Turn the Page
Well after about 4.5 months, I’ve lost almost all confidence in my so-called osmosis technique – that is, learning Tibetan just by listening to an hour a day of news in the language.
What I’ve found is that now, 134 days later, as I listen to the audio each day on my ipod – usually while doing something else – my brain pretty much totally tunes out everything as if it were just background noise or classical music.
So it’s not that I’m frustrated by a slow rate of learning. I feel like I’m no longer acquiring any new words. I’m even forgetting some of what I’ve learned! 
Of course things might be different if I were to lay down, close my eyes, and really listen hard to the hour of audio each day. I just don’t have the time to do that right now.
And my experience tells me that if I did have the time, I’d get a higher rate of return if I used that hour to instead:
• study a good Tibetan textbook
• watch Tibetan TV, or
• take a Tibetan Skype lesson with Sonam.
Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised that the audio osmosis technique didn’t really work. It seemed too good to be true, and if it was such an easy way to acquire a language, everyone would be doing it.
So my plan is to abandon the daily audio and see what time I can find for the more efficient learning methods mentioned above…
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5 Responses to “Turn the Page”
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I’ve found that listening is a great technique if you already have a good understanding of a language as written and want to gain a listening comprehension, but I’ve also found that I almost always learn to read and write a language before I learn to hear and speak it. This is mainly because written (especially typed) words are not ambiguous and are easier to look up and recognize.
I guess my hope was to be able to acquire listening comprehension of a language as a baby does, w/o studying. Maybe it would have worked if I were truly immersed, but an hour a day of audio didn’t seem to be doing the trick.
I agree that listening is immensely helpful once you understand a language’s basics. I studied German at university and rarely speak it now but can still understand it well b/c I often listen to the news in German via podcast.
psst!
try searching on tibetan on soulseek (www.slsknet.org).
if your lucky you’ll find what you’re looking for. (i did.)
Listening to the news is not a good way of acquiring “listening comprehension of a language as a baby does, without studying”. Think about how a baby really learns language: He doesn’t _start_ by listening to the news! His parents name simple objects for him, praise him when he repeats, give him very simple 2 word commands etc. They repeat until he understands and responds, then increase the complexity of the language directed at him. If your input were really like what a baby hears and interacts with, your “osmosis” technique would work, I think.
Good point, Leigh. Too bad I can’t rent some Tibetan parents for a few months.
Perhaps a better method for someone using the internet to learn a language is to first develop reading comprehension – then at least you have some sort of foundation in place that you can leverage when then beginning to work on listening comprehension.
Thanks for writing
-lumi