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Where to practice

Another polyglot’s book, Benny Lewis, Fluent In 3 Months. What he said in prologue is: “A language is a means of communication and should be lived rather than taught”.

It corresponds to “5 hypotheses of language learning” by Stephen Krashen, especially this one: “Acquisition requires meaningful interaction in the target language — natural communication — in which speakers are concerned not with the form of their utterances but with the messages they are conveying and understanding”. It derives from his main definition between “the acquired system” and “the learned system”: the first is what we receive by the natural way, as do children; the second is what we learn consciously during classes as a system of grammatical rules and accompanying vocabulary.

It’s my basic problem in languages, especially in English. I’m constantly reading a huge amount of books in English, fiction and non-fiction, but I almost don’t communicate in it, except only rare touristic experience abroad, where the native language of my vis-à-vis also isn’t English nearly always. Such common “touristic” Runglish as “two-tea-to-two-two” serves my well elsewhere from Prague to Dubai to Hongkong but doesn’t satisfy me at all.

But I extremely don’t like “conversations for the purpose of conversation”, it looks like a waste of time. That’s why I failed when trying to join the language studying groups, where people are chatting with each other about anything what they can discuss with their very poor vocabulary and wretched pronunciation. Why they torture himself and each other? Anyway, I don’t want to be a part of this BDSM club.

So, the problem remains.

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About Алексей Чадаев

Директор Института развития парламентаризма