[Talk] How to properly learn English(or any other language)

看板EngTalk (全英文聊天)作者AlShinn (夜花水月)時間3年前 (2021/06/29 00:42)推噓1(1推 0噓 0→)

留言1則, 1人參與討論串1/2 (看更多)

First, a little of my background, I have been living in Australia for almost 7 years. And I will turn 22 in a few months. Some of the following will have some scientific practicality, but most will be anecdotal, from my own experiences. Before learning a language, you have to ask yourself: Why do I want to learn this language? I may not even need this skill to live my life. It is essential that you find your motive before continuing. For example, "I want to learn English so when COVID is gone, I can travel to the US." So, you want to go to the US, experience the life in this foreign country, and the prerequisite to enjoyable, memorable and fun experiences is having a descent speaking skill. Some people may learn a language for different purposes, for example, many priests in Vatican city learn Latin, but they do not converse in Latin, the language is mainly used for ceremonial purposes. Some of my friends only learn a bit of English so they can understand the textbooks for their study, not something they use for verbal communication. The reason you want to find your motive is that the vocabulary varies in different context, like normal people would never speak like Othello by Shakespeare. Here I want to introduce a scientic phenomenon called Zipf's Law. It is an observation of the mathematical relationship between each words. Let's use English as an example, the word "the" is the most common word in English followed by "of" "and" "a", and the frequency of the word "of" occurs is half to "the", "and" is one third to "the", "a" is a quarter and so on. You may ask: Why does this have to do with learning a language? If you understand the principle behind it, this is actaully applicable to every aspect in life. I am yet again going to introduce another peculiar phenomenon, Pareto distribution, which states that 20% of the causes account for 80% of the outcomes, or simply 80-20 law. In the context of English, only 20% of English words are involved in 80% of the conversations. So, how many words are there in English, and how many for 20%? There is no clear answer to that, but I would say, if you know 1000 common words, you are quite descent already, and that would probably suffice for your travel. To recap briefly, depending on your purpose for learning a particular language, the complexity of the vocabulary that you will be using will be different, and you should accommodate yourself so that you are learning the things you need, although it does not hurt if you can learn more than that. I will continue some time this week! -- ※ 發信站: 批踢踢實業坊(ptt.cc), 來自: 159.196.105.193 (澳大利亞) ※ 文章網址: https://www.ptt.cc/bbs/EngTalk/M.1624898521.A.870.html