Tuesday, 20 July 2010

Imitation

I encountered on the forum How-to-learn-any-language, a French man who speaks Mandarin like a native from Beijing. There is a video on youtube which shows him on a tv show having a conversation with 2 Mandarin speakers:




After reading through the rest of the post, the man who claims to be the man in the video starts posting on the thread and answering questions on how he achieved this feat. This is part of what he said :
I started with tapes, and always by myself. Tried schools and university, and all added together lasted a month and half! My philosophy is that language is all about imitation, so learn THEN understand is the key rule. Unfortunately most education systems these days are more and more the contrary of my theory, since in order to make people feel good while learning they make sure you understand BEFORE learning. What a waste of time! Sometimes the more you think, the less you learn. Which also means that at the end you are less able to think.
Think of that: the main reason why we study a language faster in its country is because we don't understand anything. You keep hearing words and wondering what they mean, and will remember them before knowing their meaning. Which means when you start using them you'll do it naturally! If I teach you a word and tell you its meaning, say, “computer”, the only thing you’ll remember after a few days is that I taught you a word which meaning was “computer”. What was the word? Forgot it. Now if I don’t tell you its meaning, you’ll remember it a lot more probably.



I think this is such a interesting method and I too have sort of learnt some words this way in Japanese. I'm always listening to Japanese music and in songs there are some words such as 心 [kokoro-Heart] which always turn up. I can remember hearing this word and once I knew what it meant, I have never forgotten it. So I'm going to start an experiment. I will start my Chinese studies by repetitively listening to texts and then imitation what is said. I will not attempt to learn any of what is said until August 1st. I will be using LingQ as the main great resource for this experiment as it has both text and audio so you can read and listen at the same time.

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