Baby Stage || Learning Hmong in 30 days series
Week 2 is called the baby stage of language learning because this is where you should be use to saying pronouns, common verbs, and adjectives - you should be able to communicate like a baby (you/that/me/give/hot/this/etc.). I’ll continue to do some of the things that I did in week 1, but I should hopefully be more comfortable with words and it should hopefully be starting to click.
Videos
To learn more commonly used vocabulary and get use to hearing the target language, I’m going to watch more videos in that language. I’ll try to start off with dramas or vlogs if that’s available, things that are about easy topics where the vocabulary isn’t too highly specific to a certain topic (e.g., I wouldn’t want to watch a documentary about space). The simpler the topic is, the more you’ll understand it. During this time, you must be tolerant to ambiguity because you won’t understand everything. But for what you do understand, pay close attention to it and how they are using the words.
Listen a lot - let your brain soak it all in! Listen to the rhythm and patterns that repeat. With videos, you can also see their actions--the way they talk and their body language--and filler words they use. You should decipher each thing in the video. This helps you learn normal sentence connecters in the language, like how in English we say "um" and "like". Listen closely to how native speakers formulate their thoughts to create sentences.
Focus on understanding the meaning first before you understand the words. Seeing and hearing the language helps you fully comprehend it. Watching videos also allows you to practice and excites you about the language. You can grow a connection with people speaking the language. It creates a full immersion environment in that language and gives the language life.
Shadowing
Another thing you can do along with videos is shadowing. To shadow, find a clip of a native speaker and mimic everything about their speech - the pace, intonation, cadence, and most importantly pronunciation. Video clips of the speakers mouth will be most useful for this so you can copy their mouth positioning.
Don’t attempt to shadow everything though, because you won’t be able to get it and that might just end up making you more frustrated than helping you. For example, shadowing "Hey bro I was thinking we should go grab some steak at that place around the corner when we finish work" would be something along the lines of "Hey bro .... grab some... around the corner.... work." You also don’t want to rush yourself to try and copy everything because you will mumble, which isn’t a good habit.
Be attentive of your frustration level. If you get too frustrated, then stop and you can try again tomorrow to do just a little more. Don’t overload yourself and turn language learning into a chore, or you’ll become more averse to doing language acquisition. To do this, you can try shadowing for 5 minutes one day, and then try to do 5 more minutes the next day, as long as you’re doing a bit more each day.
A tip for listening to people who might mumble or talk really fast is to slow down the video's speed. "Playback speed" is an option on the settings for Youtube videos, where you can slow down or speed up the video. There's also the extension "Video Speed Controller" for Chrome so you can quickly adjust the video's speed on the fly.
Record yourself
To make it fun, try recording yourself! Sing to music in the target language and record yourself singing to the music, or record yourself mimicking a speaker’s video. Recording yourself also helps you figure out what words mean and how to put sentences together.
Read more
Read more things in that language. Moving forward from reading children stories, start reading magazines, newspapers, or online information in the target language. It’s easier to memorize words when you see it in context since we memorize phrases easier than singular words.
For a quick version of week 2 in a "worksheet" style Excel spreadsheet, see this Google Sheets that you can feel free to copy over to your own account: Learning a Language in 30 days.
P.S. It is now the second day of week 2, I've got to get on the new things...and still get better at some of the week 1 things.
