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Would you share maybe, provide an insight into your language learning method that you have developed in the course of many years, starting from 15?
Well, we don't have much time to talk about it because as you know it would take a long time anyway,
but to make a long story short I would say that
what I do is..you know, languages are like systems,
so when you have one system, which is your own native tongue,
and then you have the other system,
the target language, you have to understand
figure out how the other system works.
And so what I do is, I use a bidirectional translation,
meaning that I use my own native tongue as a "crutch"
a help to figure out how the other language works,
and by translating things back and forth,
let's suppose that I am learning German,
I translate from German into Italian,
and by translating it into my own native tongue
I make sure that I understand everything
because you cannot translate something unless you have understood it.
So this is the "analytical part" so to say, and then
I translate it back into German in order to figure out
how the language works.
By doing so, you know if you translate from
your target language into your own native tongue, it is not that complicated, but
when it comes to translating it back a few days later,
you will figure out that first it is much more difficult, and it actually helps you figure out the nuts and bolts of the language
figure out how different languages convey the same message.
And by doing that I form what I call "a language core"
meaning that I do learn words, because words are quite important if you want to speak fluently, but
first and foremost, I learned how to assemble the pieces together, like a lego.
I learned how to form sentences
According to the statistics, the amount of words that we use in daily conversation
is just a tiny part of the overall amount of words that exist in a language
So what I do is: first I make sure that I am able to put things together,
and then I add quantity to quality.
So at the beginning it is quality work, I work on a language
according by and through this technique and then
I expand it