Learning Language

Hi Guys....

I think I owe y'all a blog, and when I saw this I just knew I had to post it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_yhnWnR1g7M

Take 20 minutes out of your day to watch it.

It talks about how we learn language and it's an awesome video. For me, personally, German is my third [and by far most successful] try at learning a language. In Grammer School and Junior High I took Latin, and after 6 years of struggling through the class I was still clueless about how to conjugate verbs and decline nouns. So, I moved onto Italian. Took two years of that [mi chiamo Jonny] and was absolutely miserable, and after all that time was [and am] still clueless about how to speak the language-- But not for lack of trying. I used to go over to my friend Tony's house twice a week and try to speak to his Italian father. I used to watch the news in Italian streamed live on the internet. In High School I failed Freshman French twice and dropped the class before I could fail a third time. Nothing worked.

And so I made a decision: basically the way the neurons in my brain fire makes it very very difficult to learn foreign language. The way my brain is wired though makes it very good at some other things. For example, I am very good at math. I am very good at science (in High School I was extremely good in Physics). I'm a fairly good pianist with excellent sight-reading chops. I just always assumed I didn't have the magic language gene that some people are born with.

However, this semester is the first time that I think perhaps the guy in this video is right: Some people have an easier time learning language, but that doesn't mean everybody is not capable. If you go to 4:33 in the video he says what I think has made me more successful this semester... This semester I have just started speaking German. It's hard to explain. But, here's an example. Over the spring break I went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art [kunsthaus] with my family and in the entire museum I spoke German. Even when it was pretty crappy pidgeon German.

I think that's the key... I cannot just "study" german... I need to SPEAK it. I need to form sentences. I now see that in Italian and French and Latin I would do flashcards. I would fill out charts. I would do word for word translations. And it was all a waste, because I never actually lived in the language. I never actually spoke it.

So, when studying for this next test [on wednesday...ahhhh] I'm not just going to study Wollen...ich will... to want to. But rather, i'll form a sentence ich will ice essen.

Ok. TTFN