Somewhere between studying 15 minutes every other day and 8 hours every day, there is a point where the language learning curve is optimized. I wish I knew where it was. It seems there are two somewhat contradictory ideas about learning a language: 1.) You can focus at most for 45 minutes before your retention falls off a cliff, and 2.) It is not how long (months, years) you have studied, but how many hours a day you study. I’m retired now and I can sit all day studying Italian, but my mind can only function for a few of those hours. In a month I will go to Italy to study the language and I will have to enroll in the most basic level class, after having already studied intensively for 3 months. I went to the Defense Language Institute in California and studied Farsi for a year, 8 hours a day. It was like throwing spaghetti at the wall and hoping it would stick. Regardless of what you have heard about DLI, this is not an efficient way to learn a language. Sometimes I think the most we can hope for as language learners is having some familiarity with a language so the first time we see something in a text, or class, or on the street, it is not our first time.
[link] [comments]
from Language Learning https://ift.tt/4UuHSI6
via Learn Online English Speaking
Comments
Post a Comment