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 suprised 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…
Technorati Tags: Autodidact, Buddhism, Dalai Lama, Foreign Language, Language, Tibet, Tibetan
August 20th, 2007 at 2:56 am
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.
August 21st, 2007 at 2:42 pm
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.
October 30th, 2007 at 10:15 am
psst!
try searching on tibetan on soulseek (www.slsknet.org).
if your lucky you’ll find what you’re looking for. (i did.)