Hi everybody,
I am Alexander Volkov. I would like to share with you my experience of learning languages. I can speak English and German and use these languages professionally. I think that English is an easy language to learn. You cannot say the same about German.
Anyway, let me tell you what I think about the principles of learning any language. First, every language is different from other languages not only because same things have other names. The structure and the logic of any language is unique. The mission of a language is to express thought and feelings. Same thoughts are expressed in different ways in different languages. For example, fear, in English: “I am afraid”; in German: “Ich have Angst”; in Russian: “Я боюсь”; in Finnish:”Pelkään”. This phrase has three words in English and German, two words in Russian, and only on word in Finnish.
Often you have to hear that some people have an ability and inclination to learn languages and other do not. Is this true? Yes and no. This ability is not genetically predetermined. It is just the way you think. It is your personal approach. People, who learn languages easily, never ask the question “why”. Why there are five words in this sentence in my native language but only four words in English. If you analyze every phrase and sentence of the language that your are learning, you’d better drop it and find yourself some other hobby.
How does a child learn his native language? He or she does it by memorizing phrases not single words. I guess the first phrases a child learns in any language are “give me”, “I want”, “Come over here” and so on. Parents, when they are directly addressing their little one, would not use long and complicated sentences. Everybody knows that. Than tell me, why there are bunches of useless textbooks and courses that use other principles?
I am not saying that all textbooks and language courses are bad. What I am saying is that before you started to learn a new language, find good materials based on right principles. That means learning from very simple to simple, from simple to intermediate and so on to higher levels of proficiency.
As I mentioned earlier in this article my native language is Russian. My colloquial German is close to native speaker level. Now I am learning Finnish. I spent two years to get a hang of it. It is a language that is different from English or German. It is more like Russian but there is absolutely different words and different and complicated logic. I get by with it in my everyday life (I live in Finland) but I am still very far from perfection. Using the principles that I described above, I am sure that in less than 8 months I will be able to communicate in this language very well.
So, my friends if you need any assistance or advice, do not hesitate to ask me in your comments. I will do my best to reply to everybody.
A great help in learning a language is listening. I would advise to start with audio books. Audio books texts are read by professional actors. That means right accent and clear speaking. The tempo is not that fast as in news or in feature films. That will help your ears to get used to the sound of the language you are learning.
I have a collection of English and Finnish audio books that include more than 300 GB of materials. In my future articles, I will be giving you links to download them gradually. To many of them I have printable PDF-format files that I am more than happy to share with you.
I am not a teacher by training and I never tried to teach. I am just a man, who loves languages and who are willing to share his experience with the whole world.
Thanks for your attention,
Yours truly,
Alexander
