Interested in language learning? German? Linguistics in general? Wacky conlangs? xD

Blaacraw

My boyfriend and I are new to Waterford, and we want to find other people who are language-and-linguistics enthusiasts.

Our main project over the next year is actually to develop German lessons for English speakers. (We have reason to believe that it should be possible to teach someone to fluency in as little as a *month*, and have it be just as addictive-fun as binging on a bunch of great novels or a good TV series, the whole way through, if only you structure the lessons logically enough... (We chose German for the first test just cuz my boyfriend's from Germany.))

So we really want to find some other language enthusiasts...

Both to get some people who would love to get some free language lessons, in exchange for being our guinea pigs on new lessons (we can tell you, it is a *lot* of fun )...

And just to be generally nerd-social with! (If you the kind of person who finds themself often wanting to communicate something by referencing and xkcd comic, we would *probably enjoy each other's company xD ).

reni10

Are you talking about some sort of mnemonic techniques to learn a new language?

You also are aware of the fluent in 3 months blog I take it where Benny from Ireland teaches language hacking etc for many different languages?

If you want send me a PM as I have looked into this a little bit over the last while.

old gregg

I'd be up for this.

beazee

Count me in.

Blaacraw

reni10 wrote: »

Are you talking about some sort of mnemonic techniques to learn a new language?

You also are aware of the fluent in 3 months blog I take it where Benny from Ireland teaches language hacking etc for many different languages?

Well, it's a lot more than just mnemonics, which *can* be a useful hack, but I would say they're mostly solving the wrong problem. (If you need a mnemonic to keep the student from forgetting/confusing words, that's probably a sign that you need to restructure how you're introducing things.)

We're aware on Benny, and don't have anything *bad* to say about the guy, but what he's doing is nowhere near as systematic as what we're trying to figure out.

Basically, take inductive logic in one hand (John Stuart Mill type-stuff), and behaviourism in the other (ever read "Don't Shoot the Dog"?), and squash 'em together until you start to see education as a branch of computer science, and start thinking about writing educational instruction for human students the same way you think about writing computer code for an interpreter. xD

Okay, that's pretty much useless as a "How-To" explanation. Some time, I should really throw together a reading list of background material someone could actually use to reconstruct the methodology we're working on...

(We haven't discovered some revolutionary new theory ourselves; We're pretty much just trying to extend the application of the past work of people like Michel Thomas and Siegfried Engelmann. Actually, most of the reading list would be "pretty much everything Zig Engelmann has written". xD )

But honestly, why should anyone care about the picky details of an unfamiliar field of science until they've seen a demonstration that you can actually use it to engineer some cool new technology, am I right?

So we're trying to trying to force ourselves to shut up about the abstract theory until we actually have concrete proof that we can build awesome stuff with it.

Waterford blah

Very interested in learning German. Keep me posted!

MRnotlob606

id like that