We get one life, it's enough if we do it right !
Make every second count !!
Today's post is along these lines, working smarter and making every second count.
How can this be applied while learning a language ?
Suppose, you are learning a foreign language which is as exotic as it gets. The culture is wildly different, the sounds of the language is enough to jolt you out of your comfy English speaking and Dialect-Rich world and the the written form of the language is almost impenetrable ! B
But you find it to be inexplicably beautiful and it's "difficulty", only makes you feel all the more determined to understand it. You know, "There is magic in fighting battles, beyond endurance", or something like that;P
It doesn't matter whether you put in Arabic, Persian, Chinese, Russian or Japanese and face an apparently insurmountable challenge of trying to understand that language. Work Smarter, Not Only Harder. Use the infinite resources you can access with just a Touch.
I have talked about leaning the other aspects of the language in the previous posts, so on this post I would like to focus more upon the Reading and Writing skills in a languages with the focus being the ways in which an Autodidactic learner can approach these two hurdles.
Well, not all languages have a writing system which is coherent with the way a word is pronounced i.e. the script might not be based on representing the Sound of the Language, rather it can also be based on the Idea of the word. The most famous example being Chinese script in which the way a word is pronounced can't be deduced from the script and as China has been the cultural powerhouse for many thousands of years in the Far East, the same feature has been assimilated by the scripts of neighbouring countries as well.
Yes, of course, there are Romanisations of various systems, the way French romanised the Vietnamese language and have rendered a language tougher than Chinese (!) into a form which seems somewhat more approachable from a learners point of view. Another reason for the romanisations of various languages has been the fact that the characters are easier to taught and thus quite an efficient way to tackle illiteracy.
But then again, there are other languages which are highly unlikely to make an official transition to the Roman script due to various reasons and, I believe, that it's not our job to judge anyone upon the difficulty of the writing script. I mean, think about it ! These systems developed over a course of thousands of years and are deeply a part of the cultural identity of the people. So, the first and foremost thing that a language learned is supposed to do is to embrace it, embrace the differences of the language and the culture.
Btw, I came across an acronym by the legendary Hyperpolyglot Kato Lomb, who would refer to the Average Language Learner as A.L.L , always ! It captured her beliefs that anyone can learn any language if one really applies oneself to it.
So, for A.L.L, the technology comes to the rescue. Let's say you are learning Persian and you want to be able to read the language in a few hours.
It's definitely possible to learn the writing system for most languages in a few hours. How ?
By using the Google keyboard or any other Native application, like Baidu for Chinese etc, for the writing system. It's that easy 'cos Human Mind works pretty much the same everywhere and it would be quite a torment to write out all the characters the way we do while actually writing using our hands. You know, each alphabet in the Arabic script has a different form depending upon where it occurs in the word!
So, instead of learning the numerous forms of each alphabet, just download the Keyboard and start typing the words which you study in some transliteration system using the Romanised script. And as you get proficient in typing out these words and figure out where each alphabet is located you can actually move on to check the spellings and how each word looks like in real life. And experience that exhilarating feeling of actually doing something each time you type in.
Same is true for the Asian languages like Japanese and Chinese et cetera. Though there might be no sound correlation with the word, which is especially true of the Chinese characters in all the Asian languages apart from their own native forms which suit their own languages better. So, even if there is no such correlation, you can still learn to recognise them from the suggestions offered by the keyboard and still get to improve your vocabulary and know-how of the language.
I actually recommend that you try out writing your language as soon as possible.
You know, Make Every Second Count=)
Make every second count !!
Today's post is along these lines, working smarter and making every second count.
How can this be applied while learning a language ?
Suppose, you are learning a foreign language which is as exotic as it gets. The culture is wildly different, the sounds of the language is enough to jolt you out of your comfy English speaking and Dialect-Rich world and the the written form of the language is almost impenetrable ! B
But you find it to be inexplicably beautiful and it's "difficulty", only makes you feel all the more determined to understand it. You know, "There is magic in fighting battles, beyond endurance", or something like that;P
It doesn't matter whether you put in Arabic, Persian, Chinese, Russian or Japanese and face an apparently insurmountable challenge of trying to understand that language. Work Smarter, Not Only Harder. Use the infinite resources you can access with just a Touch.
I have talked about leaning the other aspects of the language in the previous posts, so on this post I would like to focus more upon the Reading and Writing skills in a languages with the focus being the ways in which an Autodidactic learner can approach these two hurdles.
Well, not all languages have a writing system which is coherent with the way a word is pronounced i.e. the script might not be based on representing the Sound of the Language, rather it can also be based on the Idea of the word. The most famous example being Chinese script in which the way a word is pronounced can't be deduced from the script and as China has been the cultural powerhouse for many thousands of years in the Far East, the same feature has been assimilated by the scripts of neighbouring countries as well.
Yes, of course, there are Romanisations of various systems, the way French romanised the Vietnamese language and have rendered a language tougher than Chinese (!) into a form which seems somewhat more approachable from a learners point of view. Another reason for the romanisations of various languages has been the fact that the characters are easier to taught and thus quite an efficient way to tackle illiteracy.
But then again, there are other languages which are highly unlikely to make an official transition to the Roman script due to various reasons and, I believe, that it's not our job to judge anyone upon the difficulty of the writing script. I mean, think about it ! These systems developed over a course of thousands of years and are deeply a part of the cultural identity of the people. So, the first and foremost thing that a language learned is supposed to do is to embrace it, embrace the differences of the language and the culture.
Btw, I came across an acronym by the legendary Hyperpolyglot Kato Lomb, who would refer to the Average Language Learner as A.L.L , always ! It captured her beliefs that anyone can learn any language if one really applies oneself to it.
So, for A.L.L, the technology comes to the rescue. Let's say you are learning Persian and you want to be able to read the language in a few hours.
It's definitely possible to learn the writing system for most languages in a few hours. How ?
By using the Google keyboard or any other Native application, like Baidu for Chinese etc, for the writing system. It's that easy 'cos Human Mind works pretty much the same everywhere and it would be quite a torment to write out all the characters the way we do while actually writing using our hands. You know, each alphabet in the Arabic script has a different form depending upon where it occurs in the word!
So, instead of learning the numerous forms of each alphabet, just download the Keyboard and start typing the words which you study in some transliteration system using the Romanised script. And as you get proficient in typing out these words and figure out where each alphabet is located you can actually move on to check the spellings and how each word looks like in real life. And experience that exhilarating feeling of actually doing something each time you type in.
Same is true for the Asian languages like Japanese and Chinese et cetera. Though there might be no sound correlation with the word, which is especially true of the Chinese characters in all the Asian languages apart from their own native forms which suit their own languages better. So, even if there is no such correlation, you can still learn to recognise them from the suggestions offered by the keyboard and still get to improve your vocabulary and know-how of the language.
I actually recommend that you try out writing your language as soon as possible.
You know, Make Every Second Count=)
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