How to use news or text books for language learning - The Birkenbihl method.

Hello.

In my last post I wrote about what material you can collect to prepare yourself for learning a foreign language. I will now show you with an example how to proceed. There are dozens of ways to learn a language but I am going to show you the way I am doing it.




At the beginning you choose a text with a topic that interests you. For example you take this article about the olympic championship. But it is necessary, that you have the read out audio version of this text available. If not, ask a native speaker to record it. I will tell you about native speakers in the future. A great source to meet people therefore is: Italki. Another great source therefore are text books, or stories.

1) Preparation (De-Coding)

Now you copy it into your text editing program

Next, you just have to increase the gap between the single words and the lines. You can do that by pushing the "tab" button after every word and pushing the "Enter"-button at the end of any line twice. But make sure the size of the text is big enough. I recommend a letter-size of 14px.
Now your text will look like this:

And now you simply translate every word, word by word into your mother language. Make sure to use the grammatical forms of the target language. Write the translations below the words. Do it in a different language (red, blue, green...) to make it clear. You do not have to translate names, because that would take time and so you can learn to differenciate them. Add pre- and suffixes (Endings) that do not exist in your language (for example case endings).
It should now look like so:

That is probably everything you have to do. If you can´t translate a word, ask someone who speaks the language. He will help you. If you already know some words, you do not have to translate them. For example if you knew what "idag" meant, just leave a space and go on. This is going to be important in the next step.

2) Listening and Reading (Active hearing)

Take your text (ideally printed out) and listen to the audio file. Read while you listen. Read the (english) words you are currently hearing and cross out the words you DO understand, so you can read the (swedish) ones instead of the (english) ones.
Repeat this several times.
The goal of this exercise is to make you hear the language and to make you understand the structure. The human brain is able to absorb the structures of the language as well as the sounds and the meaning of the words subconsciously. That is the way children learn the language. They hear it and hear it and hear it and slowly get used to the meaning of words. By reading the spoken text you improve the baby-method.

You will also get used to the sentence structure and soon notice differences to your own native structure. Every language has got it`s own.
I give you an example in german.

Ich gehe heute mit  meinen Freunden Pizza essen.  Wir haben uns schon lange nicht gesehen.
I    go   today  with my       friends     pizza eating. We  have   us   yet     long  not   seen

You also will notice similar vocabulary (we - wir; uns - us; long - lange) which will definetly help you!

You may struggle during the first times understanding the texts and also translating them, but you will get used to it very fast.

Repeat that step about five to ten minutes and then make a break. Do that about 4 times or more a day and you will succeed fast!

3) Listening in the background (Passive hearing)

The third step is the easiest step. You take the audio file and listen to it as long as possible (ideally 24 hours a day) passively. Just play the dialog or the spoken news-text while doing anything else. For example while you are driving the car, while you are playing computer games, while you are reading books, while you are watching tv. You can turn the volume down to a point where you are barely able to hear it. That is the perfect volume. You do not have to understand a word, because you already did this in step 2. Just listen to it while it is in the background and concentrate on something else.

It is like if you sit in the cafeteria. You have this background noise of people speaking arround you, but do not exactly understand what they are speaking, because you are concentrating on something else.

The goal of this step is to make you familiar with the sound of the language. Most people get into trouble when they are trying to understand foreign speakers, because they are not used to the sound of the language. They are doing exercises, they write a lot, but (especially this is done in schools), they do not listen and hear! And this is the very reason why people visiting countries learn language so incredibly fast, they are surrounded by it the whole time!

You can also listen to other texts you already understand.

4) Actions

This step has to be done after several weeks, 3, or 4 weeks. After you got used to the sound of a language. Now you can do whatever you want: Speaking, Chorus-speaking, try to pronounce words, singing, writing texts, dialogs, etc. But this step is indepentend from the previous ones. It is up to you! Do whatever you like to do!

"Nothing is as succesfull as the own succes!"

- Vera Birkenbihl 

I hope that this is going to help you.
If you need material for learning swedish, or if you have questions, just leave a comment!

Thank you for reading. See you the next time.