It’s been about a week since my last post, and it has been mostly my own fault. I was finishing up my finals for the spring semester here and afterwards I went on a trip with my friend Arata to Las Vegas. This was of course all fun and everything but I lost track of time and stopped adding posts on my blog, and for that I apologize.
I’ll give a quick run-down of what’s going on with me and let’s see if we can track down this burn out together and find ways that we all ca
n get back up on each of our own horses.
First off my grades from the spring term came back and I was glad to see that I had gotten all A’s and B’s so that means that my grades won’t be holding me back from going to Japan in September and graduating in a year. I have been offered a small job with a fashion group looking for translations to be done. Later on when I get more things finished with them I will post some of it up and add links. And finally, in terms of this site I will start adding video’s here hopefully by the end of the summer! But until then I will be restarting word of the day.
Now on to the part of this post that can help you…
We all get tired and bored of doing studying and it is hard to keep our focus on anything especially if it has to be done every-friggin’-day. However, with a few simple steps I think we can turn it around and fix the problem.
The problem is in our head for the most part. It feels impossible to listen to stuff that we don’t understand for hours on end, and if you’re anything like me you tend to fall asleep when you do try to do stuff like that. So what we got to do is figure a way to trick ourselves into understanding it.
So let’s try to understand the vocabulary with music, listen to a full song of your favorite band once without studying then find the lyrics and pick out one word and try to remember it as best you can. Then listen to the same song again trying to pick out that one word every time it is said. Once you can do that, then find another word and do it again this time picking out both words, and on and on until you get the whole song. Only at the end should you find out any grammar points (keep in mind most music grammar is incomplete) and figure out what the song is talking about.
Image via Wikipedia
The great thing about this is that you can do this anywhere and at anytime, as long as you enjoy the music then the language should come naturally.
My getting back on the horse tip: close the stupid textbook you have been studying all year and pull out that iPod and start dancing instead.
Extra pointer: having your blood circulate while trying to learn a language increases the capability to remember, reading it aloud does as well, as does writing down the word. So try to do all three while learning from your music.
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