Let’s look at some common advice.
- Surround yourself with the language
- Read in your target language
- Speak to yourself in your target language
- Watch tv in your target language
- Lookup words in a dictionary and get definitions in your target language
- Don’t translate
So how do we follow the advice and stay motivated? Let’s break down this advice and go through it carefully.
Surround yourself with the language. Language involves four different disciplines; reading, writing, listening and speaking. When you are told to surround yourself with the language it is about incorporating as many of these as possible as often as possible. Our site is designed so you can listen to the sentences in English, you can read them in English and you can recite them in English. That’s three of the four covered. Of course, you can always write them as well, but we don’t think you need to do that to learn, so I wouldn’t waste your time with that one. Time is precious and we want you to learn efficiently.
Read in your target language. We have already covered that one, you will be reading the transcripts in English. Remember that in English speaking and writing are very different and as a result reading a novel will not help with your speaking style, it can help with vocabulary but that is all.
Speak to yourself in your target language. Well, you will be doing that a lot with our system. We recommend that you repeat all the audios you listen to.
Watch TV, in your target language. This is our first tough one. Yes, this is very helpful, however, it is also totally pointless if you can’t follow the story. The reason that teachers advise this is that the pictures will help you to understand what is going on when your listening fails you. At AudStudio we look at it differently, we don’t want your listening to fail you. Yes, there will be times when you have to guess, but when you are learning then we want you to understand. Our audios are different lengths and they are broken down into the different parts so you can listen to a sentence over and over until you can hear it. You don’t need to guess, you don’t need pictures to help you, you can understand the system we have created and if you have a problem, you can ask us!
Look up words to get a definition in English. All the vocabulary is learnt in context, you won’t even need a dictionary with our system. We have transcripts so you can easily use your favourite tool to check a part or the whole text, depending on your preference.
The final one we need to look at is quoted all the time; don’t translate! This often confuses students, the one thing we really do not want you to do is to translate when you are talking, but when you are learning of course you should translate, crikey learning a language would take a million times longer if you didn’t translate at all. So then we have to touch on how to not translate when you are speaking, this is a whole other blog post probably, but I will touch on it here. If you learn sentences that are connected by context then when you are having a conversation about a topic all those sentences will have been learnt together and will therefore be filled together. It is a bit like opening a drawer and finding all the ingredients you need for a meal in the same place. You don’t forget an ingredient because it is there in the drawer with the rest of them. It’s the same when you learn a language. You open the draw for a conversation about beach holidays and you have everything you need to hold the conversation filed together because they were all learnt together.
So the advice is good, but often it is given in damaging ways. At AudStudio we want you to learn as fast as possible and to enjoy it as much as possible so we have designed a system to make this happen! The best tried and tested principles but rejigged for our modern lives and expectations.