An easy way to learn a foreign language. Language Teaching: Myths and Reality

But even if, introducing me to someone, my friends did not focus on my “multilingualism”, it still made itself felt. Hearing French speech at the party, I would definitely join the conversation. Sometimes in one evening I was able to talk to five different languages. My interlocutors were shocked by the ease with which I switched from one language to another, and I spoke almost without an accent. I wasn't trying to impress, I just wanted to chat. Free communication in different languages seemed to me something self-evident, but those around me looked at me as if I were an opera diva who gives out a new aria every half an hour. What did I need to do? Hide that I understand someone else's speech? I tried, but I'm not a good actress. My true nature still made itself felt.

My life has been a rainbow of tongues. Even the content of my dreams appeared before me in a wide linguistic palette, sometimes even languages that I did not speak were met in it.

I was surrounded by various intonations, accents, semantic structures, alphabets. My consciousness was not limited to the possibilities of one language - moving from language to language, I myself reincarnated. I was a real chameleon, only I didn’t change the color of my skin, but my way of thinking. Reproducing phonetic structures, I kind of created myself anew. Sounds were born in my mouth, in my larynx, in my nose; elicited certain physical sensations when I pouted my lips while speaking in French, or uttered a booming Russian “rrrr.” The sound of my speech even influenced my attitude towards what I was saying. The singsong sounds of Brazilian Portuguese prevented me from discussing serious topics with Brazilians.

My body resonated to different frequencies like a musical instrument. I was a human orchestra. My thoughts were formed under the influence of semantic and grammatical rules. Passive and reflexive voices, features of the agreement of adjectives with nouns during French forced me to always be vigilant, otherwise I would pronounce words incorrectly and form sentences from them. And the dominance passive voice V Spanish dulled my sense of responsibility, because I talked about what was happening to me, and not about what I do myself (and for which I am responsible). Subtly perceiving shades of sounds and meanings, I tried to build phonetic and semantic structures as accurately and naturally as possible.

Forbidding friends to focus on my language abilities, I was angry primarily at myself, not at them. They were proud of my talent: "If I knew languages like you, I would definitely not hide it." They did not understand what a burden my talent was for me. Would anyone advertise their weaknesses? When others found out about my abilities, they immediately asked to translate their words to someone, but for me it was hell! Sometimes I was ready to wash toilets, just not to pretend to be a guide on a tour of tower of babel. Worst of all, when the one whose words I translated turned out to be not very smart or asked stupid questions. It was very embarrassing for me to speak on behalf of such a person.

But no one understood me.

I was often told that I was doing the wrong thing and wasting my time in vain. I dreamed of working in the field of diplomacy. And some quite seriously advised me to become a spy: “The CIA, the FBI and Interpol just need people like you. You don't even need to be trained. You are a natural chameleon." But I was not going to become Mata Hari of the 21st century.

Natural talent? No!

Maybe the fact is that at home they spoke Russian, and I grew up in an English-speaking country?

No. A bilingual environment certainly provides some advantages in language learning, but there were plenty of immigrant families around whose members did not always find learning easier than everyone else. So the secret of my gift was something else.

Maybe it's because I'm a talented musician and my absolute pitch helped me imitate sounds?

No. Since childhood, I loved music of various directions and attended classical music concerts, but I was never a virtuoso. I played clarinet and piano, but mediocre. I liked to sing, but I didn't hit the notes more often than I could notice.

Maybe I inherited the gift? Also unlikely.

Even before my father partially lost his hearing, languages were a real punishment for him. His dad said that as a child, a bear stepped on his ear.

Mom's parents studied several languages at school, and my grandmother even taught German and literature at the university, but none of them conveyed the nuances of pronunciation as I did.

Solving the mystery

After reading the book "Musicophilia" by Dr. Oliver Sachs, a neuroscientist, I unraveled the mystery of my giftedness. Dr. Sachs claims that music activates more parts of the brain than written or spoken language. It was easy for me to pronounce and memorize because I listened to foreign languages like music, and also watched movies and TV shows in the original language. I did not learn to speak well in so many foreign languages because I diligently attended classes. The decisive factor was that I listened to a lot of live speech and songs. Listening is not taught in schools or language centers, which is why I wrote this book. To learn to speak well, you must first learn to listen.

When teaching languages, you can and should use music, television, radio and other media, then the process will be exciting and will give good results. You don't have to be a gifted musician to take advantage of my advice. You just need to learn to perceive foreign languages as music. After a stroke, people often lose the ability to speak, and in order to regain the lost skill, they are advised to listen to music. Music is the main component of communication.

In 2013, the University of Edinburgh published in the collection Memory and Cognition the results of a study of the performance of students studying the Hungarian language. It turned out that young people who heard phrases in songs that were new to them pronounce them twice as well as those who simply repeated after the teacher.

As part of a research program, Dr. Paul Sulzberger of the Queen Victoria University of Wellington conducted an experiment to study the ability of English speakers to recognize spoken Russian words after a single listening session. The participants in the experiment had no previous contact with the Russian language.

Auditory recognition of words in the Russian language directly depended on the frequency of occurrence in English language sound combinations from Russian words. Russian words containing sound combinations that are rare or never found in English were very difficult for English speakers to recognize even a few seconds after they first heard them. These results in the context of learning a second language show that the acquisition of vocabulary depends on the intuitive knowledge of sound combinations typical of the target language. This knowledge can only be acquired by prolonged auditory contact with the language (i.e. by prolonged listening to oral speech). This allows the brain to pick out (and memorize) the typical sound combinations of the target language. Once mastered, these combinations become the basic building blocks used by language learners to expand faster. vocabulary.

Susanna Zarayskaya

Easy way to learn fast foreign language with the help of music. 90 Actionable Tips

SUSANNA ZARAYSKY

LANGUAGE IS MUSIC: OVER 70 FUN & EASY TIPS TO LEARN FOREIGN LANGUAGES

All rights reserved. No part of the electronic version of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, including posting on the Internet and corporate networks, for private and public use, without the written permission of the copyright owner.

Legal support of the publishing house is provided by the law firm "Vegas-Lex"

This book is well complemented by:

The polyglot phenomenon

Michael Erard

From knowledge to skills

Doug Lemov, Katie Yezzi and Erica Woolway

This year I…

M. J. Ryan

The art of teaching

Julie Dirksen

This book is dedicated to my parents Rimma and Ilya Zaraisky. Thanks for pushing me to make music. I didn't really want to practice the piano and clarinet every day, and I didn't quit just because of you. Thanks also for the French lessons. I was a sixth grader when my teacher decided that I had no talent for foreign languages and made a note in my documents accordingly. My parents corrected this mark, transferred me to another school, and from the seventh grade I began to study French. Today we can all laugh at the shortsightedness of that teacher.

To Dr. Oliver Sachs: If it weren't for your book Musicophilia, I probably never would have discovered the secret of my ability with languages and would not have written this book.

My passport is swollen with visas. I have been to the most exotic places, such as Tajikistan and Cambodia. In my search for adventures abroad, my knowledge of languages helped me a lot.

I have traveled a lot and I am a polyglot. My goal is to help people become citizens of the world: to keep abreast of world events, travel confidently to other countries and communicate in foreign languages. I have studied eleven languages (English, Russian, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Sephardic, Serbo-Croatian, Hebrew, Arabic and Hungarian) and I can speak eight of them fluently. (Only fragments of Hungarian, Hebrew and Arabic remain in my memory.) The trajectory of my life passes through many languages and countries (I lived in nine countries, and visited fifty). I feel like a citizen of the world. I have taught English in Argentina, Bosnia and the United States and figured out how to make learning foreign languages easier and more varied through music and listening exercises.

I started traveling from an early age. While studying and working, I lived in many places and always tried to get to know the country where I ended up as best as possible. As I got older, I realized that learning a new language opens up a whole new world for me. Through other cultures my life is enriched.

Here are the main milestones of my linguistic path. When I was three years old, my family emigrated from Soviet Union to the States. As a child, I realized that I have two completely around the world: at home we spoke Russian, and outside it - in English. At first we lived in St. Louis, and two years later we moved to Silicon Valley. At the age of 15, I went to France, where I lived for two months in the town of Pornichet. After high school, I studied political economy at the University of California at Berkeley. There I picked up Spanish and Italian. The last semester I studied abroad, in Budapest: it was interesting for me to get acquainted with the life of another former communist state. At the same time, I mastered the basics of Hungarian.

After university, I worked for the US Department of Commerce Export Promotion Program. In order not to get moldy from the office routine, I started learning Portuguese. At the same time, a passion for writing woke up in me: in parallel, I was engaged in journalism and literally turned everything upside down in order to go to study in Buenos Aires in 1999. I received a scholarship from the Rotary Foundation to study at the Universidad de Buenos Aires, then I did an internship in the commercial department of the US Embassy. At the same time, I wrote and edited articles for the local English-language newspaper Buenos Aires Herald and also taught English. Back from South America to California, I couldn't sit still for long. Employed with the International Rescue Committee and Mercy Corps in Bosnia, participated in program development economic development and elimination of the consequences of the military conflict. Thanks to the fact that my native language- Russian, I spoke Serbo-Croatian with ease, since both languages are Slavic.

As much as I enjoyed living in Bosnia, at the end of 2001 I returned to sunny California. She worked as a freelance teacher for two years and, thanks to her knowledge of Spanish and a Pew Trust grant, wrote for the University of San Francisco research work about the role of religion in the lives of immigrants from Mexico and El Salvador. However, the craving for travel did not fade away, and I made up for the lack of travel by being an election observer in the former republics of the CCCP. Since September 2005 I have devoted myself to writing.

With the assistance of the US Consulate, I held a presentation of this book at the Mayakovsky Central City Public Library and at the Russian State Pedagogical University named after Herzen in St. Petersburg, and in addition, also in Mexico, Qatar, Bosnia, Laos, Thailand and Kyrgyzstan.

Why do you need a foreign language?

We have all heard about globalization. It affects various aspects of our lives. More and more often we have to visit different parts of the world and meet people who do not know our language. Today, people often visit other countries: traveling, doing business, leaving for permanent residence, so more and more people speak several languages.

I got my first job at the Ministry of Commerce only because I knew Russian. In Silicon Valley, in March 1998, an export promotion program hosted a summit between US Vice President Al Gore and Russian Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin. To work with members of the Russian government delegation, a person who spoke Russian was required. To get this position, I had to pass a security check: after all, politicians and directors of the largest companies in Silicon Valley spoke at the summit. I was only 21 years old, just graduated from university - and got a job at an international summit because I knew Russian.

After a few months, my knowledge of Spanish came in handy. The Minister of Communications of Argentina came to visit Silicon Valley, and in our office no one but me spoke Spanish. By law, at my age it was impossible to rent a vehicle, but my boss agreed, they gave me a minibus, and I gave a tour for the Minister of Communications of Argentina and his retinue. And again, as in the case of the Russian delegation, I attended meetings of dignitaries whom I would not have met if I did not know the language. It was useful for me to communicate with the Argentines, since next year I was going to go to Argentina on a scholarship from the Rotary Foundation.

I would have missed all these opportunities if I didn't know Russian or Spanish.

Imagine foreign languages in the form of keys - both musical and the most ordinary. And every time your voice begins to sound in a new key, a new door opens for you, the existence of which you had no idea. Each language is the key to a new world. I will open these doors for you, and your life will be filled with the sound of various languages!

In January 2012 I was interviewed for the BBC Newshour. The topic of discussion was the fact that the British economy is losing from 11 to 26 billion dollars annually due to the lack of knowledge of foreign languages by employees serving the needs of the export sectors. The British professional training organization published a report titled "Economic reasons for learning foreign languages and the role of the employer in this process", which, in particular, stated that "foreign language skills are becoming one of the main requirements for candidates for a wide variety of vacancies in various sectors of the market. Unlike their peers in continental Europe, British youth were not forced to learn foreign languages, nor were they motivated to do so, despite the fact that fluency in several languages provides clear career advantages. The report also states that “Three and a half years after graduation, the employability rate among those graduates who majored in foreign languages is much higher than among those who studied law, architecture, business, or programming—and they have more salary".

A very interesting book...
Small format, the book is like a not very thick notebook. The binding, the book block are neat, white offset, the font size is standard for adults, the layout is "free": a lot of margins and empty space on the page. The print is clear, not smeared, there are no illustrations. There is a lace. In the text, there are omissions of some punctuation marks, incorrect case endings. This does not cause irreparable damage to the meaning of the text, but it annoys me personally.
And now about the content. Expecting that, after reading this book, they will immediately speak Hindi, Swahili and national languages all the tribes of Papua New Guinea, please do not worry. There will be no such miracle. This is a book about the method of learning a foreign language based on the audio channel, that is, by ear. By personal experience I know that learning a foreign language from textbooks by means of silent, gloomy memorization of grammar and rare attempts to give birth to the sound of words that you have never heard in your life and then never use in your life is just a waste of time, nerves, money and in general a bad occupation. Time goes by, money disappears, and I haven’t studied the language, and I don’t study it. And all this in an atmosphere of mortal anguish. As a result, the thought creeps in that you got defective brains and the convolutions there are all straight.
Starting to learn a language with sound is much faster, and indeed it works. Even without understanding the phrases, they are easy to remember and reproduce aloud. A long experience of watching South Korean films with subtitles led to the fact that I easily recognized the most common vocabulary, understood and could clearly pronounce short phrases, so never looking into the dictionary and not setting a goal to learn this language at all - everything was remembered by itself.
In fact, this book contains 90 tips on how to use your ear: listen to music, watch movies in the target language, sing karaoke, and the like. All these tips could be combined into one not very long text describing all the ways to train language skills by ear, but this would not be as visual and perhaps not as effective. And so you can take one or two of any advice, implement them for at least a couple of weeks, evaluate the result and proceed to implement the next ones. Personally, I find the book really useful. It helps to break away from the stupid memorization to which we were forced and accustomed from school, passing it off as the only way to learn at least something (I see that all schools come out such masters in the field of English / German / French). These 90 tips are a list of tricks that can make learning a foreign language interesting, productive and fast. Yes, you can’t dodge grammar if you want to express thoughts in writing, but it’s much easier to learn grammar when the text of the example does not seem divorced from life and its meaning does not have to be picked out one word from the dictionary.

Current page: 1 (total book has 7 pages) [accessible reading excerpt: 2 pages]

Susanna Zarayskaya
An easy way to quickly learn a foreign language through music. 90 Actionable Tips

SUSANNA ZARAYSKY

LANGUAGE IS MUSIC: OVER 70 FUN & EASY TIPS TO LEARN FOREIGN LANGUAGES

Legal support of the publishing house is provided by the law firm "Vegas-Lex"

This book is well complemented by:

The polyglot phenomenon

Michael Erard

From knowledge to skills

Doug Lemov, Katie Yezzi and Erica Woolway

This year I…

M. J. Ryan

The art of teaching

Julie Dirksen

This book is dedicated to my parents Rimma and Ilya Zaraisky. Thanks for pushing me to make music. I didn't really want to practice the piano and clarinet every day, and I didn't quit just because of you. Thanks also for the French lessons. I was a sixth grader when my teacher decided that I had no talent for foreign languages and made a note in my documents accordingly. My parents corrected this mark, transferred me to another school, and from the seventh grade I began to study French. Today we can all laugh at the shortsightedness of that teacher.

To Dr. Oliver Sachs: If it weren't for your book Musicophilia, I probably never would have discovered the secret of my ability with languages and would not have written this book.

About me

My passport is swollen with visas. I have been to the most exotic places, such as Tajikistan and Cambodia. In my search for adventures abroad, my knowledge of languages helped me a lot.

I have traveled a lot and I am a polyglot. My goal is to help people become citizens of the world: to keep abreast of world events, travel confidently to other countries and communicate in foreign languages. I studied eleven languages (English, Russian, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Sephardic, Serbo-Croatian 1
– At present, it is customary in the academic world to distinguish between two languages: Serbian and Croatian. Despite the obvious similarity, these two languages have different alphabets. The name "Serbo-Croatian" was widely used throughout the history of Yugoslavia for political purposes - to unite the southern Slavs into one people. Note. ed.

Hebrew, Arabic and Hungarian), I can communicate fluently in eight of them. (Only fragments of Hungarian, Hebrew and Arabic remain in my memory.) The trajectory of my life passes through many languages and countries (I lived in nine countries, and visited fifty). I feel like a citizen of the world. I have taught English in Argentina, Bosnia and the United States and figured out how to make learning foreign languages easier and more varied through music and listening exercises.

Here are the main milestones of my linguistic path. When I was three years old, my family emigrated from the Soviet Union to the States. As a child, I realized that I had two completely different worlds: at home we spoke Russian, and outside it - in English. At first we lived in St. Louis, and two years later we moved to Silicon Valley. At the age of 15, I went to France, where I lived for two months in the town of Pornichet. After high school, I studied political economy at the University of California at Berkeley. There I picked up Spanish and Italian. The last semester I studied abroad, in Budapest: it was interesting for me to get acquainted with the life of another former communist state. At the same time, I mastered the basics of Hungarian.

After university, I worked for the US Department of Commerce Export Promotion Program. In order not to get moldy from the office routine, I started learning Portuguese. At the same time, a passion for writing woke up in me: in parallel, I was engaged in journalism and literally turned everything upside down in order to go to study in Buenos Aires in 1999. I received a scholarship from the Rotary Foundation to study at the Universidad de Buenos Aires, then I did an internship in the commercial department of the US Embassy. At the same time, I wrote and edited articles for the local English-language newspaper Buenos Aires Herald and also taught English. After returning from South America to California, I could not sit still for long. She got a job at the International Rescue Committee and Mercy Corps in Bosnia, participated in the development of programs for economic development and the elimination of the consequences of the military conflict. Due to the fact that my native language is Russian, I easily spoke Serbo-Croatian, since both languages are Slavic.

As much as I enjoyed living in Bosnia, at the end of 2001 I returned to sunny California. She worked as a freelance teacher for two years and, thanks to her knowledge of Spanish and a Pew Trust grant, wrote a research paper for the University of San Francisco on the role of religion in the lives of immigrants from Mexico and El Salvador. However, the craving for travel did not fade away, and I made up for the lack of travel by being an election observer in the former republics of the CCCP. Since September 2005 I have devoted myself to writing.

With the assistance of the US Consulate, I held a presentation of this book at the Mayakovsky Central City Public Library and at the Herzen State Pedagogical University of Russia in St. Petersburg, as well as in Mexico, Qatar, Bosnia, Laos, Thailand and Kyrgyzstan.

Why do you need a foreign language?

I would have missed all these opportunities if I didn't know Russian or Spanish.

If that's not enough to convince you, consider that knowing multiple languages is good for brain function, and children who speak multiple languages feel more confident.

A study by Northwestern University's Viorica Marian and Anthony Shook, Ph. brains of people who speak only one language. This is possible because their brains have evolved the ability to turn off one language when using another. At the same time, bilingualism has a beneficial effect on representatives of all ages: bilingual children, even at the age of seven months, better adapt to changes in environment, and in older people who know two languages, mental functions fade more slowly.

The constant active use of two languages can delay the acute onset of Alzheimer's symptoms, as the brain gets used to frequently switching between different functions, moving from one way of thinking to another. The January 2013 issue of the Journal of Neuroscience cites the following research data: "The latest behavioral statistics show that active bilingualism throughout life is able to maintain cognitive control functions at the level of a young brain even into adulthood."

Raising children in a bilingual or multilingual environment will provide them with many other benefits in the future besides the ability to speak multiple languages. According to an American Psychiatric Association study report by Dr. Wen Han of Columbia University and Dr. Chen Huan of Rutgers University, “Being able to speak both languages equally well in some way reduces children's tendency to develop inner states such as anxiety, loneliness, low self-esteem, and reduces the likelihood of destructive behaviors such as arguments, fights, and impulsive acts.”

Han and Huan hypothesized that such children's understanding of two cultures helps them get along better with their peers and teachers and treat those who are different with more respect.

The ability to speak multiple languages is a bit like mental juggling. Try yourself in this business and you: it's fun!

Language Teaching: Myths and Reality

MYTH
To learn a foreign language, you need to live abroad for some time in order to fully immerse yourself in the language environment.

REALITY
No. I learned to speak Spanish and Italian fluently without leaving the US: my pronunciation is almost flawless. If the myth is to be believed, then all immigrants and refugees living in Russia must speak Russian flawlessly. But this is not the case, and partly because the traditional system of teaching a foreign language is based on the thoughtless memorization of words and grammar rules.

With this approach, students do not hear the true sound of speech, the music inherent in it. They never learn that learning a foreign language can be fun and easy.

MYTH
If you do not have the opportunity to travel to a country where they speak the language you are learning, you will have to hire a tutor.

REALITY
I am living proof that a tutor is not needed. I have never taken private lessons except for a couple of occasions in Bosnia.

MYTH
In order for the pronunciation to be correct, you need to live for a long time in a country where they speak the language being studied.

REALITY
If that were the case, then Arnold Schwarzenegger, the former governor of California who was born in Austria but lived most of his life in the US, could have said his state's name without a German accent.

Nowadays, people learn foreign languages using all the same inefficient methods that did not help their predecessors very much. Cramming rules and word lists is BORING! Memorization must be approached with imagination, otherwise all efforts will be in vain. Just memorizing the words is like preparing a recipe and not trying it, or reading the instructions for driving a car, but not getting behind the wheel, not knowing how it behaves on the road. To master a foreign speech, you need to feel with your lips, tongue, larynx, lungs the features of its sound, catch its melody and intonation.

My book is written to fill serious gaps in the system of language education. With me you will learn to enjoy learning foreign languages without tutors and trips abroad.

MYTH
You have to be a child to master a new language perfectly.

REALITY
The child learns new language differently than an adult. A study by Dr. Paul Thompson of the University of California, Los Angeles, shows that children process language information in deep motor areas of the brain, which are responsible for automatic actions like brushing their teeth. Children do not need to actively think about learning a second language, while adults do because they process new information in more active areas of the brain. Adults are able to correct their mistakes themselves as they learn the structure of the language, while children must hear the correct variant several times before they can memorize it and change their speaking habits.

From children we expect less vocabulary and less complex sentences than from adults. And although we think that children learn a language much faster than adults, this is largely due to the fact that our expectations regarding their success are much more modest.

When it comes to pronunciation of new sounds, children have an advantage, because this element of learning is really much more difficult for adults. And yet, both children and adults need to immerse themselves in the necessary language environment as often as possible in order to learn how to pronounce sounds correctly.

The fact that you are no longer a child should not be a reason not to learn a new language. Your analytical skills will actually help you speak a new language more correctly than if you learned it as a child.

MYTH
Adults are not able to get rid of the accent and learn to speak like native speakers.

REALITY
Adults can reduce the accent and master correct pronunciation it's just a matter of time and effort they're willing to put in to relearn how to speak. In Part I of this book, I will explain how to listen properly in order to learn a foreign language. Depending on your previous experience with music and foreign sounds, the range of frequencies that your brain can perceive may or may not be limited. To learn how to pronounce new sounds, you will first have to practice listening to them correctly.

Actors work with native speakers when they are about to shoot as foreigners. Russell Crowe is Australian, but he was able to authentically play characters from America and Britain, skillfully imitating local accents. Gael García Bernal, a native Mexican, successfully imitated Che Guevara's Argentine accent in his work, as well as the Spanish and Chilean pronunciations in other roles. Actors practice foreign pronunciation for several hours a day for several weeks in order to fully get used to the character. However, ordinary people, as a rule, there is neither time nor money for such a diligent work on pronunciation.

It is not necessary to immediately speak exactly like a native speaker, first you need to focus on musicality new speech and its rhythm, immerse yourself in its natural course. And then you can move on to mastering specific sounds. Progress in learning gradually.

Introduction

This book is conceived as an addition to the existing methods of teaching foreign languages. It will show you how to study with pleasure, but will not replace grammar lessons and practical exercises. You still need to learn the rules in order to know the structure of the language. Musicians also learn theory: without solfeggio, they will not be able to play and compose musical works. It's the same with languages. Yes, I learned a lot by listening to the speech of native speakers, but without knowledge of grammar, I would not be able to absorb what I heard and build phrases correctly. Teachers' explanations and grammar books are very important in the learning process.

The secret of my talent

I have studied eleven languages in my life and I am fluent in English, Russian, Spanish, French, Italian, Serbo-Croatian, Portuguese and Ladino 2
– Ladino is the language of the Sephardim (Mediterranean Jews). It belongs to the Ibero-Romance subgroup of the Romance languages. Note. transl.

When I lived in Budapest in the autumn of 1997, I could speak Hungarian, but now almost everything has been forgotten. I read a little Hebrew, but I don't speak. Once I even started to learn Arabic, but in the second week of classes, the exercise CD broke my music center. Therefore, I remember only a few words and read a little in this language.

I am often asked how I managed to learn so many languages without visiting language schools abroad and without tutors. Languages have always been easy for me, and I did not understand why others have difficulty with them. I didn't like memorizing grammar rules and word tables either, but I benefited from such learning. I memorized the rules like mathematical formulas and applied them when needed. Mathematics was also easy for me, so it was not difficult for me to understand the structure of the language. However, according to my observations, other students did not succeed. Many of them thought that they would never master a foreign language.

I saw with what difficulty English is given to my father: he learned it back in the USSR, although then he lived in the States for many years. I came to the conclusion that traditional language teaching was useless and that I had a special talent for picking up languages so easily, despite the inefficiency of the methods. At that time I did not know what this talent was.

I did not understand why people whose native language is one of the Romance languages (French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese or Romanian) cannot learn another one from the same group. I thought it was easy for them, because Romance languages are descended from Latin and have a lot in common in grammar and vocabulary. But I was deeply mistaken.

Everyone was amazed at the ease with which I learned the rules and language constructs, but they were even more surprised at my pronunciation. I could reproduce almost any sound. As soon as I said a few words, native speakers began to admire my knowledge. And I didn’t utter a single complex phrase or abstruse word! I was told that my speech was flawless, even when I made mistakes. My pronunciation, apparently, perfectly masked all the shortcomings.

Friends introduced me to their acquaintances: “This is Susanna, she speaks seven languages. It's a walking Tower of Babel."

I tried not to show that I didn't like the way they presented me. However, later, in private, I asked my friends never to do that again. I was angry that only my rare gift was noticed in me. Does a mechanic go to parties to discuss the differences between a Mercedes and a Honda engine? I doubt. Talk about motor oil doesn't go well with cocktails. A mechanic attends parties to socialize, not to talk about work. No matter how much I asked not to mention my knowledge of languages, the first thing they said about me was that I was a polyglot.

In response, I heard the same thing. "How smart you are!" “How did you manage to learn so many languages? Have you lived in all these countries? “Where do you get so much money for travel?” “I have been learning Spanish for many years, but nothing works. Maybe you will advise something? Maybe I should go to Costa Rica for the summer and take Spanish lessons there?”

I replied that all I had to do was attend classes, listen to Spanish radio, watch Spanish TV channels, go shopping in a Hispanic area. They didn't believe me. And I learned the language just like that - and I succeeded!

“But what about the subjunctive mood and strange forms of the past tense?”

I answered: learn the conjugation tables by heart. Spanish is still easy compared to other languages.

They looked at me with bewilderment.

Susanna Zarayskaya An easy way to quickly learn a foreign language through music. 90 Actionable Tips

This book is well complemented by:

About me

Why do you need a foreign language?

Language Teaching: Myths and Reality

MYTH

REALITY

MYTH

REALITY

MYTH

REALITY

MYTH

REALITY

MYTH

REALITY

Introduction

The secret of my talent

You may be interested

Susanna Zarayskaya
An easy way to quickly learn a foreign language through music. 90 Actionable Tips