Hints From “Ideal” Language Learners
According to research ( National Foreign Language Center at the University of Maryland,) there are some typical characteristics of good language learners. While you may already have some of these characteristics, see if consciously cultivating others helps your learning.
Successful language learners share the following characteristics:
Successful language learners share the following characteristics:
- I am selective in what I retain from a passage.I focus on main ideas and content and function words. Most important, I focus on what I can understand instead of what I can’t.
- I tolerate ambiguity language.I am able to fill in the meaning of items that I do not understood immediately by using the context to make intelligent guesses.
- I have insights into my own preferred learning style and am able to organize input into a coherent system for myself.
- I am willing to take risks and appear “ridiculous” in order to test my own hypotheses about the language. A wonderful language learner, when asked the secret of his success, answered with a smile, “I have no sense of shame!”
- I focus primarily on communicating and doing things in the language (rather than on following grammar rules).
- I do not refer back to my native language system, but create a separate reference system for the new language. I am able to “think” in the language early in my study.
- I can take advantage of every opportunity they have to use the language. For example, when people are talking together in the language, good language learners will be “impolite” and listen in. Try to speak Chinese to everyone that you know who speaks it as well as (or better than) you. And try to read something in every Chinese sign or note that you see, including online.