General Tips & Tricks for Learning a Language

Hello, my name's Laura and this is German GrammarPod. This podcast's going to be a bit different from the others. In this one I'm going to try and pass onto you the most important things I've picked up over the years about learning languages. The first thing I need to say, is that everyone's learning style is different. Some things that work brilliantly for me might not work at all for you. Some methods that don't do a thing for me could be the best thing since sliced bread for you. So I'm going to ask you take every tip I suggest in this podcast with a pinch of salt. If it works for you, that's great, stick with it. If it doesn't, then your learning style is probably a bit different from mine, but you still might find some of these tips useful. My first tip is not to think badly of yourself if you get something wrong, even if you consistently get it wrong. Languages are extremely cumulative. There's an order you need to learn things in. The order's not completely fixed, and it's possible it varies from person to person, but there is nonetheless some sort of order. This has the impact on me that I sometimes find that I'm not yet ready to learn a word or a grammatical concept, and that no matter how hard I try, I either can't keep the word in my head or I can't correctly follow the rules of the grammatical concept. This happens to me a lot in Polish, where my level is somewhere between GCSE (that's Britain's exam for 16 year olds) and A level (Britain's exam for 18 year olds). What I've learnt from learning German is not to let this bother me. If, after I've given it a fair shot, I can't get a grammatical concept, I just chalk it up as one I'm not ready for yet even if it's one we're supposed to be focusing on in class. What usually happens is that when we come back to that concept a year or two later, I've moved on in my understanding of other bits of the language, and suddenly I'll be able to make sense of it. Sometimes it's not even a case of that. Sometimes you just need to hear loads of examples of that word or that concept in use, and eventually it will lodge in your brain. I like to let my subconscious mind do the work. After I've had a go at taking in a concept, if I'm not getting it, I'll give it a rest and not consciously think about it. I find that my subconscious mind will have kept working on it, and next time I give it a go, I'll understand more. This only works if you keep practising, though. If I stop practising a language I find I forget it. But the practice doesn't have to be aimed at one particular grammar point or word. Exposure to the language in general is usually enough. When I'm learning words, some words I can just learn straight off, like dog or cat or brother. Others, however, I come across and just know I'm not going to be able to learn them yet. This is particularly true of longer words or words that are only used in quite complicated sentences. For instance, if you're a beginner, you're likely to find the word Mglichkeit possibility quite difficult to remember after all, when you're a beginner, it's hard to think of a sentence you can say that you'd want to use Mglichkeit in. However, after you've been going for a while, things change. You'll

probably learn the word mglich possible fairly early on. Once you've got mglich possible, it's much easier to remember Mglichkeit. But even once you know the word mglich you're unlikely to be able to remember the word Mglichkeit until you're either saying, reading or hearing sentences that use the word. When I have reached that stage, I sometimes still find it easier to learn a word if I learn a related word at the same time or if I already know a related one. And don't worry if you find learning new words difficult, learning new words is quite hard. I usually reckon that I have to encounter a word at least ten times before it sticks, and even then I'm quite capable of forgetting a word again if I don't hear it or use it for a while. Some people like to learn words using practice cards. You write the foreign word on one side (preferably with something to show what gender it is, like a die or der or an m or an f or even the colour of pen you've written it in). And then you write the same word in your own language on the other. The easiest way to start is to go through the cards with the foreign language showing and see if you can get the meaning. You turn the card over after each attempt to see if you've got it right. When I went through, I'd generally sort the cards into two piles ones I got and ones I didn't get. I'd then go through the ones I hadn't remembered first time round again, sorting into the same two piles, until eventually all of the cards got into the remembered pile. You then turn the cards over so your language is on the top and test yourself to see if you can remember the foreign language. You go through again sorting into piles until everything's in the remembered pile. A lot of people find this very effective, but it doesn't work well for me at all. I'd only use it for small sets of words that I had a particular reason to want to learn either for a test or because they sounded particularly like the sort of thing I say. My problem with the card method is that although I was quite capable of getting all the words into my remembered pile within a few shuffles of the pack, if I tried to remember the words a couple of weeks later they'd have gone. This also happens to me with words I practise by using them in conversation or which I keep coming across when listening to a foreign language. The difference is, I find the card method boring. If I have a conversation or read a foreign language book or listen to a podcast, I rarely regret the time I've spent doing it, because I found what I was doing interesting. And if I don't learn as much as I'd have liked, well at least I had a good time trying. With the card method, I tend to get annoyed that I put all that dull, dull effort in and still can't remember the words. Learning words from cards does have the advantage that you control precisely which words you're focusing on. You can't do that with a conversation or by listening to the radio or watching TV. So if you have specific words you need to learn, the card method's worth considering. If you're simply trying to improve in the foreign language generally though, I recommend you try and find opportunities to communicate in the foreign language or watch its TV or listen to its radio or podcasts. Doing one of these things has the extra advantage, that from the hundreds of words you will hear from other people in your average few minutes of listening, your brain

is likely to pick up on and start the process of storing words that are particularly useful for you and appropriate to your level of language. It will also let you hear these words in context. This is important for a number of reasons. This first reason it's important, is because words often don't cover exactly the same stuff in one language as another. Sometimes you're alright. Katze means cat, and they match up pretty precisely, until you try and go into figurative uses like calling a woman catty. Other words, though, don't match so well. My favourite simple example of words that don't match up between languages are Stuhl and chair. Basically, Stuhl means chair. My archetypal image of both is the kind of chair I have round my dining room table made of wood, 4 legs and a wooden back. But this is where it starts to get a bit complicated, because in German, Stuhl also covers what we'd call a stool a three or four-legged backless seat for one person. On the other hand something else I'd call a chair a big comfy seat for one person that comes as part of a three piece suite isn't a Stuhl in German, it's a Sessel. The things that seem to be important in the German word include being for one person and being hard. Whether or not it has a back isn't important. For chair, although this is also a one-person seat, the hardness isn't important, it can be hard or soft, but it does need to have a back. Without a back, the seat is a stool. If you're learning words by hearing them used in context and trying to use them yourself, you'll gradually pick up on this sort of mismatch in a way that might pass you by with flashcards. I think this is actually even more important with verbs than nouns. Verbs often match very badly between languages and hearing them used in context will help you form an understanding of the range of their meaning. I find that nowadays I do this automatically without thinking about it too much. The more often I hear a verb used, the more I build up my sense of its range of meaning. In some ways, it can be a bit like a reading comprehension test. I'm so used to not understanding 100% of what I hear in foreign languages (and also my hearing's not great, so I miss the odd word quite a lot in English), that I just get used to taking a guess about the meaning of the missing part of the sentence. The next reason why learning from hearing words in context is better, is grammar. If you listen to words in context, you'll be hearing where other people put the word within a sentence. As everyone who's listened to my word order podcasts knows, word order is a tricky subject. The more you listen to or read words used in context, the more you'll get used to where they belong in a sentence, as well as just learning the word's meaning. Also, with verbs you'll hear and practise them in all their conjugations, rather than just learning the infinitive, which is very important. Another good reason for learning in context is that often the words and phrases that a native speaker of the foreign language would choose are rather different from the ones our native language would lead us to pick. For instance, the phrase ich mag isn't nearly as common in German as its literal translation I like is in English. German has other ways of saying this, depending on the context. For instance I like playing football is more likely to be said as ich spiele gern Fuball literally I play football gladly. Or I like the picture better every day might be Das Bild gefllt mir jeden Tag

besser literally The picture pleases me every day better. It's because of the tendencies of different languages to prefer different ways of saying things that instruction manuals translated from foreign languages can sound so odd especially if they were translated by a native speaker of the original language, not the language being translated into. Or that people who aren't native speakers of your own language can seem to make such odd choices of words and phrases. If you learn words in context, you should start to pick up on these sorts of things and your language skills will be the better for it. Not necessarily perfect, but definitely a lot better. That brings me onto my next message: practice, practice, practice. Every time you encounter the foreign language you'll help your brain consolidate existing knowledge and expand on it. Usually it doesn't feel much like that at the time. But it's cumulative. If you keep doing things to come into contact with the language, you will keep learning. If you do nothing your abilities will start to dwindle. You won't much notice the difference after a day or a week, but after a year, you'll start to see a real difference between if you've had a lot of language exposure and if you've had none. The nice thing about languages is there are so many ways of getting exposure to them that are fun and that can feed into your other hobbies. Anything that you enjoy is particularly good, as you're likely to do more of it, and in my view, in learning a language, quantity is extremely important. The more of the language you encounter, the more you'll learn, whether you intend to or not. This is one reason that foreign learners of English often appear to have such an advantage they often grow up listening to music with lyrics in English, watching American films subtitled into their own language and seeing slogans in English. It is possible to let all this completely pass you by, but if you have an interest in learning English, this will all help. So, here's a list of ways I and other people like to learn languages: Tip 1) Go to the country for as long as you can manage. If you're a beginner or intermediate learner, I recommend going on a language course or any other thing that will force other people to speak the language to you. If your English is good enough to understand German Grammarpod, whatever your native language, whatever country you go to, unless you're already very advanced in the language, the natives are likely to want to speak to you in English, as a large number of people across the world now speak really good English. It's easy to understand why this happens. If you want to communicate with someone, it makes sense to speak a language you're both fluent in rather than to struggle on in a language one of you has clear limitations in. Even if you are advanced, some sort of course can make sense. I don't know about you, but if I visit somewhere, I tend to spend a lot more of my day looking at things or talking to the people I came with than striking up conversations with the locals. Working in the country is also good. I've been a chambermaid, an au pair and a waitress in Germany. Of these, I wouldn't recommend chambermaid, as it doesn't tend to lead to much language practice, but au pair is good, as the international agreements on au pairs mean that au pairs are obliged to take a course as part of their

time in the country, and even if your family doesn't speak to you much in the foreign language, you can learn it on the course. Waitress is also obviously good if your language skills are up to it, as you have to speak to the customers. Tip 2) If you have access to it, watch TV in the foreign language. This is really easy if you're in the country. If you're not, then YouTube might work well for you. If you're not in a German-speaking country, I recommend setting aside a certain time of the week to watch German TV, otherwise, if you're like me, it'll never move from your to do list to your done list, and quantity is important here. The more the better. If you can find them, I recommend family shows, things like Unsere Kleine Farm which is Little House on the Prairie dubbed into German or Mash dubbed into German. Diagnose Mord, you've guessed it, Diagnosis Murder dubbed into German also worked well for me. Programmes specifically aimed at children are much harder. They often include words relating to magic or different species of bird or plant that your average adult learner doesn't much need and hasn't been learning. Also, clever comedies like Friends are really, really hard. Star Trek I found just about possible to follow back when I was at university, but it wasn't easy. The key trick is to find a show you enjoy that you're able to follow well enough to motivate you to keep watching. You don't have to understand everything, just enough to make you want to watch again. It doesn't even have to be something you'd usually watch things I'd usually watch in English are often too hard for me in a foreign language, so I have to find a compromise. I find things I enjoy in foreign languages are often similar to things I enjoyed in English when I was younger. You may have noticed that all the programmes I've mentioned so far are ones made in English dubbed into German. This doesn't really matter. Every now and again there'll be a mistranslation, and you'll laugh at a joke that works when literally translated into English, but wasn't a joke at all in German. And every now and again you'll hear some idiom literally translated that you couldn't actually say in standard German, the translator just hadn't understood it was an idiom. However the vast majority of each show will be in correct, idiomatic German and you will learn correct idiomatic German from this. My list simply consists of dubbed shows because I didn't find any German shows with simple enough language for me to enjoy them when I was first learning. It's important that the show be dubbed though. You won't learn nearly as much from watching a show in your native language subtitled into the foreign language, because you just won't be making the effort to process the information that you'd have to in a dubbed show. Subtitled shows aren't a complete waste of time, they're just not nearly as useful as dubbed shows or ones originally made in the foreign language. Also, if you have the option of watching a programme in the foreign language with subtitles in your own language, unless you want to watch and understand that programme more than you want to practise your language skills, don't use the subtitles. If you use subtitles, your brain will take the easy route and you won't learn nearly as much as if the subtitles aren't there. Tip 3) Read books, magazines or websites in the foreign language. I've got to say, that

I find it hard to stick to reading magazines or websites, but when you're a beginner, books are too hard for you, so having a go at a magazine or a website is definitely better than nothing. For me, with reading, the important thing is to find something at my level of the language. This doesn't mean something where I can understand every word, just something where I can work out enough of what's going on to keep it interesting. Whether this is something I'd normally read is a more secondary consideration. Although if you don't enjoy the text at all, you won't keep going with it, so you do need to try and find something you enjoy on some level. Some books and magazines are much harder than others. Obviously proper literature is hard although some famous writers are harder than others. I still barely understand a word of Schiller. Surprisingly, Goethe is easier and Max Frisch is pretty well as good as it's going to get in proper German literature. Like with TV programmes and for the same reasons, children's books are generally quite hard. The easiest sort of book I've found in foreign languages is romances Mills & Boon, that sort of thing as they tend to be quite formulaic and you can often guess the meanings of words from the few words you know in a phrase. I find myself guessing things like Her heart pounded faster in her chest , just from knowing her, heart and faster. I also found translations of Maeve Binchy fairly easy I think she tends to write about topics people cover in language class, like family and going out. Again, don't worry about the fact that you're reading a translation in a Maeve Binchy book or in a romance, most of which seem be translations from English. There's every chance that with just a few overly literal translations, the translated text will be full of correct language and useful idioms in the foreign language. I found that science fiction and crime were both much harder than romance or Maeve Binchy. So, even if Mills & Boon or Maeve Binchy isn't your cup of tea in English, it might be worth trying it in a foreign language, as there'll be an extra layer of interest from the language. When I first get nearly good enough to read books in a language, I tend to buy my own copy and write all over them in pencil with words I've translated. By the way, for reading books, buy yourself a good dictionary, find a good one online or click the language button on Google and use its translation facilities. Dictionaries small enough to carry around generally won't have enough of the words you need to read a book. Google Translate is particularly handy because unlike with a dictionary where you have to work out the infinitive of the verb you're looking at or the singular form of the noun or the masculine singular form of an adjective, Google will translate any word you put into it as is. If anyone does find any types of easy-to-read book or authors suitable for intermediate learners who hate romance, then please put a comment on my blog germangrammarpod.blogspot.com. Some books are definitely harder than others, even within the same genre, so if at first you don't succeed, try, try again. Also, if you find books too hard, don't worry. You need quite a high level of language to do it. I'm still only 19 pages into my first Polish romance which I bought two years ago and most of the words are underlined. Realistically, I'm probably not yet at a suitable

level of Polish to read it, I just keep hoping and trying, because I know once I can read books (even really basic ones) I'm away and can improve my language skills really easily doing something fun. If you live in London, you can get all sorts of books in foreign languages from Grant & Cutler. If you don't, then try and remember to pick a book up if you're ever in the country. Alternatively you might be able to get something from eBay even if you have to order it in from another country. If you're an advanced learner, you might be able to get a book from your local library. Mine has a surprisingly large foreign language section. But, I find that's no good at the beginner or intermediate stage, as you need to keep the book for months and it will probably help to scribble all over it. Tip 4) Listen to podcasts. Obviously, I recommend German Grammarpod. If you're pretty advanced, I also recommend Pukka German. It's a podcast I listen to about German idioms. However, I think it's probably at a bit of a high level for beginners or intermediate learners. Quite a lot of people on my blog have recommended Deutsche Welle podcasts particularly Deutsch - warum nicht?, a series of lessons with dialogues and exercises, and also Langsam gesprochene Nachrichten, which means the news spoken slowly. In the same vein, people also recommend a podcast called Slow German. Hearing German being spoken slowly should help beginners and intermediate learners a lot, as before you're fluent in a language it takes longer to recognise and mentally process each word. Practising like this should help you improve your processing speed, so that eventually you can understand German spoken at a normal or even fast speed. Also, quite a few people on my blog also recommend My daily phrase German, which does what it says on the tin. All of these podcasts can be found on iTunes. In fact, if you search the word German in iTunes, you'll find a whole host of podcasts, at least one of which should be right for you. Tip 5) Translation. Translating texts can be very productive. Sometimes it's not until you try and translate what you're reading that you realise you weren't understanding something correctly. Translations should be quite short. Beginners and intermediate learners shouldn't attempt more than one or two paragraphs at a time. Ideally from a simple text. Something that's been written specifically for your level would be ideal. Translation is good in both directions. Into or out of your native language. Particularly if you're translating into your native language you should read your finished translation through afterwards and make sure what you've written sounds natural, not translated. Despite what you may sometimes hear, there's nothing wrong with comparing a foreign language in detail to your own language. Translation should help show you where the differences lie and where you need to be careful. For instance, in German, to talk about your job, you might say ich bin Finanzanalystin literally I am financial analyst. In English, however, that sentence should include an a and be I'm a financial analyst. Knowing this difference is extremely useful and won't ultimately stop you reaching the goal of thinking in the foreign language. While I'm on translation, another quick word on Google Translate. If you click

Language on the right of the search box in Google, then you'll get to Google Translate. You can enter a text or a website and choose the languages to translate from and to. Google Translate has definite limitations. The more complex the sentence, the less likely it is to get it right, and its mistakes can be quite massive. But it's a very useful tool. If you need to produce a letter or email in a foreign language, you can write it in the simplest English you can manage and stick it into Google Translate. Then read the output and compare it to any existing knowledge you have of that language and make changes. Google Translate will always get Dear Sir and Yours faithfully, right because these are set phrases. I have never yet persuaded it to get right I am interested in the acquisition of company X. Sometimes Google Translate will produce such nonsense as to be incomprehensible, so I only ever use it in a language I don't have any knowledge of in extreme desperation, and then I include my message in English, just in case. However, I have a lot of experience using Google Translate to help me translate Polish to English, and I can tell you that although it speeds up the task considerably making this the right choice for me to use at work it barely helps me learn at all. So if you are going to use Google Translate to help you translate as a learning exercise, only use it for individual words and phrases. Try and puzzle as much of it out as you can before you go to it. Sticking the whole text in won't help you learn nearly as well. The more you think about language, the more it sticks in your head. If you aren't using Google Translate, you have a bigger problem on your hands. You need to relate the words you're reading to the form that appears in the dictionary. I think I'll probably have to do a separate episode on how to use German-English dictionaries and what they have in them. It's a topic in its own right. A key message with dictionaries though, is bigger is better. Although every Collins dictionary I've ever owned, however small, contains a translation of the obscure word isthmus, if they are small they often don't have other surprisingly common words, such as croissant or a surprising number of the verbs that appear in even the lowest level of foreign language text book. Not having a good enough dictionary makes translation hard. In terms of online dictionaries for English-German, I particularly recommend dict.cc, Leo and Wordreference. I can't vouch for Wordreference's breadth of field, as I don't tend to use it professionally (whereas I do use dict.cc and Leo), but it does have the major advantage that it often includes an example sentence to show you the word in use. Again, I can't vouch for its German English dictionary, but I can warn you that its Polish English dictionary, which is admittedly a work in progress, contains errors. But then, most bilingual dictionaries do contain at least one error, even the paper ones you buy from well respected publishers. You just have to work with what's available. Tip 6) Music. Listen to music with lyrics in the foreign language. My husband is a particular fan of Rammstein, which is pretty handy for German. I don't tend to listen to much music, so this method doesn't work so well for me. At most, I managed to pick up a couple of song titles while I was living in Germany. But if you are the sort of person who listens to a track often enough to be able to sing along, this could be

quite useful. My two issues with learning a foreign language this way are that some of the lines will have been twisted a bit so they scan or rhyme and sometimes you can't make out what the singer is singing even in your native language. I think though, that most of what you learn from music will be valid. Think about songs in your own language if you want an idea of how much will be normal language and how much won't. Chances are, most of it will be pretty OK, albeit more colloquial than formal. Tip 7) Get a pen pal. Work out between you how you're going to write. I favour both writing in your native language because it's easier and you're more likely to do it. You'll get back an idiomatic letter in the foreign language that you're motivated to translate or understand and you'll hopefully learn some useful phrases. It may be best to correspond by email. German handwriting doesn't look like English handwriting in some key ways and bad German handwriting can add a whole extra level of challenge. I recently spent 5 minutes poring over a letter from a friend trying to work out if what finally turned out to be a capital <L> was a <G >or a <J>. If you're a beginner and your pen pal isn't able to write in simple enough sentences for you to understand, it may pay to write to each other in the foreign language. That way, you should understand the letters you receive. Also, if you are the sort of person who can persuade themselves to write regularly in a foreign language, it should be very helpful for you. Unfortunately, I'm not that sort of person, so this doesn't work for me. Tip 8) Write a diary in the foreign language. Again, I don't have the right mind frame to do this, but if you are interested in doing this, someone recommended the website www.lang-8.com to me (the 8 in that's a numeral, not the word). I haven't tried it myself, but I hear the website lets users write diaries in the language they want to learn and then other users (native speakers) correct and comment on them. According to my source, it's a simple idea, but it works amazingly well. Tip 9) Do language exercises. This is something I actually do manage to do sometimes myself. You can buy a work book for the language which is my preferred method, although you'll need one that has the answers in the back to check if you were right. Alternatively, the Internet is full of grammar exercises, some of which are more fun and useful than others. Here's another website I've heard about, but not tried for myself: www.livemocha.com. Apparently on this, you can do exercises and record yourself speaking and native speakers will mark you and comment. I think the site relies on native speakers donating their time. Tip 10) Take a language class. This will make sure that you're not heading off in the wrong direction and will give you useful speaking and listening practice. It will also make sure you get some practice every week. I've been going to a Polish class most Mondays for the last 8 years and I really love it. It also guarantees that practising my Polish happens every week rather than staying a theoretical goal on my to do list.

Now, any of those methods I've just mentioned will help familiarise you with the way the language works and build vocabulary especially passive vocabulary. That's words you recognise and know the meaning of when you see them, but can't actually bring to mind when you want to use them. The problem is, you'll only be good at what you practise. The 4 basic skills in language are reading, writing, speaking and listening. If you spend your time reading books and translating, then reading is what you'll get good at. I know this all too well, as I spend a lot of time translating Dutch, and although I can read it nearly as well as I read German, I have great difficulty writing it, understanding spoken Dutch or speaking it myself. Without practising speaking or writing, you won't consolidate your vocabulary and knowledge into something you can use in speaking or writing. Practise the skills you want to have, and only get persuaded to stick to the easy skills if you're sure you'll be happy just able to use those skills. In my view, by far the hardest skills are speaking and listening. Speaking because you've got to get the words out in real time and it takes a lot of practice. Listening because again it's happening in real time (you can take as long as you need with reading and writing) and because it's often hard to make out what sounds people are making. There are three reasons for that. Firstly, in real life people speak fast and mumble. Even in your native language you probably fill in some of what other people are saying by guesswork. In a foreign language, this is much harder as you've got to guess so much more and so much less is second nature to you. Secondly, the range of sounds that count as one phoneme or another varies from language to language. This is particularly bad with vowels For instance, in English we have the phonemes <u> and <a>. All the native English speakers amongst you will have heard completely different sounds there. You're probably not even aware that they sound quite similar and would never get confused between the words mud and mad. In fact, if I say mud and mad over and over again, you'll hear the same words with the same sounds each time. The chances are though, that I'm not making quite the same sound each time and that there will be variations in the position my mouth and tongue were actually in. If you're not a native English speaker, you'll already know how similar those sounds are. You might well hear me saying different sounds each time, but you may not be sure if I've consistently said one word then the other, or if I've mixed it up a bit, because your brain won't be set to distinguish those sounds from each other. Babies start with the ability to differentiate between any pairs of sounds from any language, but some time between the ages of six and twelve months, this ability narrows and they start to focus just on the sounds of their own language. Children that get plunged into another language environment thoroughly enough and for long enough generally manage to regain the ability to distinguish between the sounds in that other language. I'm not talking a few language classes here, I'm talking months of total immersion into the foreign language like going to school in another country or going to a school taught entirely in the foreign language in your own country. But the older you are when you experience the other language, the longer you'll need to be able to do this and the harder it will be for you to make the sounds yourself. I still have difficulty with German. My accent's alright, but a native German speaker can

easily tell I'm not a native speaker, and I still can't tell or make the difference between u with or without an umlaut entirely consistently. Native German speakers find this odd. To them, the difference is as obvious as the difference between <a> and <u> is to a native English speaker. However, to a native German speaker, unless they've spent an awful lot of time listening, preferably when they were quite young, then <u> and <a> sound as similar to each other as <> and <u> sound to me. I wouldn't spend too much time worrying about this. Most of the time it's easy to guess which word is meant from the context, even if the vowel isn't quite right. In most cases, if you're reasonably near the correct sound, people's brains will automatically work out what you meant to say from the context. We do this all the time to cope with different accents. How else would a Brit be able to make sense of CSI Miami? I never bother much with my accent when I begin a language. If I can make myself understood, that's enough. However, when putting sentences together begins to come more naturally to me, I start to pay more attention to how I sound. Some of you will be lucky, and with enough practice will sound just like the natives. Most of you will be like me your accent will be reasonably mild, but always there. If you do want to work on your accent, then I suggest trying to get a native speaker to help you. Get them to say a word and watch closely what they do with their lips and tongue maybe even get them to describe where their tongue is, then repeat the sound after them several times and ask when you got it right and when you didn't. Also, try and focus on differences between how a word should theoretically sound, based on its spelling, and how native speakers actually say it. Often they won't realise that they've said something that doesn't match the spelling, because the difference will be quite subtle. It could still be that subtle difference that makes all the difference between sounding like a native speaker and sounding like a foreigner though. Now next, I have a contentious point to make. That is that I don't think it's possible for adult learners to learn a second language like they learnt their native language. In fact, I don't think it's possible for children to do that either if their only source of the foreign language is a few language lessons a week at school. If you think about it, there's one big reason for this babies get as much as 12 hours a day of concentrated language tuition from everyone around them and it still takes them a year or two of many hours a day without a break to string together their first sentence. In fact, people even speak in a special way to babies. They exaggerate language sounds to them and they make special efforts to talk in simplified language especially for babies. Most people do this naturally without thinking about it it's just the way you talk to babies. But no one speaks like that to adult learners of foreign languages. As to children learning in school, they have one teacher teaching thirty of them, and even assuming that were as good as the attention a baby gets from its parents, it would take nearly 5 years of two hours' lessons per week before those children got to the level of input a baby gets in a month or two. Would we be happy if after 5 years of school a school child could speak a language as well as a two month old baby? Not really. We have far higher expectations.

Immersion in a foreign language can be an incredibly valuable way of learning a language I don't think I've ever learnt more German in a shorter period of time than when I lived in Germany. In fact, if you plunge a child into a different language environment for several months or better still, several years, those children will learn to speak that foreign language, and if they're young enough when the experience occurs (under 10 is particularly good), many will come out sounding like a native speaker in the language. But this needs a lot of a commitment and is definitely not the same as a a couple of hours of language class a week, even if it's carried out entirely in the foreign language. Also, as an adult, you've probably had it. Although living in the country will help a lot, very few adults will ever manage to sound like a native speaker, however long they stay. My grandmother arrived in England from Austria when she was 16 and got pretty well only English and no German from then on in, but without any English lessons. What happened was that she learnt to express everything she wanted to in English and understood everything everyone said, but her accent stayed strong, and her English was often somewhat odd in terms of word order, word choice and choice of tense. There are several theories about why this might be. The ones I subscribe to most are that after a certain age, most people no longer have the facility to learn another language like their native language and also your native language interferes with how you speak and understand a foreign language. For instance, if you're a native English speaker, the pattern will be strongly imprinted on your brain that sentences start with the subject that's the nominative. When German doesn't do this, for instance if a German sentence puts the dative first for emphasis, I still have difficulty. My brain still insists that word order is more important for telling me what role a word is playing in a sentence than case and I have to consciously override my instincts when I notice this may have happened. On the other hand, the fact that I already speak a language has advantages. I'm already aware of things like the difference between a dog, a cat, a mammal and an animal and what numbers are and how they work. I don't have to learn them from scratch like a baby does. Putting this knowledge to work, together with targeted work on your grammar and knowledge about how accents work will help you learn a foreign language much faster than you learnt your first. The only bad bit is that you're likely never to get as good or natural sounding as you are in your native language. Unfortunately there's nothing you can do about this. You simply have to make the best of the options available to you. If it's any consolation, however, it is technically possible to become like a native speaker in a foreign language as an adult, and some adults will achieve this. I have a friend who came to Britain from Germany when she was 18, having always been told at school that she had no talent for English. I met her when we were in our early 20s, and even then it was almost impossible to tell she wasn't a native English speaker. Unfortunately, she doesn't have any sure-fire tricks for how to replicate her success. She isn't really sure how her accent and grammar got so good, and when I asked her, she told me that she just listened to native English speakers and copied what she'd heard.

Finally I want to talk about Sprachgefhl - a feeling for language. This term always used to really annoy me. I'd ask my teachers how they knew the answer was one thing not another and they'd put it down to Sprachgefhl. This answer is about as helpful to the learner as a doctor telling you something is just one of those things. That's why I try not to say that in German Grammarpod. Nonetheless, I have after many years come to the conclusion that Sprachgefhl is a real thing. I think what happens is that after you've been learning a language for a while, you get to the point where there are words, phrases and concepts you've learnt, but only half remember. Your conscious mind can't really tell you about it what it means or where you heard it but your subconscious mind is somehow still able to access it and so you use it and it turns out to be correct. I think this is partly due to the fact that your passive vocabulary the words you understand if you see or hear them will always be larger than your active vocabulary the words you're able to call to mind to use when you're speaking or writing. For instance, I spent a while convinced I didn't know the German for to hug because I couldn't think of what it was. But when I finally looked it up and saw the word umarmen, I realised I did know the word, it just wasn't in my active vocabulary. I've clearly not spent much time talking or writing about hugging people in German. After all, it's the words I get most practice using that join my active vocabulary. In other words, Sprachgefhl happens pretty much as a side effect of encountering the foreign language a lot. One final tip: I find that I've only got so much attention that I'm able to give to a sentence at once, so when I'm at a beginner or an intermediate level of learning a language, my homework tends to have a lot of mistakes in it. This is because the sentences I'm trying to produce have a lot of things in them that are new to me new vocabulary, new grammatical ideas. I find that even if I theoretically know all the information I need to make a perfect sentence, I still can't. I can't pay full attention to more than one of the problems in the homework. This doesn't mean I'm never going to be able to create a perfect sentence. What needs to happen for that is for several of the components of the sentence to become second nature to me like learning to drive, especially if you're trying to learn to drive a manual car. When you first learn to drive, changing gear takes pretty well all of your attention. Trying to do anything else at the same time, or even at around the same time, seems impossible. But eventually changing gear becomes second nature to you. And at that point you can change gear and give your focus to something else at the same time as well, such as not accidentally steering into the middle of the road. Well, languages are like that too. The practical effect of this is that if you're a beginner or intermediate learner, when you hand your homework in you'll often get it back covered in red pen. Unless you're lucky and your teacher has decided to focus only on the problem that is at the heart of the exercise you've been doing. Whether or not this is what happens, this is what you should do. When you get given a language exercise for homework, you should try and identify what it's trying to teach you. Is the focus on gender? Or perhaps on case or tense? That's where you should put your focus. Don't intentionally get the rest of the exercise wrong, the more you get right, the better, but when your homework

comes back to you, focus primarily on the corrections that relate to what you were trying to learn. If you got all of that right, but happened to mess up something else, you can still be very proud of yourself. You did well. In fact, I find noticing what I did well and feeling a sense of achievement is a key motivator in keeping me going on learning languages. So that was it on tips and tricks. Don't beat yourself up about not being able to do everything. Languages are cumulative. Sometimes you'll need to learn something else before you can understand or commit to memory what you're trying to learn now. The best thing to do with something you just can't seem to learn is to leave it for a while and focus on some other things. Eventually you'll come back to it with enough knowledge to be able to do it. Also, don't beat yourself up about not being able to get things 100% correct. You can only focus on so much at once, and there's a limit to how many things you can think about. Eventually you'll get the sentence right when enough of it has become second nature to you. Until then, just know it's like that for everyone. The thing that will help you improve is practice, practice, practice. Ideally you should find something you like doing that you can integrate into your weekly routine. It doesn't much matter what you do, if it involves the foreign language it'll help and if you like it enough to do it more often, it'll help more. The more practice you get, the more you learn. The only problem is you only learn the skills you practise, so try and make sure you get practice that covers the skills you want to have. Also, it's worth learning grammar I guess I don't even have to mention that to anyone who already listens to German GrammarPod but the reason is that if you didn't get a sustained immersion experience of the language when you were young, then you need to know these things, because you've already got a native language giving you messages about how languages work, and unfortunately for foreign languages, these are quite often the wrong message. Well, that's it for German GrammarPod this time. My current plans are to do my next podcast on how to use a German-English dictionary and then the one after that on adjectival endings. If you have any further subjects you'd like to hear a podcast on, send me an email at germangrammarpod@yahoo.co.uk. Anyhow, for this week, that's it, so goodbye and thanks for listening.