In this post I’d like to discuss something that is very beneficial to me when I’m starting out learning a language: getting corrected by people in a helpful way. This goes beyond simply not being rude when telling someone how to reword their sentence; it involves correcting as few things as is possible. When correcting a beginner’s sentences, change as few words as is possible to make the sentence make sense. For example, if I’m learning English and I write:

When she go, I will be first to be sad.

It’s helpful to correct it to:

When she goes, I will be the first one to be sad.

Do NOT correct it to how a native would say it:

I’ll be the first one to cry when she leaves.
Continue reading Correcting a beginner →

So, as I learn more Swedish, my Norwegian reading comprehension improves exponentially. It’s really quite incredible. My knowledge of Dutch also helps a ton in this regard, for all three are Germanic languages. I’d say about 1 out of every 3 words in Swedish looks/sounds close enough to its Dutch equivalent that I can recognize it immediately. But Norwegians are cheaters! When they don’t want me to understand them, they just switch to writing or speaking nynorsk instead of bokmål. D:

I want to take this post to briefly explain why I’ve switched between a lot of languages lately. This is my personal learning style, and it works quite well: I learn a few languages to beginner level, then maintain them before upping to the next level. In the meantime, I get myself comfortable with another language. What is the benefit of this? Language intelligibility. A fantastic example would be Norwegian and Swedish, or even Dutch and Swedish; if you learn one, your knowledge of the other increases simultaneously. Knowing and recognizing basic words and phrases in a lot of different languages means I can recognize the Latinate or Germanic origins of tongues that are closely related. My Spanish greatly aided my French and Esperanto; my English helped significantly with my Dutch.

Continue reading Why be a beginner in multiple languages? →

One of the best language tips I can think of would be to sing to music in your target language. The number one area on which this works is pronunciation, which I like getting down to a science before starting to learn too many words if at all possible. It takes a lot of the average person’s stress out of learning a language, being able to look at at least 75% of words and say “I know how to say that aloud.”

I’ve also noticed that singing a song in another language can have a slightly different system from the way the language is usually spoken (I’m looking at you, Japanese!). For instance, sentences or words are often pronounced a certain way in a song to sound more melodic or gentler. This makes it easy to recognize individual sounds since they’re often exaggerated, and when you study sung language as opposed to just conversational language, the way words are sung can make you more familiar with different phonemes. This process has introduced to me the pronunciation of Dutch, Japanese, Russian, Spanish, and Swedish. Sometimes you’ll be pleasantly surprised; for instance, Japanese and Spanish have remarkably similar pronunciation on the vast majority of words, but you wouldn’t expect that from a Latin vs. an Asian (more specifically Japonic) language!