nnxion

I disagree with you in that Klipt, the things described by grumpy are actively learnable, phonetics is picked up automatically.

__________________
"Employ your time in improving yourself by other men's writings, so that you shall gain easily what others have labored hard for."
-- Socrates

Klipt

I'm not sure what you're saying. If phonetics were not actively learnable, would it be part of college linguistics courses? If pronunciation were picked up automatically, why would anyone have a foreign accent when speaking a non-primary language?

What I'm trying to say is that a good language learner should keep pronunciation in mind right from the start - a holistic approach, if you like - rather than ignoring it completely until they get to the point where it's really difficult to fix.

UnKnown X

When learning English, I never really paid much attention to my pronunciation - I always spoke with some odd Norwegian/Russian accent mixed with American English. When I decided to fix that, I spoke decent Commonwealth English after a few months. No problem there.

Though you do have a point - a lot of people struggle with unlearning what they've learned wrong. However, I know quite a few who were able to fix their accent without much effort.

nnxion

You will notice that one speaking a mother tongue longer has more trouble adjusting the accent, it's possible to learn, but almost impossible when not hearing someone 'speak it right'. In other words, you cannot tell me on paper how to speak without accent.

__________________
"Employ your time in improving yourself by other men's writings, so that you shall gain easily what others have labored hard for."
-- Socrates

Ross

I found learning one language inside-out, basically being able to write it without allot of thinking made learning other languages a doddle! I started out trying to learn a few languages at once; Visual Basic, Basic and Java, and I got the basics with them, but got confused when I tried harder things, so I dropped them and learnt PHP inside-out. Then I came back to them and found it much easier to progress. I would stick with a single language, learn it like the back of your hand and then try and take on a few more...

Although I'm sure methods of learning vary greatly depending on the person...

-Ross

__________________
DevelopersDigest.org - the programmers wiki

Klipt

Oh, I'll agree with you there, but I think trying to learn a language without listening to any native speakers is a bit silly.

LOI Kratong

Not necerssarily, my french teacher is not a native speaker for example, and i'm doing just fine...

__________________
www.heldtogether.co.uk

DaWei

I never worried about my accent, since everyone but I had one. One day I said, "'scuse me" to a guy and he thought I said, "shoot me." Good thing I had my kevlar jockeys on. I still don't worry about my accent, but now I have a Humvee with a multilingual, armed, chauffuer.

__________________
Abstraction doesn't make it impossible to write bad code; it makes it possible to write superior code.
Contributor's Corner: Grumpy on C++ Exceptions DaWei on Pointers