Customer Reviews

How to Be a More Successful Language Learner (Teaching Methods)

5 star:		(3)
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3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

The book is designed to cover the "psychological, linguistic, and practical matters surrounding the successful acquisition of a new language." It covers the first two quite well, but the presentation of "practical matters" often falls short in providing nuts-and-bolts ideas with sufficient examples to help you implement them.

A much better book for most aspiring language learners looking for a how-to guide is Graham Fuller's "How to Learn a Foreign Language". It is less academic and more practical in tone, providing many suggestions with plenty of examples. The only practical things I saw in Rubin and Thompson's book which Fuller's did not have are (a) a self-test to help you identify your weak spots in language-learning skills, and (b) a section to help you clarify your objectives in learning a new language.

If you like the academic approach, this may be a good book for you. If you prefer a more familiar tone with a "hands-on" emphasis, get Fuller's book instead.

This book offers little information that a chat with any trained, competent language teacher wouldn't offer. Do you need to buy a book to tell you that you should learn something new everyday or be an organized student?

There are a few extras like a diagram showing the levels of fluency in learning a language, but that's not worth the price of the book. Save your money and get a good dictionary or other supplement for the language you wish to learn.

I wish I had this book 20 some years ago when I began learning Chinese. Although I have many years of language study behind me (including a degree in Chinese language and literature), I still found helpful, new ideas in this book when I bought it two years ago. And I continue to refer to it occassionaly for reminders and inspiration.

Many language teachers do not teach well HOW to be a student of the foreign language that they teach. Many are native speakers and never themselves had to think about how they learned the language they teach.

Also inspiring is the latest research and theory about language learning presented here. When I began foreign language learning, it was an accepted "fact" that adults (like me) could not learn languages as well as children. It is a suprise and relief to read in this book that research now debunks this myth.

I was suprised to see the other reviews of this book here on Amazon and to see that they were negative. I have found it to be a very helpful, well researched and well written book and an important reference in my continuing language studies.

We are using this book, believe it or not, as a required text in an intermediate level French course. I would not recommend it. Almost everything in this book is simply common sense. The information is too general to be useful - it would be much more helpful simply to learn about the language you are studying. The writing is rather simplistic. The only people who might find it useful are those who have never studied a foreign language. If you are already learning one, you know everything in this book that applies to you.

Did you already know that:

--it is worthwhile to practice a foreign language with native speakers?
--audiovisual materials could help you?
--foreign language dictionaries could help you?
--a foreign language varies from region to region?
--customs differ from one culture to another?
--one should be sensitive to non-verbal cues?
--there are formal and informal forms in some languages?

If so, then you probably won't learn much from this book.

Certainly this book is a "must". It's a little bit more practical than "How to learn any language". I can't understand why people who wrote some of the reviews on this page don't like it.
This is one of the few books written in English focused on this subject. For Instance, If you have difficulties learning pronunciation it helps you how to improve your performance at that point giving you a lot of originals tips and so on with the others items of the language learning (reading, oral comprehension vocabulary, etc).
This is a special book. A veritable treasure.

This is a truth masterpiece

I highly recommend this readable and entertainig guide to learn language. Certainly one of the few way of master a way of dominate a language is just reading this nice book.
Every page has a lot of practical advice and tips that I didn't found in others readings.