I really like Yabla.com. It has Chinese TV programs with subtitles. You can click on a word and get the definition, and slow it down. What is your favourite website?

Everytime I meet a new Chinese friend, they always ask me "Why do you study Chinese?" The truth is I have no good answer. I probably will never use it for work, there are very few people where I live who speak it, and I will never (most likely) live in China. Yet I can't get enough. For some reason I am forever entertained just learning and speaking other languages. Does anyone have any theories as to why some people, including myself, are so intrigued with learning foriegn languages?

Benny Lewis inspired me when I started speaking Spanish to jump right in and start with a native from day one. I followed this advice for Chinese also. Steve Kauffman, another famous polyglot, disagrees. What is your view?

我学习的时候 我喜欢看视频。我用一个网站叫Yabla。 这个网站有中国电视节目。我看的时候我输入卡片。 你 最喜欢的 学习语言的方法是什么

I view a great teacher on Italki as someone who is really good at practicing with the me. What does that mean?  I like teachers who use a technique of repeating what I say, but using correct pronunciation and fixing my grammar. They deliberately take the discussion into new territory to expand my vocabulary and make me find new ways to express ideas. Also, they need to get familiar with my vocabulary and grammatical repetiore, recognize when I use a new word or grammatical concept, and make a little miny discussion around that new word or concept to drill it home. Finally, they need to know not to correct so much that I start feeling overly self-conscious and can't speak freely. What do you think makes a great teacher?

I recently heard a polyglot describe fluency as meaning the ability to speak on a wide range of topics with ease, while the native listener feels comfortable speaking with you using normal vocabulary at normal speed. I think this is an excellent <em>description </em>of a person who has achieved fluency, I don't feel it really explains what happens in the learner's mind that fluency occurs.  A working definiton is important because it will guide us in our study approach.

Personally, I view fluency as the ability to connect words, phrases and idiomatic expression without hesitation in an infinite (or seemingly infinite) number of ways. This level is achieved by jazz musicians when they can improvise over any chord progression and spontaneously connect musical ideas in a way that makes musical sense.

When I was at earlier levels of musical development, I could play my solo over a chord progression only one way. As I learned more, I had two or three ways to play my solo. Later ten ways. Finally my development hit the "flash point", when I could interchange and recreate ideas spontaneously without hesitation over any chord progression. This is fluency. 

So the idea in langauge aquisition is to arrive at this point. To that end, we need a large arsenal of different ways to express our ideas. Breaking that down into its bare elements, we need hundreds if not thousands of short phrases that we practice over and over until we can execute them without hesitation.

Jazz musicians accomplish this by learning "licks" off records and then playing the lick in all keys. Language learners, if they want fluency quickly, need to memorize a lot of short phrases and practice saying them over and over. Try learning lyrics to tunes, or memorize clips from TV commercials, or just take examples out of your dictionary. 

When you can connect the dots, and, without hesitiation, connect and reshape those phrases, you will be fluent. You will know when it happens, because you will be able to freely express yourself in new and interesting ways that will be different every time. So really, and language learner is nothing less than a jazz musician using a different communication system! Cheers,

By spending my time learning the solos of great musicians and jamming as much as possible, I hyper-accelerated my musical development. The same applies to learning languages. 

For years, as a young musician, I diligently practiced scales and theoretical exercises, but failed to achieve improvisational fluency. I knew theory backwards and forwards, but my solos didn’t sound like the solos of the players I admired.  In the middle of a tune I would find myself lost, because I really didn’t understand the language. The notes I selected just didn’t make good musical sense. I thought maybe I just lacked the necessary talent to play like the pros, and gave up hope many times. 

 One day I had an epiphany – if I wanted to sound like a great musician when I improvised, why not just play the same notes he or she plays? Sounds simple enough, but you would be amazed how many aspiring musicians are completely unaware of this concept. So I stopped focusing on theory, scales, and technical exercises and started spending my time doing nothing but “transcription”, which is, in musical terms, figuring out an improvised solo off of a recording, note for note.  This has an added very important benefit -- it improved my “ear”, to the point that I can now listen to a recording and tell you what the chord progression is and even see the notes of the solo in my mind without touching my guitar. 

As a musician, you can find transcripts of solos already in print, but doing it yourself has many benefits. First of all, its actually way easier just to figure out the notes yourself in terms of learning the material. String bends, slides and vibratos all appear really difficult when seen on the wrtten page, but are easy to understand when you just listen to the recording. Secondly, by doing it yourself you get the subtlties of the solo and the overall feel and sound.

Analagizing this to language, listening to a native conversation and learning how the words sound together is a much better use of your time than learning grammar lessons from a text book. I'm not saying grammar study has no place, but only after you already have a feel for how the language goes will the rules make any sense. 

 After learning the solo, I would practice the “licks”, which are short one or two bar phrases, over and over, in all keys, until they were second nature.  I would always try to understand why the musician played what he did in terms of the relationship between the solo and the chords. Then I would try to improvise over a chord progression using the new lick. 

Learning a language is the same process. Of course we can learn many things from text books, but I am convinced, after achieving good fluency in Spanish and Mandarin, that studying recordings or videos is a better use of the beginner's time. Just like a musician, the language student needs to learn how the language "goes" by learning to hear it and understand everything in context. To this extent, I recommend that the newcomer to  spend his or her time studying videos with subtitles as much as possible. I recommend a website calledYabla. Make your own flashcards of the phrases the natives use. This is exactly what the mucisian does when he learns to improvise. The language makes way more sense when you hear the grammar, syntax and pronuciation  in real life as opposed to textbook lessons. 

To put into practice what you learn, spend a lot of time speaking. Don't wait to start speaking. It is the point of your studies and the only way you can make progress. This is true for the musician as well. Jamming with other musicians is the only way to improvisational fluency. Conversing with natives is the only way to language fluency. You need to practice all of those phrases over and over again until they are second nature. 

I hope this advice is helpful. Please feel free to add comments/disagree or whatever. Thanks