>The immersion method does miracles. After only two months of immersion I started communicating; after five, I started translating jokes. Though, the stories about my joketelling were usually funnier than the jokes themselves :).

I like the immersion method too ... not only are you forced to speak the language every day, all day ... but you get to live in that country for long periods of time!! An interesting vacation!

It was great when Gary and I did this last year for the entire month of June in France. We took a month-long course with IFAlpes in Annecy ... the classes consisted mostly of college-age kids and there were a lot of Americans, but we had a sprinkling of Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Swedish and Turkish students too.

All day while in class, the teachers didn't let us speak anything but French. One of my teachers said that this was because she didn't speak any English (but I know she did <g>). Gary picked up the language much better than I did (but then, he spoke it much better than I did too ... before we even went there). We were not in the same class, because they tested you first and put you in group levels from 1 to 10. I was in group 3 and Gary was in group 9.

Of course, after speaking French all day (or *trying* to in my case), after class in the evenings we reverted back to English between ourselves. Some of the kids were immersed more than we were ... being placed with a French family ... for them there would be even less opportunity to revert back to speaking their native language.

~~Bonnie




>>But I think the audio-aural method is indeed the best way to be introduced to the spoken language - it is how I learned English <g>
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>That's historically the best proven method to learn Latin or ancient Greek - thousands of their kids used it with great success.
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>>You listen, you repeat what you think you are hearing and eventually you begin to understand and people begin to understand you.
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>It works for me only in the first few sessions, during the tongue breaking, when even I don't really care whether what I say makes any sense. You only need to get the sound right - both in recognition and reproduction. However, as soon as it gets to production, I like to know what I'm saying :).
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>>When I speak French or Spanish I still subconsciously think the French or Spanish word "means" some English word. But in Turkish or Thai or whatever the word is the thing it represents. ( which is good because the word order and grammar - especially in Turkish - is so different from English you pretty much have to think in the language to speak it. )
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>That's my experience while learning Hungarian (at the age of 40 :). That's a Forth among languages.
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>>For me, spoken fluency has a lot to do with first exposure. As to getting up to speed quickly on a spoken language there is no doubt it is the most effective way to teach it.
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>The immersion method does miracles. After only two months of immersion I started communicating; after five, I started translating jokes. Though, the stories about my joketelling were usually funnier than the jokes themselves :).