/functional-fluency

Foreign Language Notes (Primarily Spanish, Korean, and Japanese)

Functional Fluency

This repo will hold markdown notes for foreign language studies. My focus in 2020 will be on Korean and Japanese, in addition to Spanish. Portuguese will tentatively come next (due to it's overlap with Spanish).

At this time I'm not sure how much further I'll go beyond those stated languages, but I suspect I can reach a functional level of fluency in them in an 18-month time frame. My inspiration to do this hit a tipping point when I saw the video below:

 

How to Learn Any Language in Six Months

 

I was originally doing some research on teaching a child how to read using the most commonly used letters and words to reduce the learning curve (that's a different project in a different repo). Naturally I started wondering if the same applied to other languages as well.

As the video points out: If you know ten verbs, nouns, and adjectives, that corresponds to roughly a thousand or so possible phrases (@13:30). And you can also shorten the fluency curve by focusing on the most commonly used words. In English, a thousand words covers 85% of the language, three-thousand covers 98% which is basically native fluency (@13:55).

My goal is to learn the proper use of a couple thousand words or so from multiple languages, which should be enough to reach functional fluency. Hence the title of this repo.

 

Notes from the Lonsdale Presentation

Principles:

  1. Focus on language content that is relevant to you.

  2. Use your new language as a tool to communicate from day 1.

  3. First understand the message, and you'll unconsciously acquire the language (comprehensible input).

  4. Physiological training - speaking takes muscle

  5. Psycho-physiological state matters - tolerate ambiguity

 

Actions:

  1. Listen a LOT - brain soaking.

  2. Focus on getting the meaning first before the words.

  3. Start Mixing: 10 nouns, 10 verbs, 10 adjectives is roughly a thousand phrases.

  4. Focus on the Core: 1000 words == 85% or so of a language, 3,000 == 98% or so.

  • Week 1 - the tool box: In new language, "What is this? How do you say? I don't understand."
  • Week 2/3 - Pronouns, common verbs, adjectives (you, that, me, give, hot)
  • Week 4 - glue words: but, and, even though, etc

  1. Get a language parent: Tries to understand what's said, doesn't correct mistakes, confirms understanding using correct language, uses known words.

  2. Copy the face pronunciation.

  3. "Direct connect" to mental images.