Mid-Winter Festival Day 5
Learn A New Language.
I bet you saw this one coming. Learning a language at any age is an extremely rewarding experience. We all know that babies are the best learners. Their openness,energy, and playfulness allow them to learn languages with ease. Children who have one adult speaker for each language can learn up to five different languages before the age of 5 or 6. Has this age passed you? Don't worry you are never too old to learn. Leonardo Da Vinci learned Latin at the age of 44. Let's say, for example, that you wanted to learn the Swedish language. Here are a few tips for accelerating your language learning:
- Be willing to make lots of mistakes. Don't think of mistakes as failure only as feedback. Babies don't worry about looking stupid,cool, or instantly achieving perfected success. They just jump in and speak. Your progress is directly connected to your willingness to play and to accept the fact that it isn't perfect. Keep motivated. A Viking ship wasn't built in a day.
- Just like a talking one year old who babbles...repeat words and phrases over and over again.
- To jump start your language learning why not try a blended language learning program online? I bet you saw that one coming too. LearnSweden uses an approach of online self-paced lessons along with live classroom language meetings conducted by one of our native Swedish teachers. So you study Swedish when you have time in the Learning Center. We are open 24/7,365. All of our lessons are right there at your fingertips and our friendly teaching staff is there to help your success.
- Learn words and phrases related to areas of passionate interest and then work out from there.
- Place Swedish post-it notes all over your house. Put them on everything. You can take the post-it note down once you have learned the word.
- Read the Swedish language whenever you can. Why not start in English and work towards Swedish. There is a wonderful online daily english newspaper about everything that happens in Sweden. www.thelocal.se You can move over any word and click on it and the swedish word will come right up. It's a really fun way to learn Swedish.
- Are you a poet and didn't know it ? Turn your refridgerator or cookie sheet into a poetic magnet haven. The magnetic poetry kit has a Swedish version containing 500 words to support the poet in you. You can find them at www.magneticpoetry.com
- Learn all about the culture. We have culture sections within our courses at LearnSweden as well as cultural courses to aid you in your preparation to travel to Sweden. To get you started on your virtual tour of Sweden start here www.visitsweden.se. While there why not join their wonderful community of Swedes and people who love Sweden. It's called Community of Sweden. The forum is in English so no worry there.
There is a chinese saying which says:"For every language you learn you get a new life". The meaning behind that is simple. Every language has it's way of viewing and experiencing the world we live in. With each language you learn you acquire new food,literature, music, theater, views on science,politics,religion,celebrations and traditions.Though our language is Swedish, these guidelines can be applied to any language.
Lycka Till in your new language learning endeavors. To learn more about LearnSweden you can find us here www.learnsweden.com