| I have been really obsessed with this one. Somehow I failed to learn things when I was taught in "official ways", yet I managed to learn the language by being brutally forced into practice and environment that pushed me to make it happen. I moved countries when I was 12, they put me in school straight away without knowing how to speak (although I have been studying for a few weeks, at least the basic grammar). The language group has been similar to my native tongue, however the alphabet was different (as I was used to cyrilic). Nonetheless, as a kid - I already saw some patterns and similar rules. I managed not to fail my class as well as spoke and wrote really well after 2.5 years. After 5 years I was better than most of the native tongue speakers in terms of grammar and on par with their vocabulary. Obviously using the language every day and being pressed to do so contributed. Years later I started learning German in high-school... was so bad it and never managed to even get to the basic level after 4 years. I moved to Berlin again years later but because English was already quite prevalent, it never pressed me to learn German and I never did. Somehow the most effective learning curve was just doing the thing, making a lot of mistakes and I never took textbooks into account even when doing so. The methodology was just deliberate practice and tacit knowledge in the end. |