My first contact with a foreign language was towards the end of 1st grade, when my parents found out we would be moving to California for two years and signed me up for English classes. For those two years, I learned English through interactions with classmates and teachers, and with some help from an Australian – Greek tutor. I’ve been speaking English ever since. I started learning French in 4th grade at a language school in Greece. I continued my French studies until the end of 9th grade when I got my last French certificate. In 11th and 12th grade I took IB Spanish at school, which put me at the same level in Spanish that I was in French. Although Spanish is significantly easier as a language than French, I partly attribute my success in the former to my previous experience with Greek, English, and French.
Throughout my years as a language learner, I drew several conclusions about my learning habits and preferences. One of the first things I noticed was that I am, as the Learning Styles quiz also suggested, a mix of a visual and a tactile learner. I understand information better by writing it out, color coding, visualizing, sitting in the front of the room, but I remember it better if I act it out, walk while reading, or arrange it in thematic groups. A few keys habits/needs I’ve noticed in terms of my learning processes are the following: 1) I cannot memorize information that is typed out or written by someone else – it needs to be my own writing. I am not sure if that is because of my hand writing or the way in which I organize information. In the same vein, I tend to understand and retain information better if it is written in blue ben (if color-coded, the basis color would be blue). 2) No matter how good someone is at explaining concepts, I may understand them I the moment they are being explained to me, but if I don’t go back and rework them o my own, I will rarely remember them. I have the same issue when I don’t understand the reasoning/logical continuation leading to an idea or a result. I have a hard time remembering a fact if the why behind it has not been explained to me in a logical manner. 3) I love trees and charts! If there is a way in which I can depict information in a tree, showing the relations between key ideas, then I will do it, because that is the easiest way for me to understand and remember all the information associated with it. Same for charts; pros and cons are a prime example; I would much rather write them as bullet points in two columns than in a paragraph or sentence(s).
For language learning specifically, I have noticed both with Spanish and English that I learn much faster by being forced to speak (i.e. being thrown into a country that only speaks that language) or by interacting with native speakers; asking them questions, having to paraphrase what I want to say in very simple terms, even including pantomime, because I have no other way of communicating my thought to them. Then what usually happen s is they figure out what I’m trying to say and say it in that language. When this happens, whatever it is I was trying to covey, I will not easily forget later on because much time and attention were spent on it, and I tried to figure it out myself (going back to the learning styles).
Another strategy that I find works really well for me when learning a language (in addition to the ones mentioned before) is listening to songs in that language, looking up the word-for-word translation of the lyrics, and reading along while the song is playing. That way I have the general sense of what the song is about, and more or less what each word means, so when I have to recall said words I will remember them in the context of the song and will hence be much more likely to remember what they meant.
Overall, I enjoy a variety of learning and retaining strategies, general ones but also ones specific to language learning, which I believe I have identified and am hopefully utilizing the correct way.
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