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Shea Co's avatar

Without reading your article, I was thinking about how ridiculous the silent way was and then I got to the part about how most people do it learning languages on apps and such 🤣 Guilty as charged.

Also, excited for your second newsletter. You had me at diaspora!

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Lou's avatar

I learn languages like a parrot, mimicking everything I hear, even down to the tone, accent, facial expressions and even gestures! This method is not for me 😁

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Victoria's avatar

This is very interesting. I'd like to see how The Silent Way works exactly through a video since I'm a bit skeptical. When I learned Mandarin I didn't use textbooks. I went straight to videos, dramas and other resources. I liked discovering the language that way and looking up grammar points as a I discovered them. I was able to figure it out ans get an intuitive sense as I went along.

If I were given the prompt in English "use the past continuous to tell a story", I wouldn't know where to start because I have an intuitive sense or the language. I can use the past continuous but the concept of the past continuous is something I never explicitly learned.

For French, I've been using textbooks. There are exercises that say to find the direct object pronoun etc. To even understand the prompt I need to know what a direct objective pronoun is. I find that learning grammar explicitly requires a new layer of understanding first which adds an additional challenge before I can start acquiring the language.

I suppose this is what happens when you self learn without a teacher.

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