Now let´s move on to the second element in the LIVE- methodology, which is creating yourself a language environment through daily listening.
Our practice shows that using this learning element consistently – on a daily basis – is the most important foundation for achieving great results. Therefore we advise you to use this element exactly as described in the following chapter.
IS THERE A RIGHT AND WRONG WAY TO LISTEN TO A LANGUAGE?
But before finding your first listening material, let´s discuss the importance of daily listening. And let´s start with a question.
Do you know someone who as a child watched television in a foreign language and started to understand and speak the language without any pre-existing knowledge and without studying it at school?
I´m sure that you have a friend or relative who has learned a language exactly like that. I experienced the same thing with German as a child. When I was little I watched German cartoons on a daily basis and in high-school I “discovered” that I could understand German. Before that point I hadn’t even realised that I understood it, because I had never given it a moment’s thought. It was simply a natural part of my daily life as a child – to understand the cartoons that I was watching when I turned on the TV.
But let´s take a look at how I started to understand a language by just watching cartoons and listening to it. How is that even possible? Doesn´t it sound irrational that you show a child cartoons with some reasonable consistency – without them having any pre-existing knowledge of the words and grammar of the language – and they start to understand the language. How does that even happen?
If you were to ask a friend who has learned a language like that, then they would tell you that it is something that happened automatically without them even thinking about it, that it wasn´t something that he or she was consciously thinking about. The friend just wanted to understand the cartoons, but little by little they understood more and more, until the cartoons made sense. Your friend might even tell you that they don´t remember even watching the cartoons without understanding them. This is because the way he or she acquired the language was natural.
This rarely happens to people following only traditional language learning systems. Traditional language learning would even tell you that it´s not possible.
At the same time, the people who have learned languages in this natural manner will tell you that they don´t know the names of the declensions or conjugations, but they still correctly employ the grammar of the given language, because their understanding of the grammar has developed automatically within their language function, without them needing to make a conscious effort to learn all the little details of that same grammar.
Now, when you think about how you learned a language at school then there had to be preparations made before you could start listening to something. The teachers told you to learn a certain amount of vocabulary and then you were ready to start listening to an audio text where two people where speaking about something and you had to consciously make an effort to understand what was being talked about. Nothing about this situation was natural.
In all likelihood the whole experience was mind-numbingly boring and thoroughly unenjoyable.
But as a child, not once did anyone tell me to watch those cartoons in German. I myself wanted to do it, no matter what. So what is the difference between these two situations when it comes to learning efficiency? Why was my mind totally open in one situation as a child, without anyone needing to push me to learn, but totally closed in the other?
The first major difference brings us back to a subject we covered in the introduction: YOUR PERSONAL INTERESTS.
When your interests as a learner are taken in account and put at the center of the learning process, then your mind opens up and takes in everything that you have to learn almost automatically.
But if you are placed in an environment or context that is not directly concerned with your personal interests then your mind will shut all the channels through which information travels the most efficiently and the learning process becomes slow, unmotivating and unenjoyable. It´s as simple as that.
But let´s ask ourselves again, how is it possible that someone learns thousands of words in a language by just watching television? Without ever writing them on a piece of paper or without investing time in learning these words one at a time? The answer here leads us to our second powerful keyword: CONTEXT.
It´s the visual context of watching a cartoon that will generate meaning automatically in your memory and this will develop a language