We have arrived to the third element of the LIVE-system, which is expressing the language in a smart way to really start speaking it from day one using texts that are directly related to your personal interests.
First let´s take a look at what we already have talked about.
- First of all you have completed the learning style tests that you have found in the LIVE© web-environment and you have printed out the results to take them into account to guide your decision-making process
- Secondly, you have the list of most commonly used words and you have started to learn the words that are new for you in this list using a memorization program that you have installed on your computer.
- Thirdly you have found your first listening material and you will listen to it every day for 5-7 days in a row.
This is where we stand at the moment. Now let´s get into expressing the language!
As we´ve mentioned many times already throughout this book, imitating the language is the most natural and most powerful way to start expressing it. It´s the way we acquire our mother tongue as well, isn´t it? Your parents say something that is real-life related and that has useful context for you, and you start to understand it pretty quickly. For example “Do you want to eat?” is a really beneficial sentence and it makes sense to understand it. But at the same time you probably agree that if your father expressed the sentence “I have to take my car to the carwash” then it didn´t grab your attention as much because being a baby you probably didn´t care about cars and whether they were clean or not.
So, basically this is something that your brain chooses itself – what to understand and what not to understand. It´s a cute and lovely understanding that we choose ourselves what we acquire and what we do not. Usually it´s not like that at all. The environment and the needs determine what we acquire and memorize, not the other way.
You probably agree that when you were a baby you didn´t make a conscious choice to memorize something. It just happened, didn´t it? This is again linked to the idea that unconscious learning, which we talked about in the introduction, is immensely more powerful than conscious learning.
The idea of this chapter is to give you all the tools and all the knowledge to activate your acquisition of the language in the most efficient way – so that you would feel that you are expressing yourself in the language from day one, creating a language environment in your everyday life.