hey guys, found on youtube several videos in Russian by a guy called Nikolai Iagodkin. he claims that following his method you can learn to speak English fluently in six months. also you will be able to memorise 100 foreign words in an hour. he has several other similarly outrageous claims. have you heard of him? have you tried any of his ideas? any advice on speedlearning a language (Russian to be precise) are welcome (moving to Russia in not an option at the moment).
There are thousand of methods-to-learn-anything-in-an-hour on the internet. I think you should: 1) believe in them, and you will be trying to reach the goal, working as hard as you can in a short period of time; 2) combine them and find the one that suits you best; 3) but although you will be trying hard, don't think your work will be done in 6 months.
But you need just forget about the third point, so that you can work productively for that period of time. :)
I tried the shadowing method today. It was a complete failure. It felt very weird trying to talk over the narrator. I'll try it again soon.
I haven't tried it yet, but seems to be interesting.
I know there are applications that help to compare your speech and the standard, so you can see how you're close to accent and pronunciation. I wouldn't rely too much on them, but it may help in the beginning.
Thanks a lot. Let me also get your opinion on a technique called 'shadowing'. I watched a couple of videos on it by some polyglot professor. In a nutshell, it is speaking out the language along with the audio tapes, rather than waiting for the narrator to pause for you to repeat what he said. The idea (as I see it) is to try to copy the orignal pronounciation as closely as possible. I'm thinking of trying it out with the Assimil Russian recordings.
About listening skills: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSE93GhuW-Y
The main idea is learning all the words before you listen and then to focus only on listening without thinking about words meaning.
What about Franks method, the idea is not to search words in dictionary and not to stop when reading.
You read one paragraph one time on foreign language, then you read the same paragraph with ready translation, and then - on foreign language again. No dictionaries, only natural reading.
Yagodkin suggest to collect all unknown words in the text (quickly without comprehension), to learn them and then to read the text. If you can quickly to pick up unknown words maybe it will be better. The main idea of these methods is to learn words in context.
