My Journey to a Better Language Learning System

I know the demand is often placed on the romance and germanic languages, but they're often easy enough. You can usually bring along your own character set, which dramatically eases the transition into something new.

In a nutshell, with TPR the teacher gives the student a command in the target language, demonstrates the action the command is asking for, repeats the command and finally the student copies the action.

For example, if English was the target language, the teacher could say "sit down", then sit down themselves, then once again say "sit down" and the student would copy the action by sitting down. This can then be repeated for "stand up", for "pick up the fork", or any other arbitrarily complex and sophisticated command.

As you've no doubt noticed, the commands are given in grammatically correct sentences, in context. Grammar is not explicitly taught, however. It is implicitly taught and implicitly learned.

What makes this method work really well is that when you learn words and grammar, you're not doing it with just your mind and maybe some visual cues, you're using your body and doing so in a specific physical context (the place where you're learning), associating what you're learning with parts of that place. It's somewhat analogous to using a memory palace to learn, only without any extra effort of constructing the palace or imaging placing things you want to learn there. With TPR you actually physically interact with the things you learn in that space.

Another great thing is that a TPR teacher need not have any special training in education or really even in the method. TPR takes maybe a minute or two to explain to anyone, so you can recruit helpers from any friends or acquaintances you have who know the target language and are willing to help, though if you want consistent lessons and dedication you'll probably want a professional tutor or teacher anyway.

TPR focuses on learning to understand, in emulation of the first step of a child's language learning process. Children first learn to understand, then to speak, then to read, and finally to write. TPR helps with the first part.

TPR has its limits, and it can't be used for all aspects of language learning, but it's fantastic for getting your language learning bootstrapped really quickly.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_physical_response

[2] - http://tola.maf.org/collect/missionb/index/assoc/HASH01da.di...

[3] - http://tola.maf.org/collect/missionb/index/assoc/HASH0162.di...

Personally I want very much to return to Japanese myself some day. As I mentioned in the post, I studied it for several months. It is an interesting question of how best to approach learning kana and kanji, since that's a pretty difficult thing to get fast at. Memorizing a few hundred symbols isn't super hard, but getting so good at them that you can sight-read takes a lot of time and can be frustrating.

I would disagree that learning any language is easy enough, with or without learning a new writing system. That's sort of like saying that learning the piano is easy enough compared to the violin, just because it's always on key. It's still a lot of work before anyone wants to listen to you play.

No matter what language you learn, if you want to become somewhat fluent, you need to memorize several thousand abstract words, new sounds, new grammar rules, etc. It's always a lot of work in absolute terms. I only bring this up because I feel that it's somewhat harmful to say learning a language can be "easy". It often results in people trying to learn, inevitably finding out that it's still a lot of work and then giving up while blaming themselves for being "bad at languages".