Happy New Year!
This afternoon, I watched an interesting video related to language learning posted by a young man called Loïs Talagrand. He is a native speaker of French who grew up on the French Polynesian island of Tahiti, currently working as a software developer.
Like most people on the island, Loïs went through the French education system and studied English for several years before graduating high school. However, at that point, he still wasn’t able to express himself in English fluently, and had difficulty understanding spoken English.
In the video I watched today, Loïs speaks English with perfect fluency and almost zero accent. He talks about the two main learning strategies he utilized in his college years that helped him elevate his English to an extremely advanced level.
Check this out:
The first strategy is repetitive listening. To improve his English, Loïs watched and listened to enormous amounts of native content, such as podcasts, television shows, and movies. What’s remarkable about his method is that, if he liked a certain content, instead of listening to it only once, he would repeat it multiple times to deepen his understanding. The same goes for the books he read.
As he stresses in this video, repetition is the name of the game. Consuming the same content several times allowed his brain to naturally absorb the basic rules of grammar and pronunciation, which contributed to building up his own fluency in the language.
Loïs also mentions the importance of comprehensible input, meaning that you should listen to materials that you can understand quite well, instead of something that’s too difficult for you.
The second strategy is to set English as the default language in your life, and maximize your exposure to the language, even if you’re living in a non-English speaking environment. This includes, for example, setting the interface language on your computer and smartphone to English, and trying to do as many things as possible exclusively in this language, like talking to yourself or even thinking in English.
Loïs emphasizes in the second half of the video that, even if you employ the perfect strategies, there is no hack or shortcut in learning to speak a foreign language to near-native fluency - you still have to dedicate thousands of hours to reach that level. I fully agree with what he says, and do not hold any illusions about finding some magic method that can suddenly make me super-fluent in English or French.
As I am learning French right now, I find these tips to be extremely relevant to me. Maybe I can start by increasing the amount of French that I listen to daily, with a focus on repetitive comprehensible input.
I can’t help but feel excited about how my French will evolve in the coming years!
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