A Coma Way to Speaking a Foreign Language

For most people, learning a new language incurs many hours of formal classroom lessons and daily practice of reading, writing, listening and speaking. In the case of a Croatian teenager, she awoke from a coma in 2010 to find that she had forgotten her native Croatian and spoke fluent German instead - a language she had just started learning in school.

I'm relearning French the hard way. I learnt the language in university a long time ago and I've forgotten most of it. Anyway, I still prefer learning it the hard way to speaking the language effortlessly after some traumatic experience. Anyway, there's no guarantee that one would speak a foreign language after waking up from a coma. Worse still, what if, instead of speaking French, I end up speaking a dead language like Latin!? Quid agis!

Learning English by Listening

Having taught English for a good number of years, I have often reflected on how to help my students learn the language in the quickest way possible. I must say that there's no shortcut to learning English, or any other language for that matter. Much has been written about how one can learn a language through listening, so what I'm about to share here is nothing new. 

Listening. This skill is often overlooked in the school system. Today,students are fortunate in that they have easy access to a wealth of free listening resources on the Internet. A quick search on Youtube using the keywords English listening exercises reveals 140,000 results. Pick the ones that you like which might not be too difficult for you to understand. Listen to each video several times: Understand what is being said, and after having understood it, learn to speak like the person in the video. I'm not saying you should mimic the person's accent because you may end up speaking as though you're parroting the speaker. If the video is good, you'll somehow know it, learn to adopt the speaker's fluency, pacing, and pronunciation. You might also want to pay attention to the speaker's body language, for example, eye contact and hand gestures for emphasis. Do this over several videos. Not only will you learn the language but you'll also become a good public speaker. 

What are you waiting for? Go to Youtube now!