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A comment on The Mystery of People Who Speak Dozens of Languages. Parent comment

Re:The Mystery of People Who Speak Dozens of Languages by oh_sigh on Thursday August 30, 2018 @03:10PM (#17879776)
I have learned basic conversational german and spanish by doing just that - basically just drilling 2000 of the most common words in the language into my brain with complete disregard for any grammar, conjugations, etc. Then, I spend some time learning common conjugations, sentence structure, etc, and then I start talking with people where I can.

I've had much better luck with this system than with what I was forced to use in school to learn French, which was basically slowly build up all of the skills at once(learn a little grammar, a few words, at a time).

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Re:The Mystery of People Who Speak Dozens of Languages by misiti3780 on Thursday August 30, 2018 @03:53PM (#17880145)
I agree, the few things I think are really valuable in that book are the following

* learn pronunciation/spelling first

* learn the top words using images and space repetition

* study every single day

I think this method is by far superior to anything taught in high schools in the US, which is very sad given a large portion of our population speaks Spanish and I think they could change the curriculum a bit an a lot more students would leave school bi-lingual

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