10,000 words or so of vocabulary as a requirement and yet will have hard time understanding it.
I used a technique which I always use when I am learning new topic. So I never tested in learning a language.
Something which I call Immersion.
Simply, immerse yourself completely in trying to learn the language. The basic idea behind this is to use as many methods to learn as you can. So in this case, I ended up reading/watching/listening up Japanese.
Of course as an experiment, it was big headache to handle at that time, but I refined the idea to something far better.
Tuning your ear.
One of the biggest problem you’ll face in learning a language is recognizing what is being said. So you have to someway “tune your ear” to Japanese language (in case of Richard, it’s hindi).
I did this was by watching Japanese shows, animes, and listening to audios. Now because Japanese people are speaking in these shows, it starts programming my ear to listen to Japanese sounding words. Plus I started understanding the grammatical flow of speaking Japanese.
Notice how similar this technique is to how a child learns. Children doesn’t start learning grammar or alphabets. They start tuning their ears and then follow the adults.
You can easily find Movies, shows with English subtitles that’ll help you tune your ear and help you get acquainted with the language. In Richard’s case, he should find Hindi movies with subs titles, plus while living in India, he does have daily connection with Indian people speaking Hindi.
Some people speak slow, some people really fast and some people are barely comprehensible. Your ear starts tuning to all kinds of speech pattern and voices. This helps in long run when you are learning language and bridges the gap between formal and regular speaking.
I remember before my ears tuned to the Japanese language, I couldn’t differentiate between Chinese, Japanese or Korean at all. All of them sounded same. But today, I can hear them quite distinctively.
For me, learning Japanese was a great experience. Though I wouldn’t call myself an expert in Japanese but I am good enough to go Japan and communicate with people.
Varun Pratp
Desire. Commit. Succeed.
Comments
Leave a Reply
Syndicate
Subscribe to this site's RSS feed.