Vacation Rates

“If sprinting uphill with bowling balls in each hand were the most effective way to lose fat, how long would the average person adhere to such a program?” -Tim Ferriss, “How to Learn Any Language in 3 Months”

Language learning is like love and hate affair. Many would like to have at least basic knowledge of one or two foreign languages for personal interests or for professional development. However, learning a new language isn’t always easy, many tried but might have failed. It most cases, it’s due to that they didn’t follow the program or remain focused and engaged in the learning process. Often in time, you became bored with the program, and not enough of the content you were learning was applicable to your daily thought processes and interests. After all, it is important to begin thinking in your new language as opposed to just translating your native language inside your head.  Read more...

Vocabulary is more fundamental than Grammar

“While without grammar little can be conveyed, without vocabulary nothing can be conveyed.” -British linguist David Wilkins

In the past, a concrete foundation of grammar. is considered as the fundamentals of learning a language. Language instruction was based on teaching the complex concepts of sentence construction, singular and plural forms, gender agreements, verb conjugation, and tenses. However, recent linguistic research has indicated that building an extensive vocabulary first is more effective in creating a strong foundation for a language.

Let’s think about how you learned English as a child. Before constructing sentences with subjects, verbs, adjectives with appropriate agreements and conjugations, you simply reached for the juice cup and exclaimed, “juice!” Your mother may have corrected you, prompting you to complete the sentence, “May I have some juice?”.

At this point, you either repeated her words verbatim or missed a few sounds somewhere within the sentence. You learned “juice” before learning “have juice” or “I have some juice”. Learning important words first can dramatically improve your focus when graduating to more complex material, as you are already confident in understanding the central focus of the phrase. In addition, not knowing the word for something in your new language will have negative effect your ability to create the appropriate “surrounding phrase” useless. For example, if you need to buy some ice, but you don’t know how to say ice, knowing the words for “I need to buy some…” will not get you very far.  Read more...