{"id":54,"date":"2009-04-22T01:28:24","date_gmt":"2009-04-21T23:28:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ikindalikelanguages.com\/blog\/?p=54"},"modified":"2016-01-26T02:15:47","modified_gmt":"2016-01-26T00:15:47","slug":"language-success-stories-people-who-have-learnt-languages-in-a-limited-amount-of-time","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ikindalikelanguages.com\/blog\/language-success-stories-people-who-have-learnt-languages-in-a-limited-amount-of-time\/","title":{"rendered":"Language Learning Success Stories: People who have learned languages in a limited amount of time"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Learning languages in a limited amount of time &#8211; is it possible? Well, some people do it. I want to collect a small list of personal stories of people who have done this from the web and link to them here. Here goes:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/beyondbounds.org\/2009\/02\/how-i-learned-chinese-in-only-2-years\/\">Chinese in Two Years<\/a> &#8211; a story that I have found in <a href=\"http:\/\/aspiringpolyglotblog.wordpress.com\/2009\/04\/21\/essay-woes\/\">Aspiring Polyglot&#8217;s blog<\/a> about a guy who has learnt Chinese from scratch in two years. Well, pretty impressive, considering it&#8217;s Chinese and not some Romance language but it seems that the second year was a study abroad program to Beijing. Of course, in terms of learning the language it&#8217;s a great decision but that&#8217;s a bit like cheating, isn&#8217;t it? It&#8217;s like writing an article on &#8220;how I learned maths&#8221; and writing in it: &#8220;I went to classes and the teacher taught me&#8221;. Not much value for the learner. Regardless of that, he mentions some tips such as finding a girlfriend in China (duh) or listening to Chinese podcasts and also makes a list of mistakes he did which you can learn from. He learnt Chinese almost fluently in two years so I guess you could find this article inspirational.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.kuro5hin.org\/story\/2004\/12\/29\/15258\/287\">French in One Year<\/a> &#8211; this guy seems to have managed to learn French and successfully pass a standardized French test in one year and he writes about his experiences in this article. Some great language learning tips there. I had found this website a while ago while I was actively learning French myself and I really enjoyed reading it. The thing I can recall from it even now is his way to remember the genders of the words un probl\u00e8me and une erreur: very clever.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.ikindalikelanguages.com\/blog\/how-i-learned-portuguese-in-5-months\/\">Portuguese in 5 Months<\/a> &#8211; my own story. I admit that I always wanted to beat those other guys and write my story. So I did. I learned Portuguese without ever having studied the language before up to a level where I could read books and understand the sense of them without a dictionary in 5 months. I did it just like the Chinese-learning guy, though: I lived in the country. However, this has changed my attitude to language learning and I now understand how it is unfair to say that one learns the language automatically by living in the country because that&#8217;s not true. In any case, I am glad I could make a contribution with this story of my own.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>That&#8217;s it. Three items. If you have more good inspirational <strong>language success stories<\/strong> like that, feel free to post them in the comments.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Learning languages in a limited amount of time \u2013 is it possible? Well, some people do it. I want to share with you some of their stories.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33,30],"tags":[39,40,17],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ikindalikelanguages.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ikindalikelanguages.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ikindalikelanguages.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ikindalikelanguages.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ikindalikelanguages.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=54"}],"version-history":[{"count":16,"href":"https:\/\/ikindalikelanguages.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1043,"href":"https:\/\/ikindalikelanguages.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54\/revisions\/1043"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ikindalikelanguages.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=54"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ikindalikelanguages.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=54"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ikindalikelanguages.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=54"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}