![]() This is where whatever it is I’m hearing has an immediate semantic meaning attached to it without a written representation. The immediate association of sound with meaning and vice versa. You hear a sound and you immediately associate that sound with its corresponding semantic meaning. This is pretty much my approach to language learning summed up in three words.Īlthough a written word can help us remember what we’re hearing, it can also interfere with our direct association of sound with meaning. You’ll be amazed at how something as simple and natural as this can be so effective. There’s no need to break everything down and ask 100 questions about how everything works. I’m confident that everybody would have a lot more success (and less stress) becoming fluent speakers if they put down the books and programs like Duolingo (which are all literacy-based), and just get back to the basics of listen and repeat. The reason why I constantly advocate a ‘ chunking method’ (it’s an awful word I know) is that it’s all about taking real bites of audio, listening to it repeatedly and putting it straight to use even if you don’t fully understand the grammar. We’re assuming we’re talking about spoken rather than signed languages here of course. Focus on what you hear, not what you seeįirstly, let me touch on word association. ![]() Not only is starting with literacy a backward way to learn but it can be detrimental to your conversational skills as well if you’re just starting out. Reading will not make you a fluent speaker. They start with literacy skills and assume that reading fluency will lead to speaking fluency. Unfortunately nearly all language courses and programs miss how important this is and teach language backwards. The answer is you were yapping and singing away before you could even read A, B and C. Now if you think back to your own experience as a young child learning to read – did you learn to read before or after you were speaking fluently? This means that reading and writing are essentially an unnatural form of communication. What we read and write on paper is a representation of those sounds and signs. Language is 100% spoken (or signed in the case of deaf people). ![]() In fact reading and writing was something that only the very elite members of society were even able to do until recently in human history (and there are still many parts of the world where people don’t even have an alphabet). ![]() Writing is something we invented many thousands of years after humans were already verbally communicating as a means of recording information and corresponding with people far away. There’s no place on Earth where people communicate by writing as a primary form of communication. There’s no such thing as a written language ![]()
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