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Originally Posted by Jerrek
Many people find it hard to learn a new language, but it is more psychological than anything else.
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Well, IMO, it's somewhat more a matter of teaching and memory.
Language teaching at school sucks big time. You don't learn a language by studying verb conjugations or trying to memorise lists of vocabulary, you learn a language by *using it*.
There was a documentary I saw some years ago about a guy who taught languages in a way that put the onus on the *teacher* to ensure that the pupils understood, rather than just "throwing" stuff at them and hoping that some of it would stick.
He took a group of children who had been learning (or, rather, failing to learn!) French at Secondary School and within five *days* they knew and understood more of the language than they had in five *years* of ordinary teaching!
He'd start off with a basic phrase and, once the kids had got the hang of it, he'd "ring the changes" on it so what they were learning would follow in a logical progression. If they didn't understand the next step, he'd take them back to something they had understood, then move on again from there.
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Which languages do you speak?
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English and profane
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Which do you wish you could speak? Which do you like the sound of? And which do you like the caligraphy of? (the art of writing it)
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Japanese. I got interested when I did a Japanese style of Karate about 10 years ago and I did try to learn some because there was a local English Language school where students would offer tuition in their language in return for help with English, but I never got very far with it.
It's interesting, trouble is, there's a slight problem in that if you look at their flash animation, the same symbol (a square) is used to represent "breath", "mouth", "man", "walled garden" and "person"...
Now that's not a difficulty as such (did you know that the word with the most different meanings in English is "set" with at least *twenty seven* separate definitions!) but it does rather suggest that their "explanations" for links to the Bible are a little questionable. (But, *please* let's not turn this into a religious thread!)