Bryan Murphy's Blog - Posts Tagged "self-help"
Murphy's Laws
HOW NOT TO LEARN A FOREIGN LANGUAGE
In Ten Easy Steps
Step 5. Develop avoidance strategies
Reduce your need to use the foreign language.
Get a job in which you use your own language all day (such as teaching it or writing it), preferably one in which you are surrounded by fellow speakers and/or by local people who are happy to speak your language and expect you to do so, too.
If you're in business, get your company to hire a competent interpreter for you.
Make sure you live with, or close to, speakers of your own language.
Socialise with people who speak your language and are happy to do so.
Shop in supermarkets, where silent transactions suffice. Eat at home or in self-service places or places which cater for tourists and their strange languages.
Do not initiate exchanges in the target language.
In Ten Easy Steps
Step 5. Develop avoidance strategies
Reduce your need to use the foreign language.
Get a job in which you use your own language all day (such as teaching it or writing it), preferably one in which you are surrounded by fellow speakers and/or by local people who are happy to speak your language and expect you to do so, too.
If you're in business, get your company to hire a competent interpreter for you.
Make sure you live with, or close to, speakers of your own language.
Socialise with people who speak your language and are happy to do so.
Shop in supermarkets, where silent transactions suffice. Eat at home or in self-service places or places which cater for tourists and their strange languages.
Do not initiate exchanges in the target language.
Murphy's Laws
HOW NOT TO LEARN A FOREIGN LANGUAGE
In Ten Easy Steps
Step 6. Limit input
In addition to what you learned in Step 5, avoid radio and TV in the target language.
The Internet and cable or satellite TV can keep you informed and entertained in your own language.
If you make the mistake of watching your favourite programmes dubbed into the local language, your knowledge of programmme format will make situations easy to predict; this will help you to guess the meaning of the language, which, unfortunately, might cause you to learn some of it.
Be canny: for instance, English football fans in Thailand could watch live Premiership matches on Indonesian TV, so that the language and language awareness they pick up would not be Thai.
Read a good deal, but only in your own language. Bangkok, astonishingly, has three English-language daily newspapers, as well as English-language libraries and bookshops.
Talk shop while socialising. This will prevent the people you talk to from giving you information about the target language and culture.
If you must talk about such things, try and do it only with people whose language awareness is low.
Try to hang out with people who, if they are aware of the local culture, do not like it.
This will further help to keep your integrative motivation usefully low, always providing you can stand such people.
In Ten Easy Steps
Step 6. Limit input
In addition to what you learned in Step 5, avoid radio and TV in the target language.
The Internet and cable or satellite TV can keep you informed and entertained in your own language.
If you make the mistake of watching your favourite programmes dubbed into the local language, your knowledge of programmme format will make situations easy to predict; this will help you to guess the meaning of the language, which, unfortunately, might cause you to learn some of it.
Be canny: for instance, English football fans in Thailand could watch live Premiership matches on Indonesian TV, so that the language and language awareness they pick up would not be Thai.
Read a good deal, but only in your own language. Bangkok, astonishingly, has three English-language daily newspapers, as well as English-language libraries and bookshops.
Talk shop while socialising. This will prevent the people you talk to from giving you information about the target language and culture.
If you must talk about such things, try and do it only with people whose language awareness is low.
Try to hang out with people who, if they are aware of the local culture, do not like it.
This will further help to keep your integrative motivation usefully low, always providing you can stand such people.
