Anthropoligist In Heels Top Posts
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The most common Chinese keyboard are Hanyu pinyin -based, representing the pronunciation of characters using Latin letters. First, decid... -
Do not let the Cyrillic Alphabet scare you! Let's start with a little history. The Cyrillic Alphabet was invented by two brot... -
Let the game begin with this image. It contains several alphabets, most of them ancient. You are looking at their numerical system only. (1... -
Foreign films will not teach you a language. But what they will do is give you a feel for the spoken languages rhythm, intonation and cu...
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Intelligence and Bilingualism This is a big topic. I know that the monolingual (Americans and Brits) are going to take offense to this. ... -
Unfortunately it happens to the best of us. Sometimes we go into our new language full throttle, then just get burnt out. One of my favorite...
1 comment:
First of all, I want to say how happy I was to find a blog devoted to the subject of self-taught language learning. I have been doing this my whole life with varying degrees of success. I'm teaching myself Russian and Japanese now, while maintaining my undergraduate knowledge of French and German.
Everybody taking a new hobby comes up against this number. I write a cello blog, and this number comes up in conversation just about every other day with other amateurs.
It seems to me that if you can fly a plane with 1000 hours of air time, there is still quite a bit of useful work you can do with just 1000 hours of language study. If a college semester is 400 hours of work, and you can major in a language with about 10 courses, then 4000 hours (and that's a bit high) is all the work you need for an undergraduate major in a foreign language.
I think by putting the final destination : 10,000 or Mastery in front of some more useful milestones, most people discourage themselves too easily. I wish they'd put aside this number, and remember some very useful smaller numbers even if they don't correspond to Malcolm Gladwell's concept of "Mastery"
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