Tip of the day: absorbing your Language B! It is often difficult to know where to start revising for Language B, and part of this is because language acquisition is more of a skill to be acquired over time rather than something you can memorise off a piece of paper a few days before. The good news is that you still have more than a few days to acquire it! There are plenty of ways to pack in some subtle practice of your Language B without reaaally having to do much work, and you if you incorporate some of them into your day to day life starting now, youll hopefully find your skills improving! 1. Speaking to yourself in your head. This may sound like it verges on the crazy, but the idea is that when you think something in English/your native language, you challenge yourself to translate it. Especially the verbs! So when youre gazing out of the bus window and thinking I will eat some pasta for dinner... say it again in Spanish/French/X, in your head! Then in the oral exam you wont be sitting there wondering how to do to eat in the future 1st person... it will roll off your tongue because you think about eating pasta and your brain supplies you with I will eat automatically! Trust me when I say that this works. Naming objects, constructing sentences and looking up words and verbs that you dont know can help make the language come to you more naturally. It also helps a LOT with learning exceptions - just be sure to check that your mental language B is accurate! 2. Speak to actual other people. This one is obvious and it is tremendously helpful, but obviously its hard to do. You and your friends may make the same mistakes as each other, so you really need a native speaker or your language teacher to get maximum results from this. See if you can persuade them to give you extra conversation classes! Improving conversation will help improve your writing. Making a pact with your friend to try and speak for a day or a certain time of day in your Language B can be amusing and helpful. 3. Listen to foreign TV/radio/watch things with subtitles. People always go oh yeah Ill do that! but never actually do it. Now is a good time to actually do it. Reward yourself by watching the DVD box-set of your favourite show, but stick on the subtitles. Or have it in the language with your native subtitles! Its all just subliminal exposure which will help in the long run. 4. READING! Which will help you with... the reading paper, yes. Newspapers and so on can be good if youre up to speed with the news, but other great sources of reading material are kids books and parallel texts. You can actually read some pretty quality stuff in parallel texts, Penguin are one publisher that I know produce them. I did Spanish and felt super proud of myself as I read an original Gabriel Garcia Marquez short story. It really helps improve your language. The best thing is that you can do all of these things, with at least some element of enjoyment, in your downtime! So what do you have to lose? Start talking to yourself!
Posted on: Thu, 06 Mar 2014 16:24:16 +0000
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