It's my first post here.
I was planning for a long time to learn another foreign language. Polish is my mother tongue and I also speak english. Not on a professional level of course but I'm pretty satisfied with it. I can understand and I'm understood most of times.
Anyway, yesterday I came across a youtube video made by a man who speaks 8 languages. He stated that today's methods of teaching languages at schools are completely incorrect.
He said that learning grammar in the beginning was a bad idea. As an example, he mentioned his daughter who was 4 years old and spoke polish, spanish, english and portuguese. Such a kid mustn't have a clue about any grammar. Kids don't know about adjectives, attributives and stuff like that and still they are able to wield those languages. It's stunning, isn't it?
His suggestion was to:
- Find 1000 most common words in a given language and memorize them
- Do something he called "absolute immersion" which can be listening for 4-8 hours a day to some news radio channel even without fully understanding it (not music, because it stimulates other part of brain or sth like that)
- Reading texts with phonetic notation and physically repeating it
So here come my questions:
- What do you think about that way of learning new languages?
- Has anyone tried this? If yes, how would you describe the result?
- Do you know any good websites where I can find XXXX most commom words in a given language?
- Have you got any other good and rather fast method?