#dannish

Anish Sengupta (Hotel Portofino) | Daniel Molloy (Interview with the Vampire)

Well, I by no means think that language classes are the end all be all. If you have access to them, great, but if you don’t, don’t even sweat it! Before I had taken Japanese or Korean classes (which I didn’t do until college btw), I had been studying on my own, on and off, for a few years. Here is how I typically approach my new languages (and this works well for me, personally):

1. Learn the alphabet, well

2. Learn the super useful and basic sayings and how to introduce yourself

Of course, this just always seems like the best and easiest thing to do. Not only are these the things that are most important, so I’ll likely run into them all the time, but by learning basic phrases, I can get a feel for the way the language works, both in regards to how the language sounds, and how sentences are typically constructed. This early on, even when I don’t know all of the words, I like to point out certain patterns I see while looking at the translations (For example, when I was learning Korean, even though I didn’t really know any words or grammar, just by looking at translations of basic phrases, I could see “Oh, sentences in the past tense all seem to have this -ㅆ어요 ending whereas present tense sentences only had -요,” things like that.

3. Vocab, vocab, vocab!

Even though you may not know how to hold whole conversations, I feel like learning basic vocabulary at this point is the best idea. Verbs, places, time, direction words, family members, colors; all the super important things that you would likely want to talk about on an every day basis. Just build it up for a while.

4.  Grammar!

I feel like once you have a substantial amount of vocab knowledge, now is the time for you to be focusing in on grammar. Of course at this point you already may have noticed a few things without having studied it, but now you can really dig into the grammar rules and start learning how to put together your own sentences. Thanks to all the vocab you now know, you should be able to construct sentences/hold conversations and talk about your self on at least a basic level, ask for directions, order food at a restaurant, things like that. 

5. Get more comfortable with the past and then the future tense

Once I’m comfortable with the present tense, I focus on learning past, and then future tense (and if we’re talking Spanish, the 1,000 other tenses 😒) Once you’re finished with this point, I consider myself having created a solid foundation. Now all I have to do is decorate it! :) 

6. a. Expand on vocabulary, then b.expand even further on grammar. 

When you’re at least somewhat comfortable enough to recognize when sentences are in present, vs past, vs future,it’s time to hone your skills! Now is the time to learn all of that not-your-everyday-conversation type vocab, like more specific colors or body parts, outer space, less popular animals, more places and verbs, etc. This is where I typically try to get all fancy with sentence enhancers (aka adverbs, adjectives, idioms). 

Going back and forth, repeating steps 6a and b.

You can never have too much vocab or grammar knowledge; it just keeps growing and growing. 

Gee, writing this list out makes language acquisition seem like a short and easy process lol, but we all know it takes so much time and dedication. Once you’ve done all of this, I think you should be about at an intermediate level (on paper at least). It sucks not having anyone to practice speaking with, right? 😭 For the longest time I didn’t have anyone to speak any of my languages with. Now that I’m older, I guess I just have no shame in my languages. I walk around my house speaking Korean all the time. I get my pronunciation from dramas and music. I speak Spanish with my coworkers at my job. But if you really have no one, just sing! Or repeat things out loud that you hear in the movies or shows you watch. 

So yea, I definitely know for a fact that it can be done. You already have a tumblr account, so that’s good. There are so many resources here. Notes, links, friendly people who will answer your questions the same as a teacher would, friendly people who will chat with you in your target language. Then there’s youtube, and there are endless apps and websites dedicated to teaching languages. I said it once and I’ll say it again, folks: Don’t underestimate the power of the internet! We can do so much on here, and for free. Take advantage of everything, and learn to work with what you’ve got, and when I say that, I mean both tangible and intangible factors. So much of how quickly and effectively you will learn, is based off of how well you do that (work with what you’ve got). If you know you love music, use it to learn. If you’re a doodler, draw out your notes. Some people like the sticky notes thing. If you’re like me and like to travel, go to countries that speak the languages and force yourself to talk to people. If your interest in languages and or motivation to study comes in waves (like me again haha), then work with that. Realistically, that happenes to a lot f us, I think. I stopped trying to fight it. If I am studying Korean for 2 months and suddenly I just want to study Spanish for 5 days, then I just do it, otherwise trying to force myself to study becomes a drag. I don’t ever want this to become a task for me rather than being fun.

made on june 24th for Benjamin Christensen’s 1922 Häxan