This Guy Has Some Good Pointers.

[Rsquared]

I have always been jealous of people who have grown up in a multi-lingual environment.

This guy is the epitome of my frustration!

He does however, make some very valid points.......judge for yourselves.

Just thought I'd share for those like minded as myself.

Cheers.

[kriswillems]

I think he made a few valid points.

But I don't agree with "scrap the foreign alphabet".

I think for some target languages that very "phonetic", like Thai, Finnish, German or Spanish, knowing the foreign alphabet is an extremely useful tool for your language study and it will help you a lot when you learn to speak, read or write. I personally find phonetic languages much easier to study because of the availability of this tool. (For instance, it took me only 2 months to go from zero to basic conversational level in Spanish).

For less "phonetic" language like Chinese, Portuguese, English, French and Dutch, knowing the foreign alphabet might be less important in the beginning of you language study.

Edited January 13, 2014 by kriswillems

[Aforek]

"

I have always been jealous of people who have grown up in a multi-lingual environment.

This guy is the epitome of my frustration! "

Don't be jealous or frustrated; maybe he prefers quantity to quality , because for the short text in French (my language ) he made 3 mistakes ( use of masculine words instead of feminine words, which is the basis of the language ); if he does this for every common name , I can tell you that his method is not so good.

How is he in German language , in which there are 3 genders ?

[kriswillems]

I agree. There are quiet a lot of people in Europe that can have a basic conversation in 7 languages. It just depends on where you grew up. There's no reason to be jealous.

Also, if you can speak Spanish and French the step to Italian and Portuguese is not that huge. The languages he speaks are the most spoken European languages (and they are very similar) plus Greek and Chinese. Now, I do admire him for learning Chinese and Greek.

He makes me think about Benny the polyglot, another guy that talks a lot about learning languages (while it's not always very clear if he actually is that good as he claims to be).

Here's Benny at TED:

http://speakfromday1.com/tedx

Edited January 14, 2014 by kriswillems