Bryan Murphy's Blog - Posts Tagged "murphy"
Murphy's Laws
HOW NOT TO LEARN A FOREIGN LANGUAGE
In Ten Easy Steps
1. Opt to stay mono-lingual
We all probably have room for improving our use of our mother tongue, or at least for keeping up to date with its changing colloquialisms and expanding technical vocabulary.
If you cannot completely overcome the temptation to pursue a foreign language, at least stay away from countries where the language is spoken.
This manual is based on my almost total failure to learn Thai, even though I lived and worked in Thailand for several months, which inevitably made it harder not to learn.
If you must learn a foreign language, stick to just one, because learning one foreign language will help you to learn others (Klein, 1995).
By increasing your general linguistic awareness, by making you more aware of the possibilities outside your mother tongue, and by giving you experience of what works and what does not work in the language learning process, learning a second language will make it harder for you not to learn a third language. Then you’ll really be in trouble.
In Ten Easy Steps
1. Opt to stay mono-lingual
We all probably have room for improving our use of our mother tongue, or at least for keeping up to date with its changing colloquialisms and expanding technical vocabulary.
If you cannot completely overcome the temptation to pursue a foreign language, at least stay away from countries where the language is spoken.
This manual is based on my almost total failure to learn Thai, even though I lived and worked in Thailand for several months, which inevitably made it harder not to learn.
If you must learn a foreign language, stick to just one, because learning one foreign language will help you to learn others (Klein, 1995).
By increasing your general linguistic awareness, by making you more aware of the possibilities outside your mother tongue, and by giving you experience of what works and what does not work in the language learning process, learning a second language will make it harder for you not to learn a third language. Then you’ll really be in trouble.
