Shall I learn the writing? I think that might help because not everything will be translated into romanized Japanese.
Or shall I learn Turkish? Or German? Everyone says German is hard .. it didn't look that hard to me. The characters are the same and many of the words are the same. I think learning the vocabulary will be easy-peasy.
The pronunciation is a little difficult. I just love the sound of German. What about Turkish? I love Turkish music ... And it's written in Latin characters so it will be easier to read than Korean.
And after learning an agglutinating language like Korean, Turkish wouldn't be so hard.
I don't think Turkish is that hard.
Any language is not hard to learn so long as I have the romanization/the pronunciation guide and the audio.
If I got the same thousands of phrases translated into the TL, then it would be just a matter of shadowing everyday and learning the language in ... six months? Remember in six months, if you shadow sixty sentences every day, you will have shadowed about 60X30X6=10,800 phrases. That's enough to be fluent in a language. Of course, I won't be able to read that well or write that well but if I wanted to pick those skills up, it wouldn't be that hard to do.
The thing about immersion is that the words and phrases you come across are more relevant to your situation so you are more likely to pick them up. With shadowing, many of the phrases might not be relevant to you currently so they might not be easy to remember. There is less motivation to remember less useful phrases.
I want to compile a master list of phrases - how many should I limit them to?
About 10,000? How can I get the phrases? Should I create situations? I think so.
Many permutations of various situations. What people would say in everyday life ...
If I spend a few months compiling this, then this would be the basis for a language-learning program. I would get a native speaker who was bilingual to translate everything and that would be EXCELLENT learning material. For languages like Korean where the characters are not Latin characters, romanization would need to be given. And underneath are the exact word for word translations so the person doesn't need a dictionary. They don't really need to learn grammar formally from a book because they can learn it from the material, from the word for word translations. Of course, if they want to write well, they need to learn grammar formally from a book.
Spelling ... well, that's part of writing so ... Writing and learning to speak fluently are really very separate skills. There is overlap of course but not much.
So I think that it's a matter of deciding which skills you want to learn first. Learning to be fluent in speech is better to learn first because it helps you with writing and reading.
Vocabulary is easy to pick up once you are fluent.
I think I am steadily reaching the point where one of those HUMPS will be reached. Once a hump is reached and gotten over, learning accelerates a little.
I think learning by shadowing is so effective, I've hit the motherlode in learning techniques by starting shadowing.
I am not talented in learning languages and really I am not that interested in learning languages. Some people have a lot of talent for it. For me, it's like STUDYING.
For example, English. I STUDIED it. So I learned a lot of words. I learned the grammar and can write flawlessly without grammar mistakes if I put my mind to it. I can get 100% in verbal components of GRE type of exams, but am I good at English? No. I am not a great writer. I have trouble expressing myself at times. I am not interested in speaking with a lot of people. I don't do word plays.
I think I am OK at picking up language when immersed in it - the same as the average person - not great, not terrible.
Why does it take so long to pick up KOREAN? I don't know. Something about this language ... it must be a communicative language ... you have to communicate in it to learn it. It's taught through communication. Unlike English which can be learned from books, Korean has to be learned through communicating with others. This is my conclusion. Sigh. I will try and go as far as I can with the phrase book shadowing and leave it at that.
I think I am OK at shadowing. I will reflect back after a month and see how much or how little I've progressed. I think in a month I would have finished the migrant book and KGU and the Essentials book.
I think that's good progress. In the second month, I would have finished the Korean at a Glance phrase book.
The third month, I shadow the teenage book and the WOW comics. The fourth and fifth months, I shadow the IL book, and that should be it!
I should be fluent after five months!
I should be able to write basic sentences with ease and read many easy books with ease. I should be able to pronounce words well and read and speak with the correct intonation.
I will be a phrase-picking up machine!
I think I will leave the translations for later ...
The newspaper article translations are so hard! I want to know how the words are pronounced too ... I wonder if listening to the radio is useful.
