Danny Glover,
famous American actor, once said that his new year’s resolution was to learn French, because everyone he wants to speak with in West Africa speaks French. If you would like your fun new year’s resolution to be to learn a new language, then there are quite a few different ways you can go about it.Perhaps you’ve been wanting to learn language of your Grandmother. Perhaps you would benefit from learning an official language or unofficial second language of your country, such as French in Canada or Spanish in USA. Or Greek in Melbourne Australia! Apparently second largest Greek-speaking city in world after Athens, in terms of number of people who speak Greek, is Melbourne Australia! Or perhaps you feel like learning something that feels exotic like Japanese or Swahili. One Saturday in November 2004, national Canadian newspaper “The Globe and Mail” put its entire front page in Chinese, explaining that with globalization of jobs, Chinese will probably be a necessary business language of future.
A fun way to start learning a new language, especially if you’re not a disciplined type of student, is to enrol in a language course. You meet other people in your class who have same language interest as you which is fun in itself, you’re being taught by a real teacher, and once a week schedule of classes means that you are practising your new language regularly and steadily. Local community centers offer these courses. Colleges, private language institutes and continuing education programs at university offer them. You may be lucky enough to have cultural organizations nearby that offer language courses. For instance, a local immigrant organization in my town offers courses in Swahili, a language spoken in many east African countries. Downtown, a cultural organization funded by France called Alliance Française, offers French courses. A nearby Saturday Chinese school offers courses in Mandarin Chinese for both adults and children, and it’s quite encouraging to see Cantonese-speaking adults there having as much trouble pronouncing Mandarin as non-Chinese adults!
If you can’t get away to a class, then there are lots of language courses you can study at home: books, audio cassettes, video cassettes, DVDs, music, interactive computer software, and online courses on Internet. Your local library probably has language learning resources that you can borrow, if you don’t want to start off year with expense of buying these materials. When studying on your own in this way, try to devote 10 minutes every day to a bit of study or revision, instead of doing 1 hour one day but then not finding time to look at it again for a couple of months. With 10 minutes of study each day, you probably won’t feel like you are making progress because progress is so gradual. However, progress will also be steady, and in 3 months time when you look back on how much you have learned, you’ll probably impress yourself.
To get you started learning your new language in next 5 minutes, here are some links to free online courses
http://www.bbc.co.uk/languages - On BBC website, you will find free online courses for French, Spanish, German, Italian, Greek, Portuguese and Mandarin Chinese. And also for Scottish Gaelic, Welsh, Irish and English, and links to British Sign Language.
http://www.word2word.com/course.html - The Word2Word website contains links to free language courses all over Internet. As of January 2005, it has links for 114 languages, from Abenaki, Albanian and Arabic, to Urdu, Vietnamese and Xhosa. In all, there are 288 links to online courses. So whether you want to learn Cree, Croatian or Korean, hopefully you’ll find a free course for language you want here.
A great way to learn and practise another language is “language immersion” – being surrounded by people who speak that language and you having to get things done in that language environment. A holiday in a foreign country is a very interesting and fun “language immersion” opportunity. People amaze themselves, speaking words in a foreign tongue that they didn’t realize they knew, when they have to function in a foreign language environment. Closer to home, local immigrant community events may be able to provide you with a language immersion environment without expense of travel.
My Japanese teacher told us that if you understand more than 5% of what is being said in a foreign language, then you are not at optimum level for learning maximum amount possible of that foreign language. If you understand more than 5% of what is going on in your class, go up a level he said! If 95% seems gooblety-gook to you, then that’s perfect he said! Take heart. It means you are soaking up as much of that foreign language as is humanly possible!
