제 짧은 경험으로 생각해보자면 외국어(영어)를 공부하는 왕도는 없습니다. 하지만 목표와 방향은 잡고 공부해야합니다. 우선 "당신은 영어를 왜 공부합니까?" 무슨 공부든 목적이 있어야 합니다. 취업할때 스펙이 필요합니까? 그럼 토익책 사고, 토익강의 들으면서 토익공부하시면 됩니다. 이 글을 읽으실 필요는 없습니다.
아래글은 외국어를 공부하고자, 언어를 마스터 하고자 하는 사람에게 필요한 글입니다. 그리고 언어공부중 얻은 짧은 팁이라고 생각하시면 맘이 편하겠군요.
오랜만에 좋은글을 보게 되서 스크랩..ㅋㅋ 길지만 외국어 학습자라면 다 읽어보시길...
I’m now in the UK to learn English, more precisely, to improve my English. Even though I started learning English when I was at Primary school, for more than 10 years, I don’t think my English is good enough. I still have problems to express my opinion, and it’s not a matter of vocabulary.
The most serious problem is that I still hesitate before I say something. I have to think of what I’m going to speak and quite often, my brain tries to translate my thoughts which are Korean into English. That makes me always hesitate and not be able to speak naturally and automatically.
Of course, some people would argue that it’s absolutely natural because English is not my mother tongue. Yes, I used to think like this. However obviously there are many people out there who can learn languages much quicker than others or at least are good at English as their second language. I’ve heard of a linguist who was be able to speak more than 15 languages even though he never went abroad for his whole life. Is this ‘Phenomenon’ utterly because of their talent and gift?
No, it’s not true. Because we all know children can learn language amazingly faster than adults and when a family moves to a foreign country for some reason, usually their children would be able to speak a foreign language in a few years, whereas their parents wouldn’t.
Many linguists used to think that children had special talent to learn language effectively, which disappeared when they grew up. But some recent researchers say that no one loses this ability but we just forget how to use it.
Yes, it’s sad but true. We’ve forgotten how long it took that we were able to say our first word (usually, ‘mom’) when we were babies. Before a baby starts speaking, they wait. This silence period is one of the most important factors of learning a language.
There is research about a 29-year-old Mexican man living in the United States for 12 years. He’s a native Spanish speaker and he can speak English well, but he says that he can speak Hebrew better. He’s been working at a Hebrew restaurant whose owner, staff and most customers are Israelis, since he arrived in America.
A researcher starts looking into how he learnt Hebrew. Certainly, he’s never gone to any Hebrew language school and studied Hebrew. But his Hebrew is excellent. The researcher recorded when he was talking to his colleagues about what they did yesterday for 5 minutes and let other 5 native Hebrew speakers hear his conversation. Surprisingly, most of them thought that this guy must’ve lived in Israel for a long time. How was it possible? This guy could speak excellent Hebrew after first 3 years. IN JUST 3 YEARS!!!
Here are the secrets how he did this great achievement. First, he focused on understandable input, in other words, he focused on listening to Hebrew he could understand. In the beginning, maybe that was just one or two words, such as ‘yes, no, here, thanks, etc.’, and then getting more and more complicated. Anyway he didn’t study textbooks and memorise grammar rules or something but he focused on listening everyday to things he could understand a little bit.
Secondly, he didn’t worry about speaking, he was just listening, listening and listening for 2,3 years before he tried to speak a lot. So he had a long silent period focused on listening.
At last, he was a part of a social club. In this case, the restaurant and the owners, staff, and customers of the restaurant.
This silence period is extremely important for learning language. This also can explain that why Dutch people are so good at English. They have been exposed to English circumstance, usually by watching TV since they were young.
For learning language, ‘input’ represents listening and reading while ‘output’ represents speaking and writing. Many people think if we want to improve our speaking, we have to keep speaking and make themselves obsessed with speaking practice. But we can’t speak well if we aren’t ready to speak well. Unfortunately, under traditional language learning circumstances, we are forced to speak and study grammar rules, using textbooks.
There are many researches show this traditional learning methods are totally waste of time and money. All the grammar rules just make us think ABOUT English and prevent us from speaking naturally. As far as I concerned, I’ve never studied Korean grammar rules thoroughly like studying English grammar. But I’m not worried about speaking grammatically correct Korean and I don’t think about grammars before I say. This is because when I learnt Korean I met all three factors above unconsciously.
What’s more there is another interesting research on ‘Error correction’ used at every language schools all the time. We would seem to believe that this error correction is very important to improve our language abilities.
Well, the researchers of this research separated students into two groups. The students of the first group were corrected their errors instantly whereas the other were never done this. The research lasted for a year and the results showed there were no differences between those two groups. They were still making exactly the same mistakes. But the students who were corrected their mistakes tended to speak much more slowly and not to like learning English because they were continually frustrated by teachers with error correction.
Then, what is the best way of learning a language?
So, point the No.1, Understandable input. You must listen, listen, listen and listen more. It is the number 1 activity you must do to improve your English, especially your spoken English. If you want to improve your spoken grammar, you need to listen a lot. If you want to improve your vocabulary that you use when speaking, you must listen a lot. If you want to improve your pronunciation, you must listen a lot. Listening is the number one activity for learning or improving a language. That’s why so many people have problems with English with other languages, because they learn by reading first and memorizing grammar rules first and they never do very much listening. Therefore, when they speak, their speaking is bad and they don’t understand native speakers much. So you must listen to things that you can understand. Listening to a film will not help you if the film is too difficult because you can’t understand it.
The number two activity, understandable input is reading. Reading is also very important and it especially helps your vocabulary. A lot of reading will help your writing as well. But you should not need a dictionary when you read something. If you want to read more difficult things you should read things that are very short. These are two main activities for learning and improving your English.
Second, a long silent period. If you are a beginner of the language, it’s great to have a long long silent period. Most people are probably speaking English already so they don’t need this period, but you should still focus more on listening than speaking.
Finally, being a part of a social club. You have to belong to a group that uses the target language so that you can be connected with the language, people, and culture. Maybe you need to join this kind of social group.
I’m leaving for Korea in a few months but I’m happy that at least I found these methods before leaving. Now I’m working on it. I’m actually starting from scratch.
Language learning is definitely a long race and unfortunately, I was suffering from useless methods for so many years. Now I really need to start afresh and I hope in a few years, my English will be much better enough to speak native speakers, think IN English and speak and understand English naturally and automatically.
Also I can apply this method to learning other languages. After English, I’m going to learn another language, maybe Japanese, Chinese or Spanish or something. Then I’d not be frustrated by learning a language and be able to truly enjoy it!!
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