Dear language-speaking humans,
Welcome to another edition of Make a Fool of Yourself Friday.
Today, I'll tell you a story about my dog in Thai.
The reason I want to tell you this story is because:
a) I like talking about dogs.
b) I like speaking Thai and have no one else to speak this language to.
c) I want to celebrate the fact that Google Translate now understands my Thai about 80% 72% of the time.
d) I want to share with you a much-underestimated language learning technique. It is based on another well-known technique called “shadowing.” Shadowing is when you listen to a native speaker and repeat after them. It helps you practice pronunciation and gets your mouth accustomed to using the language. By the way, this is useful even if you don’t intend to speak this language but only want to learn how to read. Because when you engage the motor skills necessary to produce speech, your brain will get better at understanding the language as well.
But I’ve taken it one step further. I don’t just repeat what I hear, I often memorize entire passages or stories. This way, whole chunks of text stay in my head making it very easy to create new sentences based on the ones I already know. This is also the best way to learn new words because it lets you remember them in context. (don’t try to memorize lists of words, it’s both painful and completely useless.)
It also gives you a huge boost of confidence because it makes you feel like you know the language.
Obviously, you have to know what each word means and how to break it down. Also — and I can’t stress this enough — it has to be something relevant to your life. Or at least something that you enjoy talking about. Language is vast, and if you learn vocabulary you won’t ever need, you’ve wasted valuable time and energy. So choose your topics wisely.
Just like with anything, this technique might not be for everyone. I like memorizing stories because it lets me pretend that I am fluent long before I am. But if you hate it then obviously it’s not for you. We all learn differently, and you’re much more likely to learn something if you’re enjoying the process.
This video is a result of my having memorized some of Grace’s Beginners videos about pets. In some parts, I blatantly repeat phrases and sentences that I remember from her, but mostly I build my own based on the ones I already know.
(Also, I just learned how to edit videos and oh my god I feel like I’m turning into a real grown-up influencer.)
Disclaimer: Please don’t learn Thai from me or anything. Learn Thai from Grace. Or someone else. I’m doing much better with Thai tones than I used to, but when I tried to tell parts of this story to Google Translate, I didn’t quite manage to get the message across:
Apparently, Substack can automatically generate a transcript for a video, but I was too scared to look at what it generated. Maybe next year.
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