How to learning a language

When I learned Thai, I was 19 years old, single and a missionary for my church. My church had a book and a system that they used and I was living in Thailand as well. I lived language learning. This isn’t the same with Spanish. Up until a few weeks ago, I was in a country that doesn’t have a large Spanish-speaking community. I am(have) 30 years with 4 kids and I work full-time. The strategies that I used and the overall system can’t be applied in the same way that I learned Thai.

So a big part of this blog is helping me create the pattern and system for a busy working family person. Once I created a useful pattern for learning a language, I could turn around and apply it to another. If somehow this helps anyone else learn a language, all the better. That said, I have acknowledged a long time ago that I blog mostly for myself(it’s not as selfish as that sounds)

Languages can basically be divided into four separate skills: speaking, listening, reading, and writing. One needs to have a plan of attack so that you build all of your skills and not just one.

I separated them into Input(listening and reading) and Output (Speaking and Writing). The reason is that the two input skills are more similar to each other than they are to the two output skills.

Divide and conquer. Now that I have separated the skills, I spend one week doing only Input based activities and the next Output.

There you go. That is not all of it, but it is enough for now. What do you think? Agree disagree? I would love to hear your opinions. Anything I can do to improve is helpful.

http://want2speakthai.com/2012/04/03/my-system-so-far-part-1/

Sam: For kids, we can deploy a different strategy, e.g. Learn to Teach, they learn in the class, they teach their mom when they go Mom. Any strategy that prompts people to take action is a good strategy.