Wednesday, August 12, 2009

Clarifying Question Idea

Hear a sentence in the L2, then, instead of translating or understanding the sentence, generate a clarifying question about the sentence. One observed trait of outstanding language learners is their ability to provoke more input.

Friday, August 7, 2009

Cantonese Learning Resources

http://cantostories.podbean.com/
- stories in Cantonese.

Thursday, August 6, 2009

New Thoughts on Self Teaching Language

I stumbled upon a couple of new sites:


http://www.anthonylauder.com/
- this gentleman is teaching the benefits of connectors as he calls them, those little pieces of dialog that keep a conversation flowing. He is learning Czech and he tracked down the Czech phrases on his list, learned them well and uses them to keep the conversation moving along. It sounds like a great idea to me. Those little phrases like, I think ..., for example ..., I've heard, and so many others fit very naturally into nearly any conversation.

http://www.fluentin3months.com/
- from someone who has taught himself several languages. He's just posting his ideas on learning.

Sunday, August 2, 2009

Shadowing

Suppose to assist development of a good accent and fluency.

Detailed here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=130bOvRpt24

Demonstrated here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VdheWK7u11w


- walking swiftly, purposefully with good posture.

Steps of Shadowing. Each step is done several times, but really as many as you can, as long as it is still profitable.
- Blind Shadowing - no book, walking, listening, repeating.
- Reading & Shadowing - continue to shadow the material (listening, speaking L2), reading L1.
- Reading with your Thumbs - shadow and read with your thumb under the appropriate part of the L1 text, looking over to the L2 text whenever possible.
- now focused on the L2 text, flipping back to L1 text as you want for confirmation.
- Stay on the L2 text, even if uncertain. Now you are trying to keep your mind in the L2.
- Now, turn off audio, read and analyze the text.
- Read the text aloud.
- Writing the text.