Quote:
Originally Posted by Worldwalker
This whole thing comes from children being taught, not the meanings of words, but the means to reproduce sounds from those words, then understand the sounds. Not only does this produce people who can't understand any word they haven't heard, but it produces people who don't know if they mean "hear" or "here" because they don't look at it as hearing being the function of the ear, while here is a place like there. They're just guessing at which spelling is "right" for the sound "heer".
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Two things really helped me grasp spelling: 1. reading! and 2. learning some Latin (the base language for English). It's amazing how many words I don't know, but I can take an educated guess at the meaning simply because I know some basic Latin.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Worldwalker
And that makes me think of foreign languages, and one of the useful things I learned from a teacher who I didn't properly appreciate until much later: If you learn a foreign language, you will never become fluent if you only speak it by translating it to your native language. If you have to translate el libro into the book and only then recognize it as meaning that thing with covers and pages, you'll always be waiting for your mental translator, and never really understand the language; only by mentally filing "el libro" as a sort of a synonym, along side "textbook", "volume", "tome", etc., to be used similarly in the proper context (in this case, when speaking Spanish), will you be able to speak it as an actual language.
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There comes a point in learning a foreign language when you begin to
think in that language. That's when you know you really have it.