4 ms·

Cool, so I'll just find a French friend in a tiny village in the Beaujolais region of France where I can just go stay for two weeks doing nothing but learning F

Cool, so I'll just find a French friend in a tiny village in the Beaujolais region of France where I can just go stay for two weeks doing nothing but learning French. SO easy to learn French!

sethrin 12y ago
It was described as the best way to learn, not the easy way. There are probably more accessible French speaking regions, if that's an issue. It is possible to learn languages without being immersed in them, but immersion is better for a number of different reasons. You learn how people actually speak, rather than what gets committed to a textbook. You may or may not memorize words any faster, but you will be continually absorbing speech patterns. You also are forced to speak and to try to communicate. That is both one of the most critical factors in learning, and the easiest to avoid, and the psychological pressure to do so can be intense. It is so much easier to fall back to a language of which you are master. The easiest way to learn a language, in point of fact, is to not learn it at all. I spent three years in Central America, mostly hanging out around gringos, and six months immersed in the language. The difference was incomparable. I don't consider myself fluent, but I think I can say with some authority that the more exposure to native speakers that you have, and the more that you force yourself to express yourself in that language, the easier it will be to learn. There aren't many people for whom learning languages is actually easy, but there are easier and harder ways to go about it. The important point is that it is something that is possible for anyone, with sufficient effort: It's wired into our brains. As an aside, I would like to recommend the app Duolingo. I haven't used it much; it was a little embarrassing to be using it around a bunch of native speakers, but I do think it helps to gamify the experience.

Cool, so I'll just find a French friend in a tiny village in the Beaujolais region of France where I can just go stay for two weeks doing nothing but learning French. SO easy to learn French!

sethrin 12y ago

It was described as the best way to learn, not the easy way. There are probably more accessible French speaking regions, if that's an issue. It is possible to learn languages without being immersed in them, but immersion is better for a number of different reasons. You learn how people actually speak, rather than what gets committed to a textbook. You may or may not memorize words any faster, but you will be continually absorbing speech patterns. You also are forced to speak and to try to communicate. That is both one of the most critical factors in learning, and the easiest to avoid, and the psychological pressure to do so can be intense. It is so much easier to fall back to a language of which you are master. The easiest way to learn a language, in point of fact, is to not learn it at all. I spent three years in Central America, mostly hanging out around gringos, and six months immersed in the language. The difference was incomparable. I don't consider myself fluent, but I think I can say with some authority that the more exposure to native speakers that you have, and the more that you force yourself to express yourself in that language, the easier it will be to learn. There aren't many people for whom learning languages is actually easy, but there are easier and harder ways to go about it. The important point is that it is something that is possible for anyone, with sufficient effort: It's wired into our brains. As an aside, I would like to recommend the app Duolingo. I haven't used it much; it was a little embarrassing to be using it around a bunch of native speakers, but I do think it helps to gamify the experience.