<story><title>I Learned to Speak Four Languages in a Few Years: Here’s How</title><url>http://lifehacker.com/5903288/i-learned-to-speak-four-languages-in-a-few-years-heres-how</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>graeme</author><text>Another great resource is Pimsleur. I&apos;ve used their courses to learn Italian and German.&lt;p&gt;It&apos;s a half hour of audio each day. The key is that you speak out loud. You can do it while cooking or driving, or any other activity that is routine and non-verbal.&lt;p&gt;They teach you to pronounce phrases very well, and you learn the basic structure of the language. Once you can say &quot;I would like a glass of wine&quot;, you can easily learn to say &quot;I would like X&quot;.&lt;p&gt;When I got to Italy, people thought I had been living there for a year.&lt;p&gt;There are only two things you MUST do:&lt;p&gt;1. Do a lesson every day.
2. Speak out loud, in a normal conversational tone. The program is teaching you to have conversations.&lt;p&gt;I love these courses so much that I&apos;m compelled to gush about them whenever language learning is mentioned. They won&apos;t make you a native speaker, but you&apos;ll quickly reach a level where you can advance rapidly.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>xiaoma</author><text>I used Pimsleur for Cantonese in 2010 during a trip to HK and have kind of mixed feelings about it.  On one hand, it was &lt;i&gt;good&lt;/i&gt; for pronunciation.  Many people were shocked by how good my Cantonese sounded and had troubles believing me when I said I&apos;d just gotten to Hong Kong.  On the other hand, this caused some problems-- people consistently over-estimated my language abilities, and as a result said a ton of stuff I couldn&apos;t understand.  Had my speech sounded worse they&apos;d probably have modified theirs a bit and I&apos;d have learned faster.  The other wildcard is that I already spoke Mandarin fluently, and definitely had a bit of help from all the cognates.&lt;p&gt;Another downside to Pimsleur I discovered more recently while working on Swedish.  They&apos;re all about the same!  The dialogues and stories got kind of boring since I&apos;d heard them already in Cantonese.&lt;p&gt;Ideally, I&apos;d like a resource like Pimsleur &lt;i&gt;plus&lt;/i&gt; some kind of podcast (e.g. popupcantonese.com) so that I could build more vocabulary at least at a passive level and understand more of the speech I elicit from native speakers.</text></comment>
<story><title>I Learned to Speak Four Languages in a Few Years: Here’s How</title><url>http://lifehacker.com/5903288/i-learned-to-speak-four-languages-in-a-few-years-heres-how</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>graeme</author><text>Another great resource is Pimsleur. I&apos;ve used their courses to learn Italian and German.&lt;p&gt;It&apos;s a half hour of audio each day. The key is that you speak out loud. You can do it while cooking or driving, or any other activity that is routine and non-verbal.&lt;p&gt;They teach you to pronounce phrases very well, and you learn the basic structure of the language. Once you can say &quot;I would like a glass of wine&quot;, you can easily learn to say &quot;I would like X&quot;.&lt;p&gt;When I got to Italy, people thought I had been living there for a year.&lt;p&gt;There are only two things you MUST do:&lt;p&gt;1. Do a lesson every day.
2. Speak out loud, in a normal conversational tone. The program is teaching you to have conversations.&lt;p&gt;I love these courses so much that I&apos;m compelled to gush about them whenever language learning is mentioned. They won&apos;t make you a native speaker, but you&apos;ll quickly reach a level where you can advance rapidly.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dmarble</author><text>I&apos;ll add my endorsement. Pimsleur was the most enjoyable audio learning experience I&apos;ve had while commuting, because I actually learned something that has kept with me.&lt;p&gt;They use spaced repetition and native accents. I hear what I should say in my mind when I want to say it instead of trying to think of words on paper I&apos;ve learned. Of course, it has its limits (you don&apos;t learn to read or write), and only gets you the basics of a language, but it really helps you nail them in a way that makes you feel like you&apos;re naturally learning a language like a child does.</text></comment>