jpormento's recent topics

I love the idea of incorporating songs and music in learning foreign languages. I've also made a few posts and replies on learning languages using songs and music. 

Just this week my friends have been teasing me about my studies in Russian language while were in a restaurant. They then played a song translated into Russian and tried to sing it in gibberish. Of course they're just making fun while waiting for our food to be served. Then it dawned on me. It's kinda fun and this could be another addition on how we can use music/songs in learning languages. You can't rely on singing them to learn and understand the correct way to pronounce the words. But you can memorize the words this way as well as the phrases in the language you're learning.

I think other learners would also agree that its useful to memorize the words as you sing them along because that's how most teachers in toddlers would have you do, sing the Alphabet. Problem is the availability of songs that you want to sing, specially if they are in your native language, are not really translated to other languages. So we end up searching for songs of other countries. So for example if you're learning German, you need to search for German songs. This could be hard since you'll first start to memorize the tune before you can actually sing it. 

Going back to my friends, they were actually singing "Love is an open door" from the movie Frozen (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9BageU6y9Y). So I quickly searched for similar popular cartoon movie songs in Youtube. I searched for the title of their songs then I added "in Russian" in my search since that's the language I'm learning. It worked. This time I searched Aladdin's A whole new world (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJbMW-CGwGs) which is even better because the subtitles have Russian and English translations. So this made me realize that there's a foreign language translation to almost every cartoon song that I watched. I'm assuming most of us do know these songs because it's either we watch them or we watch them with our kids. 

So if you're someone like me who's used to singing songs in the foreign language they're learning to memorize the words and phrases and you want to use a song that you're already familiar with, try the popular cartoon songs, more often than not they have a translation to a lot of languages. Better if you can search a version in Youtube that has subtitles both in English and the foreign language you are learning.

As for my friends, jokes are on them because I ended up singing the chorus of "Love is an open door" in Russian and I'm confident I got the correct words. Just don't ask my if I got the correct tune. :D

I've been reading some psychology articles lately and one article I saw in the suggested section was about learning languages where it says that we're supposed to also improve our skills in our first language if we're studying a foreign language. I find this very interesting because frankly, I didn't feel any change or improvement in my first language at all. And I tried to think about how is this possible and in what could it improve but I really can't think of any.

I've read about this on the website of Oxford University press:

I liked the article that tackles why learning a foreign language is important. One of the things mentioned though is that doing so would also improve our mother tongue skills. I couldn't help but ponder about this. As we start to focus on the mechanics of the second language, we get a better insight to our mother tongue making us more effective communicators and writers. There's no further explanation about it though.

Better insight of my mother tongue? I didn't seem to have this as I'm learning a new language. I've searched more about this kind if improvement but sadly I wasn't able to find any.

So now I'm curious if could there be any truth behind this even with out own observation. Any chance you had any similar experience like this?

By the way, I replied to a chat but the user I'm replying to is already offline. There was this option to "Send an offline message". I did send an offline message thinking that it will be sent on our chat room but it was sent to the inbox instead. I just want to suggest to have it sent to the same chat that we used because when they see my message to their inbox, they won't see the rest of our message in chat. It's as if I started a new conversation again.

Can we have notifications for chat replies? I do notice that there's a sound effect and I'm assuming that's means someone replied to my chat. However, when I check the last of chat inbox, you still need to find which one replied to you. So I was wondering maybe there could be other notifications than the sound effect? Perhaps put the most recent chat at the top and has a mar of "unread"? 

I would just like to share the similarity in learning new languages that I found and one method I've learned that maybe can help us.

As I try to make progress with my language learning, I try to always find other ways how to learn it more effectively. I also like to converse with other people who are learning the language as I do and see their progress and ask what they're doing. I've continued watching Youtube videos about it and this time the similarities in language learning that I learned was through your own method that you can enjoy and have the patience to learn it. 

Learning a new language is not really easy since we start but not knowing anything about it at all. And although we are motivated to learn the language, the motivation seems to fade away as time goes by without any considerable amount of progress.

Lydia Machova is a polyglot who also said the same thing. That people who learns new languages do so by finding ways to enjoy it. They create their own system or method on how they're gonna do it on their own little ways. Going to language classes is a good thing but instead of just sticking to their courses, you too must have your own method on how your are going to learn it.

One of the most funny and smart way she shared that I really liked is what her friend did using a group chat. Her friend added several friends in Russian. Then chatted one friend with hello, in Russian where he received another reply in Russian that he didn't understand. After he used a translator and found out what it means, he copied the reply, and sent it to another friend in the group chat and did the same thing again having the two people chat with each other with you as the middleman sending each of their replies while researching what the words mean. This way he got genuine conversations with that language and learned how the phrases are being used and so on.

Smart I would say. They all know they're in the group to learn new languages so it was okay anyway.

This is what I plan to try this week for myself while in search of other methods I can use to love learning a new language even more.

Do you guys also find other ways to love learning new languages? What do you think of this method by exchanging conversations in chats?

Hi, I just noticed that all posts in the General Chat as well as logs are all dated "1 year ago". I also created a new thread in the general chat. I can see at the home page of the "Community Forum" Tab that I'm the last one to make the post. However I can't find it now. I guess all the old posts are showing at the top and the most recent ones are being sent to the bottom. I don't remember it being this way last time so I thought maybe this could be a bug or something.

I just want to share that I've started listing down all the words that I'm learning, about 3 or 5 per day which I'm gonna be using for the rest of the day. This is working for me so far. Sticking to those words makes me practice with them consistently even for just a day. Hopefully when I'm better I can start with the phrases. What do you think about this? I hope you guys can try this too sometime and let me know if it also helped you.

Hi! I'm still learning the basics of russian language. I'm still a beginner but I plan to practice what I learned by communicating with someone. I'm curious to those of you who practiced speaking to someone before in order to improve on the language you are learning. Have you tried both methods? Which one was helpful for you?

Like all other language learners, I'm trying my best to memorize all the basics of the Russian language and try to use them in some phrases when practicing. It just dawned on me that one of the many reasons why I'm having a hard time is because of the formal and informal versions of their common phrases as well as the different versions of it. For example, when you look for the translation of the phrase "I'm sorry" in Russian, you'll find that there are different versions found everywhere online. Some youtuber says it's "izvinitye" while some websites will say that this phrase means "Excuse me". And now I've learned that it can also be said as "izvini" without the ending "tye" and will still have the same meaning. The more I learn, the more I realize how harder my learning is going to be and I won't give up until I learn them all.