Surrounding Myself
A learning trick — rather a tool, actually — very often praised is to surround yourself with things in the language you’re studying, forcing onto you the need to understand said language. This technique is certainly a great one and has helped me a huge deal when I was taking English lessons and later when I ventured into French.
Back then, I borrowed my cousin’s SNES and his Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego cartridge — which I remembered playing as a kid trying to decipher what “rojo” meant as I didn’t speak English at the time and Spanish was the closest option to Portuguese I could get — and had a great time beating the game in French with quite some ease.
Unfortunately it was the end of my days as a Junior, meaning that I would have to dedicate my time to studying for University Entrance Exams. Alongside that, I didn’t have much contact with French, besides a few songs I started listening at the time. Those reasons led me to keep language learning on hold for around a year.
As soon as my Senior year had passed I decided to branch out to Japanese before my first semester at college began. Many people find it to be an odd choice of a language to get learning, but, for me, switching to Japanese was the must logical thing I could do once I had — and still have — way more contact with Japanese media then I have with the French one, thus making it easier to practice and a must if I don’t want to keep being dependent on subtitles and translations.
So, what was my first move after I’ve learnt a bit of the language? You guessed right, set as much things I use as possible to that language. Currently my Facebook account is set to Japanese. With this I’ve surprisingly been able to read things I though I had not enough understanding of the language to comprehend yet. Even though I had to search the meaning of others, it is a great motivator and way to check your progress with a said language.
Not everything goes as smoothly, though. For instance, I’ve tried playing The Sims 2 in Japanese and — Let’s just say things hadn’t gone as intended — I couldn’t understand what options I was choosing leading to my Sim making a foe out of the Good Witch while I wanted the pretty opposite. I hurried things up too much. Yet I needed to put what I learned into practice and challenge myself with things I still hadn’t learnt, I hadn’t taken into consideration that it was a whole new language with three writing systems completely different from the one used in most western languages, such as Italian or Dutch.
After that, by my own experience, I’ve come to grasp the ups and downs of surrounding myself with a language I’m learning. Is it a good idea? Sure, it is a great idea. But you probably will face times you will be stuck and, if your resolve is not strong enough, such hardships are prone to make you quit. So it’s a tool that needs to be used with caution in order to avoid backfiring.
So, have you ever tried this technique? How was it? Did it work out for you? Please let me know in the comments!
