This is the first of a two part series. In this post, I'll cover the first four rules, which are more strategic directives. The second post, with the last three rules, covers the tactical concerns of how to implement the principles I talk about in this article.
Language learning is a passion of mine. It started when I was a Freshman at OU and decided to study abroad for a month during the summer of 2010. That got me hooked on both travel and Spanish. In the years since then, I've honed, distilled, and refined my language learning philosophy and methodology, which I'm going to share through 7 rules. I call them rules, but they're really more rules of thumb. To quote George Orwell, "Break any of these rules sooner than say [or do] anything outright barbarous." Since studying abroad in Chile, I've had the wonderful opportunity to travel to nearly a dozen countries, and I've used these ideas to learn Spanish and Italian. Currently I'm applying them to learn Portuguese and especially French. The rules are as follows, with explanations further below:
First off, I will say that very few, if any of these ideas are original. While I have made them my own, so to speak, I had several very formative teachers (who probably don't even know I exist). Of particular importance to my development was the website All Japanese All The Time (Thank you Madi-san for introducing me to the website!). The tagline on ajatt.com is very informative: "You don't know a language, you live it. You don't learn a language, you get used to it."
Stay tuned for the second part, where I dive into how to implement these rules.
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