2025-02-06
11 分钟Last week, I did a video about how I recover languages that I've studied before,
have forgotten or have slipped in.
But today I want to talk about how do we get started in a brand new language?
And I'm going to talk about some theory, the principles of starting afresh in a new language,
and I'm going to talk about my own experience and some of the things that have worked for me.
Now, the first thing about starting in a new language, we have to understand what's involved.
So if we think that we're going to get into a new language by learning the grammar rules and learning lists of words,
and that somehow we're going to end up speaking or understanding the language,
I think that will prove to be quite inefficient.
And I'm going to talk about preferential learning.
Learning which relies on the function of the brain,
the ability of the brain to infer what's coming at it, what the sounds mean, what the words mean.
The important thing about being able to infer anything is that we have to have something to refer.
The only way we can infer is
if we have a vast database of experience where almost without us realizing it we are able to make an inference which in some cases is correct and some cases is incorrect and when it's incorrect that helps adjust our next inference.
So that sounds a little bit theoretical but I'm going to explain why that's important.
It's important
because learning a language and particularly a new language is not so much something we do deliberately,
methodically.
It's more a matter of exposing ourselves to the language,