{"id":4079,"date":"2015-06-05T20:04:47","date_gmt":"2015-06-06T03:04:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.corbinstreehouse.com\/blog\/?p=4079"},"modified":"2018-11-03T13:36:22","modified_gmt":"2018-11-03T20:36:22","slug":"on-learning-languages","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.corbinstreehouse.com\/blog\/2015\/06\/on-learning-languages\/","title":{"rendered":"On learning languages…"},"content":{"rendered":"

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I’m working on learning Italian. When I was a kid, I hated learning languages, and had the terrible monopolistic language view that everyone should speak English. I have long since realized that was a really stupid opinion, and it really hindered me from learning another language. In high school, we had to take two years of a language as a graduation requirement. I wanted to take German, just because I thought it would be cool, but they stopped teaching it the year before I reached high school. So, the options were French or Spanish, and I heard Spanish was easier and I took that. I generally had terrible teachers with the worst teacher being Mr Nava. Ironically, you would think he would be the best, because I believe he was an immigrant from Mexico. He simply made us memorize verb conjugations, and we never spoke Spanish in class. I memorized, and I got an A, but I didn’t learn.<\/p>\n

Now I really want to learn Italian, and at 37 it is becoming more difficult for me to learn new things — especially things like languages. I tried self-teaching myself German back in my early 20’s, and I know a few words, but I can’t really do much with the language. I decided I really want to learn Italian though, since Costanza is full fledged Italian.<\/p>\n

Unless you’ve been in the dark, I’m sure you have heard of duolingo<\/a>. It is an awesome website, and I’ve reached “Level 11” in Italian. I do a lot of lessons on my phone, and some on the website while at my Mac. I also listen to Pimsleur audio books on the way to work. They utilize spaced repetition for learning, and I really like the technique. I also ran across a great app called Anki for the Mac. You can make flashcards with it that utilize the Pimsleur spaced repletion techniques. And, as an added bonus, you can add sound. So, I combine the two techniques by “borrowing” sounds from duolingo.<\/p>\n

I’ll do a post on this soon on how I’m hacking it to learn in a way that works well for me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’m working on learning Italian. When I was a kid, I hated learning languages, and had the terrible monopolistic language view that everyone should speak English. I have long since realized that was a really… [read more]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4079","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.corbinstreehouse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4079","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.corbinstreehouse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.corbinstreehouse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.corbinstreehouse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.corbinstreehouse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4079"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.corbinstreehouse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4079\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4080,"href":"https:\/\/www.corbinstreehouse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4079\/revisions\/4080"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.corbinstreehouse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4079"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.corbinstreehouse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4079"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.corbinstreehouse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4079"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}