Wednesday, November 7, 2012

Can You Learn a Language in 3 Months?

Last month on the Student Globe Travel blog, we posted about Lifehacker contributor Maneesh Sethi who claimed he had learned a new language in 90 days. What were his keys to success? Not surprisingly, he found the ways he had been taught a second language while being educated in America's public schools were not effective. He had essentially, been taught to pass a Spanish test, but never had really learned to communicate in the language in real world situations. He also found popular language learning software like Rosetta Stone to be ineffective. So how did Maneesh ultimately achieve success? In the article he lays out four key strategies.

1. Get the necessary resources. This includes a grammar book, dictionary, memorization software, movies, books and music.

2. Get a private tutor. Maneesh recommends at hiring one for a month at at least four hours a day. PLUG: SGSS offers private tutoring at all of our Spanish schools. Check out our popular 1:1 Spanish courses in Buenos Aires.

3. Attempt to think and speak only in the new language. This one is way harder than it sounds! A tip I have found helpful is to stick post it notes on every item in your house listing the [insert language] name(s) of the item. You may look crazy to your friends, but it is an effective way to learn a lot of useful vocabulary quickly.

4. Find friends, language partners, and other speakers of the language. Predictably, Maneesh states that moving to a country and immersing oneself in the language and culture is the most effective method of doing this. We have been (selfishly) extolling the virtues of Spanish language immersion for years! You can read the entire article here. [via Lifehacker]

1 comment:

  1. This is amazing and i feel that is the way how thigs are necessary to be.It ha to be appropriate when its about learning it in the right time period, Ways to Learn the Arabic Language works for sure like you have mentioned about three months it is something like that also.

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