Hey guys.I have some simple questions for you.How do you learn a foreign language.How many free time do you have to learn a language?How many words do you learn everyday?And the most important question-how do you remember this words.As for me,I’m listening to an audio many times to know this words like a native-without translate to my native language.But it takes time-I can learn 15-20 words for two days.And what about you guys?How do you learn a foreign language?
Hi couch,
Well, now I don’t have time to learn anything but I try to find time to learn between 2 and 3 hours per-day.
When I go to my job I spend 1 hour listening and when I’m back I’m listening again.
when I’m at home I go to my lingQ lessons and spend 1 hour reading over and over the same thing, normally I just use 3 lessons per week .of course I’m not as methodical with this lessons but every day I need read or listen some content in english or in my new focus Italian.
I don’t know how many words I’m learning during the day but I need say that say after day I know more and more new words and phrases and to me the most effective way to review this words is spending time reading in this new language.
1 year ago when I was learning english here on lingQ I had a lot of time , something like 7 and 8 hours per-day to learn english.
Thanks Lucas for you post.It’s very useful information.People I’m interested in your way of learning too.Come on,post here)
You may learn about 50 words in one evening (a couple of hours) using flashcards. Listening and reading are absolutely necessary, but flashcarding can be more effective (than working 10 times with the very same text/recording) when acquiring a lot of vocabulary is your main goal.
I should say my main goals are increasing vocabulary and listening=)
Eugrus,I think if I’ll learn 50 words everyday i’ll forget it soon.Do you think so?
couch_potato There is a SRS system here at LingQ that should help a lot not to. Check this out: http://lingqcentral-en.lingq.com/lingq-srs
Thanks a lot man.I’m a new member so don’t know all useful options on this site=)
I’ll just add that most words are not learned in a single day. You develop a relationship with a word over a indeterminable length of time. Some words come quickly and easily. Some take weeks, months or even years to fully understand. Patience and a love of words is key.
I read a great deal on similar subjects if I want to commit a certain type of vocabulary to memory. I don’t read the same text more than once or twice unless it’s something I really enjoy and I do not use flashcards nearly at all. Listen to music, watch television and movies, talk to people, and read. I’ve found that these are the types of things that make language learning more enjoyable and that’s the most important step in learning: make sure you are having fun. Also, I use LingQ in waves. Sometimes, I am reading a great deal on here, but often I have just used the site to keep track of my vocabulary improvements by updating words that I’ve learned in other ways (like books, TV, movies, music, etc.). For example, I learned a whole bunch of geographic and nautical themes from reading a great deal of Neruda with/to my Cuban girlfriend. You can be sure I am not going to forget the word for dock (muelle) or any of the five or so different ways he describes hills (loma, colina, cuesta, monte, etc.) any time soon.
-ZW
Thank you guys for you posts.
People be more active in this topic.I’m interested in you way of learning too.Please post here
Hi there! I’ve started using Lingq to learn German and I am still only a beginner in that language, but I have learned Japanese as a foreign language to a high degree of proficiency.
How do I learn? With German, mostly by reading and listening. With Japanese I studied traditionally for several years, before finding www.ajatt.com and taking a more direct, immersion based approach (reading and listening =lots= ^^). This helped immensely.
As for time, I find that reading German with Lingq for an hour or so a day makes it quite easy for me to learn twenty or more words per day. Two hours a day can get me to a rate of fifty or so. At this stage I am mostly content to focus on reading, although i also use the SRS software Anki to make and review my own flash cards. When I am bored of some material I can grab a few sentences out of it that I value, and then consign it to archival/deletion. The period in which I advanced the most with Japanese however, I was reading and listening to the language for almost all waking hours for a year.
Like Imyirtseshem says, knowing a word isn’t something that necessarily happens overnight, although the closer the language the faster you can go. I can be fairly sure that the German word ‘spiel’ has almost the same meaning and use as the English ‘play’. An MP3-Player in German is an MP3-Spieler, for example. You can ‘spiel’ music just like you can ‘play’ music. There is no way you can do that with 遊ぶ (asobu), ‘play’ in Japanese, though. Of course, German also has its differences to English, only they are less pronounced making it faster to acquire.
Yeah. Dutch ‘spelen’ and Yiddish ‘shpiln’. No doubt it’s similar it most other Germanic languages, as least those of the western branch.
Still, you’ve got to ‘register’ these words in your mind. It’s just that the process is much quicker. I’ve noticed that for languages which have unrelated/unrecognisable vocabulary, the brain rejects the words for a while before letting them in. After a while, the brain relaxes in some way and it becomes easier.
danchan
how long have you been learning German?
“Still, you’ve got to ‘register’ these words in your mind.” Yes, this is why I particularly like Steve’s emphasis on just pushing on. A word which refuses to stick one day suddenly feels very familiar the next. Being comfortable with this resistance and knowing it is temporary really helps me relax when learning a language.
@couch-potatoe
Hmm. According to my account, I have been a member on Lingq for 3 months now, which is how long I have been learning German. Dividing my remembered words by days of membership, I have been learning a bit over 30 words per day on average. I would like to speed things up a bit for the sake of a looming entrance exam (I have to translate a German passage on philosophy into modern Japanese!), but the current pace is still quite comfortable in and of itself.
I always find that I learn more words than I think I am learning. I learn them incidentally through my listening and reading.
steve
So you don’t try to memorise words.You just listen and read and then you remember this words without memorise,right?
I like to watch TV & movie…
I also like to read the history & culture materials of other countries…
I would make some multimedia tutorials for language studying…
You need to drink the blood of natives to gain their knowledge and essence.
Yep, but it’s really important to be sure that poor native was a highly educated person!
Well, I’m trying to avoid using Russian when I learn and use other language, so I spent my time reading and listening to some interesting content, creating mostly monolingual lingQs for words and phrases I’m not sure about.
The time I spend depends on my schedule and mood, so it’s hard to say how much time does it take… I also read different articles, listen to the news and podcasts, sometimes post something meaningful (or meaningless) on forums and so on… Taking part in group and 1-to-1 conversations also help me a lot.