I think this first legit exploration of learning languages is the main question I get asked: How do you do it??
Being that I'm in a city with a typical demographic of people, African-American, Caucasian, and Hispanic, with small amounts of other ethnicities, it is extremely hard to find people to practice with. My girlfriend speaks a few foreign languages (She just so happens to be Mexican, so I go to her for Spanish), so she is a big help, but when we go out, we typically don't hear anything foreign unless I'm at the nail salon with her or randomly in Wal-Mart. This is unfortunate, because as you know, conversational practice is VERY important.
What to do, what to do? IMMERSE YOURSELF. Just because you might not be in a typically diverse neighborhood doesn't mean that you can't practice speaking and learning. You can immerse yourself by following people of foreign languages on Twitter (You'd be surprised at how it helps your reading), going to ethnic restaurants and speaking their languages (You never know...You might get free food...Not like I'd know anything about that, lol), walking up to ethnic looking people and striking up a conversation, writing in foreign languages in your spare time, joining LiveMocha.com, and countless other ways.
There's a new Thai restaurant in town, so you already know I'm going to test what little Thai I know there.
If you want fluency, go get it. Forget trying to let it come to you. Seek it out. Immerse yourself the best you can. It's gotten me pretty far.
How am I learning? Well..Aside from the paragraph before, I've found that using a program called Pimsleur helps out a lot. I was a fan of the Rosetta Stone, but then I got tired of sitting in front of a screen only learning words and not learning how to be conversational. With Pimsleur, I can be walking around, sitting in the library, lying in bed, or at the gym, and just have it playing on my iPod. And because I'm an aural learner, it sticks so much more. I remember the first time I tried Hebrew. I thought I was going to forget it ALL, but I woke up the next morning and remembered it all. That's not to discount the Rosetta Stone. I just don't have the time to be stationary for that long.
To keep you from having to read more blocks of texts (because I was going to go over a lot), I will continue in the next post!
До свидания,
Your Favorite Polyglot
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