To learn to speak you have to speak

 It must be heavily emphasised that language consists of sounds. We are becoming so accustomed to silent reading and writing that we are apt to lose sight of this fact. Language must have existed for at least 20 000 years, but only for the last 4000 has there been any sort of written record. Writing, therefore, is an invention of yesterday, comparatively speaking. It bears the same relation to language itself as a page printed with staff-lines and black dots does to the sound of music. Even when we read silently, we are unconsciously "hearing" the words with an inner ear, and literary style is judged by the sound which the words make when spoken, never by the pattern which they may happen to make on paper. Take great pains, therefore, to master the pronunciation. Read the pages on pronunciation very carefully, and on no account skip them to come to "more important" matters. 

It follows, also, that you should try to speak Esperanto as much as possible, right from the start. If you can make contact with an experienced Esperantist, he will be delighted to help you. But if you have no one else to speak to, you should speak aloud to yourself. Put a question and answer it. Imagine that you have at your side a four-year-old child who never stops asking "What?... Why?... Where?... Who?..." Ask yourself these questions and answer them. The answer will often contain precisely the same words as the question ("Is Esperanto a beautiful language?" "Yes, Esperanto is a beautiful language", etc.), but say them again, nevertheless. This repetition is part of your training and gives an encouraging feeling of fluency. The important thing is to use Esperanto itself as much as possible. No doubt you will need to use some English at first, but regard it as a crutch to be dispensed with whenever possible, and finally to be discarded altogether. The only way to learn to swim is to go into the water and try. Books may tell you many interesting things about swimming, but however much you read them, you will never become a swimmer if you never actually enter the water. Similarly, the only way to learn how to speak Esperanto is by speaking Esperanto.

- Teach Yourself Esperanto

John Cresswell and John Hartley

Language islands

 

Mikel's "fluent in 30 days" builds on the idea of language islands. I think his idea was to give you 150 sentences every day built on language islands, so that at the end of the month, you have a very good vocabulary with grammar learned in practical sentences that you can use to talk about things that you would discuss in your native language.

So, for this method or idea to be useful to you, you need to start by thinking what it is you talk about with people. Think of 30 things. You can ask ChatGPT to give you ideas of language islands, and pick 30 that appeals to you. You can also ask ChatGPT to give you 75 questions in your target language, with translation, and then answer them, and ask ChatGPT to translate the answers into your target language. ChatGPT can also give you the pronunciation sound files. Now, I don't know how correct or good these are, but you'll have something to work on. 

Then to something different...

 Evildea looked into Mikel of Natural Language Learning, and I got interested. 

"Learn to Understand & Speak ANY LANGUAGE in 30 Days". 

Ok... challenge accepted. I want to learn Basque. He speaks it, so he should be able to teach it. Let's see...

The first day, we are to learn "150 conversation sentences NOW".
Basque is not in the audio files. ("If there are no audio files available for the language you want to learn, let us know in the comments". Where are the comments? I can't find them anywhere... No way to contact anyone.)
And it's Google Translate :-D
And the sentences are... well... not relevant to me, and because the audio files are prerecorded, they don't adjust to the changes in the text file... so I will learn to say I live in Basque country and have worked in Germany. Except that I don't, because they don't have the Basque audio files.

Anyway, he says one should find one's own questions... and then translate

But - I will learn these ~150 sentences today. 

And that's it... because only Day 1 is ready. All the rest of the days are "coming soon". 

Go to Omniglot and learn those sentences. THERE is an audio file, and even additional information.

Anyway, learning languages is very forgiving. You can learn totally worthless crap that doesn't really make any sense - Babel Fish translations - and try to speak a language using them, you will learn the correct way soon enough, if you understand Google Translate and AI make mistakes, and you might be learning something very wrong :-D

The thing is that when we are new to a language, we will make mistakes, and the people we talk with will correct you. They might not be nice about it, but it's just to admit you have been using these methods, they will understand, and it will become a joke. Just remember, you will be teased about your "favorite bidé" for the rest of your life. (In Finnish, mielipide is opinion, but mielibidé is favorite bidé)

Also, it looks like he has taken "his" method from the same source I've taken "mine" :-D

I was planning...

 I was planning on focusing in Syriac-Aramaic, but... ha! I stumbled over "Dreaming Spanish".

So now I'm doing that. 

And thinking about how I could adapt the method to Syriac. It's really hard to find material. So... I found this Swedish lady doing cooking videos in Syriac - but there is no translation, and I don't have the slightest idea of what she is saying... If I was younger, I'd guess what she is saying, and find translations, or something like that, the closest thing... but... most resources are very... Biblical. I suppose I should go and actually speak with people :-D 

Also, every time I see a language video on YouTube, I want to learn a language that was mentioned. I found Evildea, and now I want to learn Esperanto :-D

I like Esperanto. It's a bit of an interest club thingy, but there's nothing wrong with that. I've heard people get really upset because they think everyone learning a language must be the same. There's a couple of million people who know Esperanto, and more learning it, the idea, that they are all the same, is stupid. 

"Third week and still interested" :-D

 17 months later... 

I assume the interest died there. Well... it's time again :-D

There have been some changes in things during this... year and a half I've been absent. LingQ has changed a bit. There are more languages there. More languages in Duolingo, too. 

Anyway, a lot of information and links are now more or less worthless. I'm sorry, but I won't be going through them now... feels like I should start at the beginning, and I'm not doing that right now. Maybe later. 

I have been thinking about my childhood and all the possibilities I had at that time... sure, it was before the internet, and the possibilities are practically limitless now. 

There are things I would do differently if I could wake up in my 16 years old body...