LANGUAGE EXPLORER

Examples of personal barriers

How we personally feel about our progress

Our ability to remember words, phrases, grammar points

Our feelings about how well we pronounce words

What other people tell us about how we learn

Teachers’ comments good or not so good

How much we feel we need to learn a language well

What we think language will give us and what we think it might make harder

Examples of physical barriers

Time or lack of it

Opportunities to speak with other speakers of the language (native speakers in particular)

The place we learn (class or home)

The things we have to provide us with language “input”: courses, books, DVD, MP3, Websites

All these things (and many more I am sure) affect us in how we learn. It may be a positive effect or not.

Some negative effects could be, if we have a bad teacher, this will affect us, if we don’t have enough good learning material, if we don’t have enough time.

Some positive effects could be having a good teacher, praise that makes us feel good, remembering more words that we expect, finding we can pronounce things well.

There are many more things that we can add to this list.

I think our attitude or perhaps a better way of saying it would be our “way of thinking” is very important and can also affect how we learn and perhaps more importantly, how we feel about learning and how much we can get from the language learning experience.

My opinion is that we should think about these things when we feel that we are not making much progress or when we are making good progress, and she what we think may be affecting us in a positive or negative way.

Making a list may help. Once we see something written down we can maybe think about it more and also we then have a record to look back on. Something that tells us how we felt about language at any particular time.

I have started to call myself a “language explorer” rather than a “language student” . To me, this feels more appropriate and right for me. Maybe you prefer the word “student”.

Everyone has to choose his or her own path, although those of you doing courses must follow the way the course is taught.

I like to find my own way whereever I can, however I do study language courses and I would always say that these are important, providing they are good courses and we can learn well from them.

To help us with our attitude to learning and way of thinking about learning, try saying this to yourself.

Instead of “I wish I could know more” say to yourself, “I am glad I have learned so much already”

Instead of “I could do better” say to yourself “Perhaps I can find some new ways to learn”

“Poor language skills” should be “can I improve language skills?”

“pronuciation problems” should be thought of as “what can I do if I am uncertain to best way to say it?”

“not enough time” should be “can I make us of the time I have?”

“no learning fast enough” should be “is there a way I can speed up?”

What I mean is, instead of making statements “my English is poor”, turn it into a question “what can I do to improve?”

This will focus our minds on what to do for the future not dwell on what has gone before

Take care

Be good, be happy

 

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 My Podcast Alley feed! {pca-1ba8d72ddb3c45ade96ca8da36809045}

Hello everybody Today I want to talk about a new idea I have had to do some language practice on our own with no more than a piece of paper and a pen. I call this idea “mind word essays”. With this idea, you can practice: Thinking in a language Writing Reading and grammar Speaking/Listening You can do this anywhere, whilst travelling, at home, with friends. I had the idea when I was flying to Germany and I wanted to practice German but I had nothing with me except a pen and paper. The idea is simple and you can do this in any language. I will demonstrate it here using English. You start with a simple sentence: “My friend has a car” – you write it down Next, you quickly think of extra words to make the sentence bigger For example: “My good friend has bought a new car” – you write this down under the first sentence Now, you make another sentence from your head – don’t worry about making mistakes “My good friend from London has bought himself a new red car which he likes very much.” You write this down also Then you make a bigger sentence “My very good friend from London, who I spoke with last week, told me he has bought himself a new red car which he likes very much” 4 sentence are probably enough although you could write more. You can then check the sentences as well as you can for grammar and spelling and then read each sentence out loud and listen to how you say it. So, from four sentences, you have a lot of chance to practice many different language skills. I believe that this will help also improve fluency The important thing is to think of it like a game and enjoy it, getting the words from your head as youy can. This will make you think more clearly in the language and help you to think of the words you need when you have conversations with people. Enjoy your mind essays, you can keep them and look at them again a few weeks later and try the same sentences again to see if you can think of words more quickly than before. Be good, be happy Bye for now

 

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Hello everybody Today I want to talk about a new idea I have had to do some language practice on our own with no more than a piece of paper and a pen. I call this idea “mind word essays”. With this idea, you can practice: Thinking in a language Writing Reading and grammar Speaking/Listening You can do this anywhere, whilst travelling, at home, with friends. I had the idea when I was flying to Germany and I wanted to practice German but I had nothing with me except a pen and paper. The idea is simple and you can do this in any language. I will demonstrate it here using English. You start with a simple sentence: “My friend has a car” – you write it down Next, you quickly think of extra words to make the sentence bigger For example: “My good friend has bought a new car” – you write this down under the first sentence Now, you make another sentence from your head – don’t worry about making mistakes “My good friend from London has bought himself a new red car which he likes very much.” You write this down also Then you make a bigger sentence “My very good friend from London, who I spoke with last week, told me he has bought himself a new red car which he likes very much” 4 sentence are probably enough although you could write more. You can then check the sentences as well as you can for grammar and spelling and then read each sentence out loud and listen to how you say it. So, from four sentences, you have a lot of chance to practice many different language skills. I believe that this will help also improve fluency The important thing is to think of it like a game and enjoy it, getting the words from your head as youy can. This will make you think more clearly in the language and help you to think of the words you need when you have conversations with people. Enjoy your mind essays, you can keep them and look at them again a few weeks later and try the same sentences again to see if you can think of words more quickly than before. Be good, be happy Bye for now

 

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Hello everybody. Thank you very much for visiting my new website!  I have my own website and I have chosen “Language Explorer” as the name.  I am a native English speaker and I learn French, German, Mandarin Chinese and Spanish.

Are you also a “Language explorer”? Well, if you are, then this may be the website you.

My hobby is language learning and I like to share my ideas and experiences.

Maybe in time, we can have a “Language Explorer Community”  of people who are also interested in language and making life fun through developing language skills.

I am making this site for:

• People like you who are interested in improving foreign language speaking, listening, reading and writing.
• People like you who like a relaxing and interesting website where they are always welcome
• People like you who enjoy listening to some relaxing music
• People like you who want to share ideas and get to know people and culture from around the world.

I will be telling you about life in England and also some of the culture and history of my country.

My “Google Earth” reference is: Lancashire, England

I will put some “videocasts” on my site sometimes

I am always interested in your ideas and feedback. Please leave messages if you want to and I will try to answer you as soon as I can. I really want my website to be interesting to everybody who visits.

Thank you for visiting and “watch this space” for new things…..

You can still visit my other websites which I will keep going for some time yet:

www.alanlancs1.podomatic.com (my first website for everyone who enjoys languages)

www.alanpalmer.podomatic.com (for chinese friends)

Be good, be happy!

Your friendly Language Explorer

Alan

Dragon Boat Racing from roflman79 on Vimeo.

Here is a video of the Dragon Boat Race that my son and I took part in yesterday.

I hope you find it interesting. A bit of Chinese Culture in England.

My commentary on the video is: Alan here. We are at Hollingworth (I made a mistake and said “Hollingsworth”) Lake where today we’re going to have Dragon Boat Racing. Perhaps not the same as in China but the boats will look very similar and we’ll see what we can do.

The company I work for has a boat (on hire) and we will be racing very soon. We hope we can win, but at the moment we don’t know - so we’ll see…

So enjoy the next part of the video which will be the dragon boat race….”

Bye for now

Alan