Author: pabloroman

I'm just a random Spanish guy, but I'm determined to improve how we learn foreign languages worldwide. The whole idea happened while I was studying in Japan, as a combination of frustration in my research and watching too many TED talks. I realized that languages was something that I knew how to learn (I learned English, French and Japanese to fluency), and that language classes all over the world were doing a really bad job trying to teach it, so I thought that was something I could contribute to the world. My experience learning English taught me that your level of proficiency at a particular language could be improved quite a bit by just doing stuff in the language. My experience learning Japanese taught me that it could be done right from the start, without any formal instruction at all. Because of that, I started researching alternative aproaches to learning a foreign language that matched my experience. For a few months I read many blogs and research papers (I still do) and eventually I found a method that really matched my idea of language learning. I'm talking about the ALG method that's used at the (http://auathai.com|AUA Thai) school of Bangkok. When I learned about it, I read the book (http://algworld.com/archives.php|From the outside in) by the creator of the method, J. Marvin Brown. That book hit me so hard... It matched so well my experience when learning languages that convinced me to look deeply into it. I'm now living in Bangkok and attending the AUA Thai school. Trying to learn Thai to test the method on myself, and at the same time take a look on how well it works on other people, how it can be improved and how it can be adapted to different situations.

You’re not stupid

I don’t think most people believe themselves to be stupid. So why is it then that we treat ourselves as if we were stupid when we are trying to learn a foreign language? We do that by seeking an explanation for every detail of the grammar, a translation for every word, as well as explanations of when and how to use those words.

In this post I talk about how the brain is a really good pattern-finding machine. It is perfectly able to learn a language without us having to spoon-feed everything to it in the form of grammar rules and translations.

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Posted on by pabloroman 5

The Mythical Visual Learner

Can you learn a language visually? Imagine that you listened to audio recordings of Picasso while he was painting his masterpieces. Imagine that the sound was detailed enough that you could hear every brush stroke. Could you ever become a good painter by just listening to those recordings? No way! Why do we think that the opposite is true? Why do we believe that we can learn to speak a foreign language by looking at the written word?

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Posted on by pabloroman 2

How to play a foreign language

Would you teach a child how to swim by having the child read a book about swimming? I doubt it. Different abilities require completely different approaches to learning. In this post, I’m going to talk about the differences between becoming fluent in a foreign language and learning other abilities, and why insisting on applying concepts that belong to other abilities is preventing us from learning foreign languages as well as we could.

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Posted on by pabloroman 5

Be a child

Adults can’t learn a language as well as children can. Everybody knows that, right? Lots of research papers “prove” that after a certain age we can’t learn grammar and pronunciation to the same level as a native speaker (nevermind that nobody seems to agree on what that age is). Well, I beg to differ. In this post I’m going to discuss why  both popular belief and all that research are a result of flawed reasoning and how adults can learn a language as well and as effortlessly as children. Here’s a clue: be a child.

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Posted on by pabloroman 2

Language education is broken

In this post I’m going to share some observations that I made while learning foreign languages. These observations contradict the common beliefs, as I found out that that we don’t need to study grammar rules, to practice speaking or writing, or to get corrections. This realization is what brought me to try to find alternative learning methods and alternative explanations to the different phenomena encountered by language learners.

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Posted on by pabloroman 0