Getting Languages Easier to Learn. The Least Efforts & Best Wishes. Artyom Chelpachenko

      The answer to the topic: «Without listening to speech, it is impossible to learn to speak». Conclude it for yourself.

      You can also compare learning languages with learning music. My mother graduated from a music conservatory, my brother graduated from a music school, and my father played the cello in his youth, so don’t wonder why I compare language learning with music learning. Let’s say you learn only musical notes, the theory about music is solfeggio, and without ever sitting down at an instrument or hearing a piece of music, will you learn to play? Not listening to music makes it hard to memorize the notes, likewise, not seeing the notes makes it hard to memorize the music. We face the same thing when learning a language.

      Without listening to foreign speech, your efforts to learn to speak will come to nothing, and I am not even talking about the fact that you will not be able to understand the other person speaking. How will you be able to understand your interlocutor who speaks in his native language with his peculiar pronunciation? Of course, sometimes knowing a lot of words can help – if you don’t understand the whole phrase of the interlocutor, you can at least recover the meaning of what was said by a couple or three familiar words.

      The problem is also that native speakers speak with a different intonation than recorded speakers or teachers. It is necessary to develop the skill of listening (aural perception of speech), and audio tracks to printed materials are helpful in this. Those Soviet times have passed when people managed to learn a language without audio materials. Lingaphone courses were not available to everyone, foreigners were impossible to meet, and it was almost impossible to hear live foreign speech. Today, thankfully, there are no borders of communication and traveling around the world, which makes mastering a live foreign language a simpler and more exciting experience.

      Let’s dive back into our childhood and remember how we learned to speak. After all, at the age of five, not everyone can read and write, but they can speak! It appears that you can learn to speak faster than to read and write! Take a 5-year-old child as an example and think about how he or she managed to learn to speak. It’s very simple. The child copied words and intonations from the parents’ speech – «mom», «dad», «can», «cannot», of course, perceiving these words by hearing. The child learned not only new sounds, and words, but also intonations, thanks to which, even without knowing the meaning of words, he could understand whether his parents asked him a question, whether they condemned his behavior, etc. You should not forget about such a God-given gift as hearing, especially when learning a language because it can be of great benefit to you! Let’s take an example from children just for once! Let’s try to repeat after the presenter, as if we were children, repeating everything after our parents, copying intonation, and melody, and of course, respecting the peculiarities of foreign language pronunciation.

      Summarizing this section, I would like to recall the Russian proverb «No pains no gains». No matter how much you would like to follow the path of less resistance, even if you «learn» the language by grammar, you will still have to «learn» vocabulary and words. Especially if your goal is to master speaking, try to learn as many lexical units as possible, be it words, common phrases and clichés, dialogues and thematic texts, and even boring examples of grammar rules. The main thing is not to be lazy, to treat the lessons with ease and relaxation, and not to forget to use sound materials in lessons. We will talk about the main techniques of language learning in the second chapter. I hope I have answered the question of why they say «study math» or «study physics» BUT «learn a language