Studying Spanish
I’m plugging away at my Spanish learning, and I’ve found a couple of books to be useful—and both are written by polyglots.
The first is Language is Music: Over 70 Fun and Easy Tips to Learn Foreign Languages. I got this as an eBook, and the tips are indeed useful. The emphasis is on listening to the language you’re learning as music: learn the tonal patterns, the rhythm, the flow of the language. The author, Susanna Zaraysky, uses the example of native speakers of Vietnamese, a language in which each syllable is spoken as a word. When a native Vietnamese speaker learns English without learning the "English melody"—the rhythm and tones of English—the staccato delivery makes his speech difficult for a native English speaker to understand. Thus Zaraysky strongly recommends listening to the language from the very beginning: songs, movies, audiobooks, native speakers, radio or TV programs: whatever is handy. Listen to the language at length, until you absorb its tonality, rhythm, and sound.
Zaraysky studied ten languages (English, Russian, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Serbo-Croatian, Hebrew, Arabic, and Hungarian) and still speaks seven of them.
On the whole, I have found her book (with 70 tips in all) to be helpful in moving my learning along.
Another polyglot, Kató Lomb, started learning other languages as an adult. A translator and one of the first simultaneous interpreters in the world, Lomb worked in 16 languages for state and business concerns in her native Hungary. Polyglot: How I Learn Languages, first published in 1970, is a collection of anecdotes and reflections on language learning. Because Dr. Lomb learned her languages as an adult, after getting a PhD in chemistry, the methods she used will be of particular interest to adult learners who want to master a foreign language.
Both books are quite valuable for adult language learners.
