It is easy to be distracted from doing The Right Thing.
People are in a hurry. They will want to teach you how to say where you are from and how to ask back where they are from… and so on. You might even yourself want to learn right away how to order a meal at a sidewalk café in your chosen country.
You can indeed learn these things quickly. But then the sound barrier stops you from moving on, because people talk back before you have established the necessary neural infrastructure to catch the words that come flying at you.
My advice is:
- Don’t slow down.
- Change direction from short-term satisfaction to long-term contentment.
- Keep the speed up.
- Concentrate on building that neural infrastructure – new neurons, a myriad of new synapses and neural pathways to connect them. (I’ll show you how in coming posts.)Avoid, at all times, using your mother tongue’s neural pathways for your new language.
Many think that listening comes naturally. It does not. It takes patience and perseverance to learn the art of listening accurately. It is not for nothing that professional singers routinely practice do-re-mi-fa-sol and other scales. Musical sound patterns need maintenance and constant practice. So do linguistic sound patterns.
It may sound far-fetched to liken language acquisition to sports. In all sports the goal is to win competitions. That requires intensive training over long periods of time – volume training, as it were – as well as attention to detail.
Linguistic training is not so different. The goal is to win the attention and interest of the listener. I’ll show you a few techniques on how to achieve that in my next post, one of them being the instinctive wisdom of young children.
Hasta luego
Karl
The Hofsö Method 