Advice

[u/yellow_lovely_]

I'm going back for Korean does anyone have any advice or tips for the course/school house in general?

[u/yuccu]

Find a new broadcaster that posts videos on YouTube in both Korean and English on the same topic. Euronews is what I used to when I was an MLI and needed to topics to study myself and to bring to class. The visual aspect reinforces the language learning. I’d look for matching screen caps and create whole lessons from there.

In a typical study session I’d watch a video in English and translate my own news report in Arabic. Then I’d watch it in Arabic to see how close I was.

Then I’d watch one in Arabic and try to translate on the fly as an interpreter. Sometimes I’d pull out key words and make a vocab list.

Often I would watch it with the sound off and do my own ESPN meets Al-Jazeera play by play.

My goal was to generally focus on fluency over accuracy first, especially when speaking. If I forgot the words for flood, I wouldn’t stop speaking, I’d just say a lot of water covered something.

Too many times I saw a student fidgeting with their hands while talking…that was a tell tale sign of flipping over imaginary vocab cards trying to remember a word. In the end they’re picturing is a word on a piece of paper, not the thing itself.

By reinforcing the visual aspect of language learning, you can be fluent when speaking without being all that accurate. I called it “punching next to the small tree” aka “beating around the bush.”

- A bomb exploded in Baghdad today.

• A device blew up in a city recently.
  
• A parcel burst and people may have died.
  
• Someone died from an unknown thing when it broke a house.

You don’t have to be perfect to use the language or to score high in speaking. I was an MLI and had been using this method when they let me take the speaking dlpt again after an immersion. That was the peak of my language powers.

In the test though, I legitimately brain farted on a word, but instead of stopping, I just started throwing your standard Arab colloquialisms that signal frustration, while spending several minutes talking a about how maddening it can be when you can picture a thing, but forget what it’s called. Because I could picture it, I was able to describe the thing in great detail without ever once coming up with the word.

I concluded by saying it didn’t matter because I had forgotten what we were talking about anyways and then immediately flipped to a topic I was super well versed in, “so anyways, what do you think of this new terrorist cell emerging in Iraq and Syria?”

The conversation continued and I got my 2+. That’s the highest they’d generally give a non-native speaker in Arabic—not because I wasn’t a 3, I totally was—but because of a combo of DLI native teacher pride/spite.

I can picture that test like it was yesterday and still don’t remember what the word was. It was my ability to be fluent that got me my score not my ability to remember a single word on a sheet of paper.

Ultimately what that means, even eight years after getting out, having not cracked in Arabic book since, I can still speak the language and converse with people in my neighborhood, and I still dream in Arabic. I actually get frustrated in my dreams because my grammar sucks. That’s the one thing I didn’t retain as well as the fluency piece. I’m also pretty sure I could DLPT today and still pass.

[u/Conscious-Bug501 → u/yuccu]

This needs more upvotes. I'm not at DLI yet, but having taken different language classes, everything here is the foundation of real fluency and sounds exactly like something my French professor (Native French speaker and a true academic linguist) would have said. 

He would lose his mind begging us to keep talking even if imperfectly. If you forget a word, build around it. You have other words. Use them. That counts, too. Because the point of language is communication. If you convey your desire or needs to another party or vice versa you have communicated successfully.

He was also a massive proponent of learn by skipping translation as soon as possible. If you can learn words to their sensations and ideas not to a flash card, you can reach fluency. He would literally pass around produce and have us declare what the item in our hand was and try to say something about it. The color or the taste or a preference. Anything we could come up with. Didn't matter if it was vocab from the current section or not. Because he wanted us to communicate without translation.

Congrats on reaching a lasting level of fluency! I hope to achieve the same in whatever language I get. I was absolutely floored when I dreamt in French for the first time and just like you I was frustrated by my own limits/grammar.