HELP! Me Learn a New Language. Please. Please, please

[poiu]

Get a time-transporter and go back to when you were 10, then enroll in a French school. You will be speaking very well from scratch in less than a month and like a native in two. This should be compulsory for all kids. It is so much more efficient to learn a language when young and in a social environment like that than years in a classroom.

Now, good luck to you. Learning a language requires a memory and that goes as you get older. I can't remember my name anymore sometimes. I've little hope.

I learnt French and German in school, but only working abroad with total immersion and with friends to converse with did I really learn well. Progress is so much quicker that way and you learn the subtleties of idiom, colloquialisms and pronunciation, which really are important things you rarely learn in class. After a month I was fairly fluent.

[liquidice]

I teach Spanish 3rd grade in a bilingual classroom. I learned starting 14 years ago. Try watching your nightly news and a telenovela in Spanish every day, with a carryable bilingual dictionary. Worked well for me, and helped me get 'la chispa' in about 6 months. Look up the words in the headlines, then on to weather and sports. The first person I could understand was the horoscope guy.

The 4 domains of language are listening , speaking, reading, and writing; rate yourself on all 4. Usually adult learners will advance in speaking and reading first, while kids develop listening faster. All are related, and increasing one will gradually lead to increasing the others. Track your progress in a journal and practice with "scripts" you write/prepare for yourself ahead of time, for common situations. Work up to buying meat at the grocery store or ordering at a restaurant all in Spanish ; important phrases quickly come up, and you'll sweat, but you will get it so much faster like that than with some cd's or whatever. Once the basic sentence frames become easy, you will find thousands of cognates and quickly be able to transfer in English learning, especially with science, math, art, and any renaissance era learning.

Buena suerte y ojalá que usted aprende rápido y con mucho gusto!

[liquidice]

Culpable! o como decimos en Español, culpable.

Sorry for double post but I totally learned Spanish as an adult and am excited for others to learn. The idea that children are better at learning new language is an old and persistent myth, some Google scholar research will back that up. Kids just aren't afraid to fail and fail spectacularly, so they get there seemingly a little faster sometimes. Adults bring an existing knowledge base to the table and once you learn to transfer that over to the new language("L2" as we say in the industry)you know a lot more than a kid. 90% of words ending with -tion, or -ly, for example, flip right over to -ción and -mente. The best predictor of ultimate L2 achievement is the level of L1 achievement. I've read a number of your posts and you have great facility with language. You will find the "secret" cognates. For example "word" is "palabra" in Spanish. English cognate: "palaver" which I know you know what it means. Not a cognate for most, but a cognate for me and soon for you as well. There will be frustrations and the despair of "there's just too many words "...
Pero le digo que claro es posible que usted aprenderá español en casi 6 meses. Es pregunta de paciencia, determinación, y fuerza mental.

[Snickers]

Excellent ideas!! Thanks for the help!