1. Materi Copas 1IntroductionEditThe Listening-Reading method, also known as L-R, is alanguage learning techniquewhich focuses on understanding spoken and written language. The method was described inHTLAL's epic L-R thread.More systematically about L-Rhere.Written and compiled by aYa, the originator of the method. Some links to resources as well. Her most complete notes on the subject in Polishhere.L-R (LR) is meant foraweriders. Seeflowas well.LR for Grasshoppers- written by Volte.ADVERTISEMENTPreparationEditThe language you are learning will be called L2, the language you are learning it in will be called L1. The tools used for this method are the same as for theShadowingmethod: a bilingual text in L1 and L2 an audio recording in L2Examples of sources to use: audiobooks plus the corresponding books in L1 and L2 the material which comes with theAssimilcourses (not considered to be true LR by aYa and many others - it's very different from using an audiobook)Try to find something long and interesting.ExercisesEditThe material can be used in a number of ways:1. listening (for getting used to the spoken language)2. listening while reading L1 (for learning the meaning of the spoken words)3. listening while reading L2 (for learning to associate the spoken and written text)4. listening while reading L2 and mimicking the speaker (for learning to pronounce the language, seeShadowing)SuggestionsEdit Listen to about 80-120 hours of audio. This is best done by having 20-40 hours of new material, and listening to each part of it three times. Switch texts if you can understand 50-70% easily. It is best to do Listening-Reading with progressively more difficult material. The ideal would be to start with an interlinear translation of a children's story. Don't be afraid to experiment and look for what fits you. For example, in a related language it might be beneficial to listen with L2 text even when you can already hear word boundaries, as some similarities might be easier to notice in the written form, while others are noticeable in the spoken language.Forum member doviendehas used it successfully for German this way, being a native speaker of English.Sumber : http://learnanylanguage.wikia.com/wiki/Listening-Reading_Method

2. Materi Copas 2The RL / LR learning methodThe Reading-Listening method of learning. Everyone I read about said it at least improved their language skills noticeably, even if they didnt do it for nearly as long/often as they were supposed to. Itcanreplace all other forms of studying but of course if you have ex. deadlines for language tests then you should probably have it as an addition whenever possible instead, and a faster method would be to mix grammar study in with it.Its very easy if you know a related language, relatively easy if you already know some basics of the language (basic grammar and 2000+ words), and difficult but not at all impossible if you dont know any related language or the sentence structure is completely different from your own. Various people (yes, English and non-English speakers) have learnt English, Russian, even Chinese from this method just fine.I was slightly surprised that learning Japanese was not more difficult than learning English, German or French, just another language.This is the basic summary:- Have a LONG text you know and understand already in your own language, and a sound recording that matches.- Read a sentence in your native language- Read the same sentence, with audio of the text playing at the same time, in the language you want to learn. You can use a free program like Audacity to slow down or speed up the audio if you try for a while and keep finding you just read too fast or slow.- Do not worry about memorizing, dont look any words up, just keep going. Enjoy reading.- After you finish the book, do it again. Maybe do it a third time.- Then try reading the book in the target language only, with the audio, for a little bit. Then try listening to the audio only. Then try reading without listening. (just one chapter or two for this step is fine)- When listening only, pause every so often to repeat wordsthat you know the meanings of. If they sound wrong, stop practising and practise listening more instead.- Do this as often as possible.This method is meant to be used intensively, at least two hours a day.

So it would look like this:It was at Kamakura, during the summer holidays, that I first met Sensei. I was then a very young student. I went there at the insistence of a friend of mine, who had gone to Kamakura to swim. . (the paragraph goes on)

*have audio paused**read: It was at Kamakura, during the summer holidays, that I first met Sensei.**play audio, and as it plays read along: *pause audio if needed, read: I was then a very young student.*read along as the audio plays: *repeat with the next lines*You may quickly notice that the translation is not very accurate. If so, edit the translation as you go along - this helps you, and if you give it to other learners after youre through, it helps them a lot too.

If you want a head-start, couple this method with using a word-frequency generator. Create a word-frequency list from the text you are going to listen-read (LR), learn the most frequent 100 words or so, then use this method.

More detailed explanation and examples:- First have two long texts (ex. long novels), one in your target language and the same, very close (if possible) or directly-translated text in a language you are fluent in. For very beginners of the language it is very good to have grammar notes in the translation.I can create direct translations and grammar notes for Faroese, Scandinavian, and Icelandic for you if you want them.E-texts (or texts stored as html pages, etc.) are the most useful for major languages since you can then use a free, pop-up browser dictionary (like Rikaichan for Japanese, or the site Lingocracy) to get your literal translation, then you can have a real translation alongside that. It is best to have the text so that one line is in the target language then the same line directly beneath it is in your language.Look here for good examples of both very close translations, and inter-spaced texts.If you know hardly anything about the language, the first 3 to 5 hours need to be translated word for word with some grammar commentary, the way I did for French, English, and German for Polish learners of the languages.Examples of literary texts for zero beginners. To download:http://users.bestweb.net/~siom/martian_mountain/mL-R/ai.7zExamples of layouts:One,two,three,four.The longer the text the better. War and Peace, Harry Potter, The Lord of the Rings, etc. Books that even if they arent long enough by themselves, are part of a series and become long enough when you read multiple in a row as long as they are in the same theme and done by the same author. The most important thing is that you love what you are reading, because you will pick things up faster when you are very interested in the subject and know it well already. The length also helps you to not be as tired by re-reading."I use The Little Prince, Camus, Kafka, Anna Karenina, The Master and Margarita by Bulgakov, The Old Man and the Sea, Andersens fairy tales, Lewis Carroll, A.A. Milne.I never get tired of them.Personally I really love Vladimir Nabokov, Osamu Dazai, Sherlock Holmes, Natsume Sousekis Kokoro, etc. so I do my best to find those.- If the language is new to you, get familiar with it. Read some textbooks and grammar overviews (no intentional memorising of anything, no doing grammar exercises etc. -this method heavily focuses on do not force yourself to learn the language, it will come naturally.All the people I have read so far who said it was a waste of time,were focusing far too much on picking apart sentences and being able to understand every word.Learn the basics of pronunciation. One guy has learnt Cyrillic (and Russian) entirely from this method and didnt even bother to look up anything about Cyrillic beforehand.You should read enough to understand if there is something important to pay attention to in the language (such as if stress or intonation affects the meanings of words, basic sentence structure if it too different from ones you know, how to tell basic parts of a sentence apart like nouns from verbs)."For languages like Chinese or Japanese it might help to go through a beginners course before starting out, but I think Listening-Reading is ideal for learning languages with nonphonetic scripts. How else is one going to learn how to pronounce the words on the page if you dont have someone else reading them aloud to you? Looking up every single character would take forever."Example with Japanese:- First learn hiragana and katakana. Alsoread about how kanji and their radicals/bushu work, stroke order rules (they are very simple), and learn how to recognize the 214 classical radicals that make up kanji, butdont actually learn any kanji.- Learn how to recognize basic conjugations and basic sentence patterns.Read through the grammar on this site,and then that step is done.Rikaichan is a really great browser pop-up dictionary,that not only shows the meanings of words or specific kanji when you hover over them, it also shows which forms they are in (past tense, etc.) and tells the meanings of particles you hover over too. Using this with your Japanese text makes it more unnecessary to be familiar with basics.

Do not read from texts that have furigana, always use texts with kanji.Furigana will handicap you in the long run, and after learning the radicals kanji are extremely fast/easy to learn. Besides, you have audio so furigana is completely unnecessary.When I understand what Im hearing, I concentrate on kanji for a moment - I dont stop listening, I listen and look at the sentence written in kanji, I try to identify the components.Any successful strategy of learning written forms of kanji boils down to this: a. dissect kanji into components recurring in many kanji b. name the components and use them as building blocks to remember new kanji c. learn stroke order rules.

I NEVER learnt kanji as single entities. I always learnt words in texts (audio + transcript + translation + pop-up dictionary). I never memorized anything. I relied on comprehensible exposure.I didnt care about the order of learning kanji or words/expressions, how frequent or infrequent they are. I was interested in what a given text meant (be it the title of a movie, a whole story or a novel). I didnt care whether I forgot or didnt forget. I was sure to come across them again in future texts.Longer explanation of the method:1. Read the text in your native language or a language you know really well first, since you will only remember what you actually understand. You should read the whole book beforehand, not just a chapter or page. This is so you overall know what is coming up in the book, and dont need to spend extra effort (thus weakening language-learning concentration) by trying to decipher the plot alongside actually trying to learn.

2. Practise listening and following the target-language text at the same time. This is only practise in keeping up with the spoken speed, this is not learning. After you can follow the written text when words are said (you know when a word is a word and can pick apart the sounds in the language), it will be much easier to follow along with the audio and do the method normally. This skill can form very fast, even within ten minutes.The goal is not to pick apart sentences, but to understand the meaning of the text or audio in gist. Pay attention to what is done and how is it done but who does it or to whom is it done doesnt matter."I used cassettes and two printed books, I had no parallel texts. When I started only listening to it I didnt understand anything, just a word here and there. But when I started reading in Polish and listening to the German reader at the same time I was able to understand virtually everything, for the fleeting moment of course, I didnt bother to memorize anything, I was just going with the flow of the soul shattering experience that only a masterpiece can deliver/provide/drown you.""And thats it for the time being - no speaking, no reading without listening, no writing. The parallel written texts are only there to help me with my listening, at this stage, nothing more."Stopping to look everything up not only takes a lot longer in general, but since it is taking breaks from a method that is intended to be done intensively, it can drastically reduce how well you learn from the method and how much reading/listening actually gets done in the same amount of time.Q: Something strange Ive noticed. Im starting to think in French, but it is just random non-sense. It will be lots of words, but it is like a noun here a verb there, past participle her, no sentense just random words. Maybe this is the first stage of thinking in French subconsciously, I dont know. Ive never expierienced this before.

A: Thats exactly what happens in the incubation period. If you go on L-Reading intensively, full sentences will start to pop-up sooner rather than later. The brain is finding its way through the maze and building up a coherent system.To get to a stage called natural listening is:Being able to understand the gist, while missing some words and details, of reasonable audio in your target language you havent heard before. News broadcasts and simple literature are good examples. By simple literature, I mean for children, or by authors known for having an approachable style, as opposed to the most difficult authors that native speakers struggle with at first in schools.Reaching the natural listening stage can take from 10 to 30 (or more) hours, depending on how familiar you already are with the language, how intensively you can do this method, etc. One English-native was able to understand 90% of completely new Spanish texts after using this method for 10 hours a day, after less than a week."I noticed something very interesting about intensive L-R (and then natural listening) after a while (weeks), speaking (and writing for languages with alphabet) come naturally, there are only two conditions to activate the skills, phonetic training and repeating after the recording here and there while listening to something you understand and enjoy."(by L-Reading they mean this entire method, Listening-Reading.)"Hmm, Ive L2-R1ed about 30 hours of Finnish so far, and now I can understand 30% to 100% of sentences, depending on the subject and style of the writing. Is it time for me to switch to L2-R2 now?"Reply: No, assuming that your goal is to learn efficiently.

I was going to point you to the updated version of the L-R summary thread, but I realized it hadnt been posted yet, and didnt actually contain the quote I was thinking of. Nonetheless, it as something about being at that stage, throwing away yourEnglish/L1 text, and being a little nonplussed when you couldnt quite believe that the monk was also a lesbian police inspector L1 is still quite useful at your current level."I started to LR russian in march 2009 (when I at last bought a walkman cell phone). Since then, Ive been LR-ing KafkasThe castlea couple of times, andThe Brothers Karamazovby Dostoyevsky. -Both of the books were completely wonderful.

After that, I could speak naturally to a russian man (making insane grammar mistakes). It was a strange and exhilarating feeling to have a real conversation in a language I had never studied. He didnt know any other languages so there were noEnglish back-door.Even if you are really good at a language, you will learn tons faster with a translation and when you already know what is going onthan with only target-language material and seeing a words you dont know and dont have enough context for to get the meaning (plus you can get the wrong idea when you go only from context with no translation).

When you are practising speaking, dont look at either of the texts while you listen or repeat, this is because you will struggle to read it as it looks like its written or as you have studied, instead of how it should actually be said, and also because"speaking comes from your own brain and not from a text that sits in front of you."So you can just listen on headphones while you commute, do chores, exercise, eat meals, etc.Absolutely avoid listening or repeating after non-native speakers, you will learn incorrectly. Concentrate not on what is difficult for you (ex. sounds or letter combinations you cant make yet), but what is easy for you. It usually takes 60-80 hours or more of repeating practice, including wait time (where you listen to the audio once before repeating it) in order to completely correctly repeat simple phrases and short sentences.- Its easier to use a word in your speech if youve heard it, rather than just seen it in writing."having conversations is not learning, it is using what you already know."Dont let the idea that you need to perfect everything keep you from advancing. If youve done Step 3, then move on to Step 4 even if you dont understandeverything. After youre done with this book, youre off to LR several more anyway, so dont get bogged down on your first book.Example: L2 German, the book:The TrialbyFranz Kafka,translatedinto Polish byBruno Schulz(his woman translated it to be exact), the translation is very good and very faithful.It took me 3 (three) days (30 to 35 hours of listening) to be able to understand every single word in the book read in German byGert Westphal.What I knew before I started L-R:I knew the book (I read it in Polish, Russian, etc) and loved it. I could recognize all the German phonemes and their corresponding letter combinations. I was able to recognize basic grammar structures (morphology and syntax). I could recognize in speech and in writing the meaning of some 800 words. (probably less). (I couldnt speak the language, I never try until I reach natural listening stage.)As I had no parallel texts with matching chunks, I did the following:I read a page in Polish, I listened in German and looked at the German text, I paid attention to meaning, grammar, and letters-phonemes correspondence. Then another page, and so on, until the end of the book. I understood almost everything. It was the first day.The second day: I only read in Polish and listened to the German reader and the same time. I understood everything.The third day I only listened to the German reader. I understood almost everything.I worked ten to twelve hours a day. I made 15-minute breaks every 45 minutes. I did some physical exercises. I had three meals a day. I slept eight hours a day. I was healthy.And then I tested myself: I took a recording in German it was The Snow Queen by Andersen. I hadnt read the story before, so I knew nothing about it. And I understood itONE MORE THING: if youre unable to attach the (or at least some) meaning from what youve just read to what youre LISTENING to, you cannot say it is L-R. I would consider it pointless. Let me say it once more: L-R is not mechanical.Why?:Long texts are because then you get used to the manner of writing the author uses (and the manner of speaking the reader uses). A single author is much more likely to stick to certain sentence patterns, repeat words, etc. and this is what helps your learning by context even when you havent studied the language before.The faster it is to glance between the two languages, the easiest this method is to learn from."The layout of the texts to learn is very important. Sensory memories - visual (iconic) and auditory (echoic)- are very short and disappear within a second, so you get lost when you have to look for words, they should CONSTANTLY be within your eyes and ears reach.""Imagine youre a biologist and youve been crossing frogs with snails and cloning sheep since you were in cradle its your life, you know hell of a lot about it, it makes you happy and you cant imagine your life without it. One day you discover theres a wonderful new theory on how sheep can be grown into lions. Unfortunately its in the clitty-titty language, and you dont know it. So you decide to learn the wonderful clitty-titty in a day or hang yourself.

Notice two points:you know almost everything about the subject and youre in love with it.The texts in clitty-titty will be self-explanatory and highly enjoyable, you wont get tired (on the contrary, youll get happier and happier) and youll guess the meaning of at least half of the sentences in clitty-titty.

And now a real life example: La principessa, a teenage girl, is in love with Harry Potter, shes been reading the books time and again and knows them by heart. She decides to become a witch herself: to go to Hoggwart, she must learn English in a week to prove shes worthy.No problem, she has a magic wand: audiobooks of her prince (Harry Potter), but, unfortunately she has no English texts.She listens to the books time and again, after a few times she can understand every single word.

Notice two points:Harry Potter is her life, and the texts in English are self-explanatory. By self-explanatory, they meanyou already know the subject.You are not reading up on molecular physics for the first time and in a foreign language at that, instead you are (ideally closely) familiar with the book.Failure comes from acting as if the target-language audio is just radio noise in the background that you dont have to pay any attention to. Watching movies with subtitles is much worse than this method in terms of how fast you learn, because you have a third thing to distract you (visuals), unless you mess with the subtitle speed you cant see the translation of what they say before they say it (which is the point of this method), and your words-per-minute rate is a lot less since there is simply less of the language involved in a tv show than in a novel. How many hardcore anime fans become fluent in Japanese while only watching anime with subtitles?Miscellaneous notes:On if you should repeat chapters over and over instead of going through the whole book then repeating the book:The original explanation suggests at least 20 (40? 60?) hours of new content. With that amount of input youre likely to get a lot of the possible sentence structures in the language, as well as vocabulary, prosody and what not - something that songs (or just about any regular study material out there) cant give you.

You start reading the target language (again) when youve listened-read the native so many times so you know what means what (and why). Ive seen 3-4 times [per book] being suggested (which is A LOT, especially if youre working with even one single audiobook of ~20 hours - that would equal 60-80 hours of listening).It is actually worse to repeat small sections because the author WILL reuse the same words/phrases in later chapters with context that is most likely even more helpful than what you have now. You learn automatically when you see a word in five or so different contexts, its not that you can pick it up automatically if you read the same single sentence over and over again.Finding materials:-On Rhinospike you can submit textand ask for native speakers to record themselves reading it. Ive had luck with native speakers recording entire chapters for me at once, but of course people might be more willing to record if you chop them up into smaller pieces.

If your language is small, your best bet for pre-existing translations and audio is new popular fiction (Twilight, Harry Potter, Eat Pray Love, The Hunger Games and The Hobbit) and classics (Dracula, Sherlock Holmes, The Count of Monte Cristo, the Moomins). The easiest thing to do is go to a major library catalogue for the country, type in an author name, and see if translations of the book you want actually exists. If you are desperate, you can of course pay for a translation.

Looking around for torrents will probably help you a lot. Also, at least for larger languages, there are websites for native speakers to learn English (or other languages), with parallel texts. The translation is usually not very direct, so you will need to fix that yourself.An example for Japanese is here.- Some will require enlisting a friend who lives in the country or speaks the language, such as if the audio or book only exists in the library then they can check it out and rip the sound or take photos of the book pages for you, or advertise on used-item sites for you etc. Other people have had luck messaging random native speakers on Tumblr to ask for recordings.- Sometimes libraries for the blind/dyslexic/old people have tons of audiobooks or ebooks and will grant you access if you ask specially, but some countries are extremely strict (such as Iceland and Sweden) and wont let you have access unless you actually fit their requirements.- You may have luck searching newspaper archive sites for stories since some countries used to publish translated stories in periodicals - thats how I found a lot of Sherlock Holmes stories in Icelandic and Swedish. However it will be in older language most likely, so either you should know enough to be able to tell the difference, not care (especially if you plan to read that kind of literature a lot), or get someone to modernize it for you.- Some countries price audiobooks and/or ebooks as the same exact price as a physical book, but rest assured if it says ebook it is an ebook even if the price is the same cost as a physical book.

- They dont always sell English versions of the book at the same store as target-language versions, or audiobooks at the same store as ebooks, etc. Also it will unfortunately be a lot easier to find audio and ebooks for books originally from the country itself, that dont even have English versions. If a movie was made for the book or the book is famous in the country, then it more likely has an English version. Titles may have drastically changed between language versions.Of course, itll be far easier to find audio/ebooks on a target-language website than on an English one.

- Its much better to have the ebook and no audio verses audio and no ebook, since you can ask around for native speakers to record themselves reading from your copy, rather than being forced to buy physical copies of the books then realizing the audio doesnt match.You can learn quite a lot about HUMAN NATURE, while preparing parallel texts:1. CENSORSHIP: ubiquitous, but North Americans excel in it.

2. Bungling and cheating: I even once saw Crime and Punishment by Dostoyevsky with the label complete and unabridged on the cover and I bought it. Then at home I couldnt believe my eyes, I checked against the Russian original: at least one third of the text was missing.

The same applies to unabridged audiobooks.Some Ebooks already formatted into the proper formatI think at least, by people who use this method, for German, French, Italian, Japanese, Spanish, Russian, and Polish.Resource lists.Russian forum for hosting torrents of audiobooks/ebooks(not only for Russian but for other languages too, often related geographically ex. Baltics and Finnish as well as the major regular languages like French). Google translate for the forum works just fine but you need to register in order to get the torrent files.I have an e-book of Harry Potter in Faroese but dont have audio for one small part, and a Sherlock Holmes audio CD in Icelandic but dont have the book, if you can help out please message me!!the-resident-psychosubmitted:Id like to recommend this wonderful site:http://librivox.org/This site catalogues 6000 free audiobooks, which you can download to your computer. Their catalogue already has 33 languages in it. It also links to a source text, where the audiobooks are read from. Im personally contributing recordings for this site in my languages (Tagalog and bisaya), and proof books in japanese.http://users.bestweb.net/~siom/martian_mountain/mL-R/For people who like learning multiple languages at a time.It was a hobby of mine for some fifty years.

I havent found anything better so far, unfortunately.1. book2 - 40 something languages, Japanese, Mandarin, Korean included.List of people willing to help you record for languages, find ebooks, has resources for languages, etc:Tipsforlearninglanguages: Can help find Faroese, Icelandic, and Scandinavian materials, can make direct translations for them too (to English).

Tipsforlearninglanguages Swedish cousin: Will record Swedish audio for books (Stockholm dialect).Sumber http://tipsforlanguagelearning.tumblr.com/post/40081169302/the-rl-lr-learning-method

3. Materi Copas 3Creativity & LanguagesLearning languages out of a classroomTesting the reading & listening method (R-L)

Photo by Emily CarlinIn this post I am discussing the reading & listening method to learn languages. I came across with this method on the language forum how to learn any language a great source of inspiration for language learners.The reading & listening method (R-L) consists in reading a text while listening its audio version. Here is a summary of the main steps:1. During the first step of the R-L method the language learner uses an audiobook in the target language and a text in his own language or a language with which is familiar. The first step, reading the text translated in your own language, allows the language learner to listen and read the text in the second step without having to stop to check the dictionary.2. In the second step the language learner hears the audiobook in the target language but he reads the text in the same language.3. In the third step the language learner tries to repeat loudly the text while listening to the audiobook.Ultimately, the language learner gets a lot of exposure to the target language and should be able to get a feeling for the language.I immediately liked this method because it is no based on learning grammar and allows you to use reading material that you are interested in, at least when you achieve an intermediate level.Sounds great but does it work?I am currently testing this method; in this first post I will describe my first impressions and results after about 5 days of using intensively this method and in the next posts I will give further information and a final assessment of the pro and cons of the method.The first texts that I have used to implement the L-R method areGrimm brothers fairy tales which are available for free on internet(the copyright has expired) together with audio versions. The main issue with this material is that the stories are too short, and the L-R method work better with long text as it is main objective is to provide a lot of exposure to the language.Then I used The little prince. It was easy to find both the German version (target language) with an audiobook and an English version of the text. I listened the whole book in two sessions. Similarly to Grimm brothers fairy tales, this book turned out to be way too short to provide the right amount of exposure to the target language (German in my case).Now I am using the first book of the Harry Potter series. This seems to work well, the book is enough long to provide a lot of exposure to the target language. I almost finished the book and I can notice an improvement in my reading comprehension of German but not yet any improvement on listening and speaking. I still have not implemented the third step of the method, where one repeats loudly the text after listening the audiobook, and this step could be the one that helps speaking improving speaking skills.PeterSumber http://www.creativityandlanguages.com/2011/03/testing-the-reading-listening-method-r-l/

4. MATERI COPAS 4Listening To Learn Language: The Listen & Read MethodbyTHE JUNKIEonFEBRUARY 14, 20150 COMMENTSListening is one great way to approach a language.Especially if you want to speak and understand a language. Thats what most learners want to do. But, ever notice how most beginners are awful at speaking & understanding a foreign language?Why? Because they focus mostly on reading.So, why listening?There was an interesting audio experiment done. It shows how1) listeningcombinedwith2) a follow-up translation/explanationgets you understanding something you didnt know before.Heres the basic premise of this experiment. A person listens to a garbled audio message that they dont understand. Then, they get its true meaning. And then, they understand what that garbled message was..Just listen to this 50 second experiment below. Press play.

So, how does this relate to learning language?Its very similar.If I were to say something new to you in Japanese, Korean or Russian, itd go in one ear and out the other. Youd forget it. Its garbled to you.For example, listen to this Japanese phrase:Audio Player00:00Use Left/Right Arrow keys to advance one second, Up/Down arrows to advance ten seconds.00:00Use Up/Down Arrow keys to increase or decrease volume.

If youre not already learning Japanese, this will go way over your head. You have no translation (old information) to connect it to. Its gone.As the experiment says, your brain cant process new words/phrases it has no prior knowledge of.But if you have the translation and can read alongas you hear it now you have something to connect it to. You instantly understand it. And next time you hear it again, youll know it. So, what you heard was: JapanesePhrase: dou desu ka? Meaning:how is it?Play it again. Now you have the1) transcript that you can read withand2) the translation.You know exactly how its said, how it sounds, what it means and how to say it.You just learned a phrase.Youve learned some language.I call this the listen & reading along method.Alright, how do you apply this to language learning?There are many ways to start a language. Most beginners start with reading a textbook. They get good at reading at grammar but their listening & speaking skills suck. Why? They put 100% effort into reading and 0% effort into listening and speaking.Its just a matter of what skills youre practicing and how you choose to start. Theres no wrong way. But remember, if you practice only 1 thing, youll only get good at that 1 thing.Heres how you apply this.Start learning with Audio Lessons, Video Lessons, Podcasts thats the first step. I recommend thePod101 Online Language Courses. However, you ABSOLUTELY must have the translations and scripts for everything you hear so you can read along and instantly understand.Heres the process. Listen to an audio lesson that you DONT yet understand. Read along to get the meaning. Listen to the language again. Now you will understand it. SIMPLE. Repeat what you hear to practice your speaking.Heres an easy example withJapanesePod101to show how I learn Japanese with this process.This sounds so obvious, right?You hear, get the meaning, and understand it.Yet, most learners start out by reading and then wonder why their Japanese listening and speaking SUCKS.This experiment is a great lesson in why you should use to audio lessons. Once you hear the phrases, your ear becomes trained for it. However, you dont yet understand it because your brain has no prior information to relate it to. Once you know its meaning, you associate the sound to its meaning. And when you hear the phrases again, youll know what it is. Your brain now relates most recent information the meaning you just learned.However, if you dont HEAR it first, you wont know what to listen for.And thats pretty much how conversation flows for beginners. They pick out words they already know in a conversation and, boom, they know what theyre being asked.But reading a word first, and THEN hearing it in a conversation wont help you identify it.Reading and speaking are two different things. Reading doesnt train your ear to hear native Japanese conversation. And heres the key point:Conclusion: Hearing the unknown trains your ear. Reading along gives you the meaning & makes an instant connection with its English translation Next time you hear it, you will understand it. Repeat what you hear to practice your speaking.Are speaking and/or listening your weak points?Have you tried this listen & read along method?Leave me a comment below! The Main JunkieSUMBER http://www.linguajunkie.com/featured/listen-and-read-method