How (and Why) I Learned German to Fluency - Luca Lampariello (2023)

FAQs

What is the Lucas Lampariello method? ›

The bidirectional translation method

One interesting way to use translation is the bidirectional method created by famous polyglot, Luca Lampariello. This is a simple method which involves two steps: Find a text in English and translate it into your own language. Translate it back into English again.

So, how did Luca Lampariello, an Italian, learn to speak English, Dutch, Swedish, Mandarin, Russian, German, French, Hungarian and the rest on top of his native Italian? And why would anyone go to all the trouble of learning and maintaining 11+ languages?

According to the U.S. Foreign Service Institute (FSI), you'll need about 750 hours of study to become fluent in German. This means that if you study 12-15 hours a week, you'll be able to speak like a pro in just a year!

The idea is to start by reading and listening as much as possible. With each new text, you learn more words, understand more and can move on to more complex texts. Once you start understanding the language fairly well, you are ready to speak it. By then you know lots of words.

The German language has 6 CEFR levels – starting with A1 (absolute beginner), and ending with C2 (completely fluent).

The Foreign Service Institute (FSI) estimates that learning German will take about 30 weeks, or 750 classroom hours, as it is rated as a category two language similar to English.

In the early nineteen fifties, researchers found that people scored lower on intelligence tests if they spoke more than one language. Research in the sixties found the opposite. Bilingual people scored higher than monolinguals, people who speak only one language.

Powell Alexander Janulus speaks 42 languages fluently

Powell Alexander Janulus, born in 1939, is a Canadian polyglot who now lives in White Rock, British Columbia. He entered the Guinness World Records in 1985 ready to prove his fluency in 42 languages.

Do bilinguals think in two languages? ›

Bilingual speakers have two minds in one body, new research has revealed. Speaking two languages literally changes the way we see the world, and bilingual speakers think differently to those who only use their native tongue.

German is rated as a category 2 language and considered to be similar to English. The FSI estimates that German takes approximately 30 weeks, or 750 classroom hours to learn. This study was conducted on a group of language students who spent 25 hours per week in class, and three hours daily on individual practice.

As Steve Kaufmann writes on his blog The Linguist, the magic formula for foreign language learning is [motivation + time] / inhibition. Polyglots are highly motivated, spend a great amount of time studying their target language, and are less inhibited in practicing their target language than others.

In one study, she and colleagues found that polyglots' networks (which include the frontal and temporal cortical areas of the brain) were smaller than those of people who speak just one or two languages.

Polyglots spend way more time listening and speaking

Most classes in schools or language courses focus on reading, learning vocabulary, and grammar which keeps students in their comfort zone. But nothing in your language learning will help you progress faster than speaking.

How hard is it to learn German fluently? ›

With plenty of straightforward rules, German is not actually as hard to learn as most people think. And since English and German stem from the same language family, you might actually be surprised at the things you pick up without even trying! And on top of it all, it's definitely a useful one, too.

It shouldn't take long to become fluent in German. Actually, after 6-8 months of studying in intense courses (about twenty hours every week) you will be able to gain proficiency of your German language to navigate your daily life. It is possible to gain professional proficiency within a mere year!

How hard is B2 level German? The German language is complex yet highly systematic. For a systematic language, you need a systematic course structure though. If the course material you are using has a thought-out structure, then it shouldn't be difficult.

For this reason, English speakers will learn German much faster than French. In fact, it takes a native English speaker an average of 30 weeks (750 hours) to become fluent in German.

The C2 level exam: Think “very hard” & multiply that by a thousand. The Common European Framework of References for Languages level C2 is one of the hardest possible examinations you can do in any language.

The only reason that German seems so difficult to people is that it has grammar rules that other languages don't. German is a language with relatively high “inflection,” meaning that the words in a sentence change based on their grammatical roles.

German for Kids: Toddlers (Age 2-5)

Three years is said to be the optimal age to start learning a second language. This is because younger kids are better at mimicking new sounds and learning new pronunciations.

For example, relative to a bilingual, a trilingual has to remember even more words and has to inhibit even more languages. To adapt to this increase in cognitive demands, trilinguals may develop a larger cognitive supply (i.e., greater advantages) than bilinguals.

Can low IQ people learn another language? ›

Studies show that children who have a low IQ or are born with some mental delay learn language just as well as any other child.

Early research on bilingualism, conducted before the 1960s, however, linked bilingualism with lower IQ scores, cognitive deficiencies and even mental retardation. These studies reported that monolingual children were up to three years ahead of bilingual children in both verbal and non-verbal intelligence.

Powell Janulus was born in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. He was exposed to many Slavic languages as a child. His Polish mother spoke six languages while his Lithuanian father spoke at least four. He could speak 13 languages fluently at the age of 18.

Across multiple sources, Mandarin Chinese is the number one language listed as the most challenging to learn. The Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center puts Mandarin in Category IV, which is the list of the most difficult languages to learn for English speakers.

Cardinal Giuseppe Caspar Mezzofanti, born in 1774, spoke 38 languages and 40 dialects. The 10th-century Muslim polymath Al-Farabi was reputed to know 70 languages.

Bilingual people show increased activation in the brain region associated with cognitive skills like attention and inhibition. For example, bilinguals are proven to be better than monolinguals in encoding the fundamental frequency of sounds in the presence of background noise.

More recently, scientists have discovered that bilingual adults have denser gray matter (brain tissue packed with information-processing nerve cells and fibers), especially in the brain's left hemisphere, where most language and communication skills are controlled.

There is a longstanding myth that real bilinguals have no accent in their different languages. Joseph Conrad and many other bilinguals, in all domains of life, show how unfounded this myth is. Having a "foreign" accent in one or more languages is, in fact, the norm for bilinguals; not having one is the exception.

The bilingual method makes use of the traditional three P's: presentation, practice, production. The three P's are the three main stages of any language lesson. First, you present material. Then you all practice together and students are expected to produce something with their new knowledge.

Bilingual method means using one language (mother tongue) which the students have mastered in learning English. The mother tongue is learnt by the child in real life situations and thus has various ideas and concepts in his mind because of the direct experience.

What are the two methods of translation teaching? ›

In general, we recognize two main types of translation techniques: direct translation techniques and oblique translation techniques. Direct translation techniques can be used when the elements of the text being translated are similar in both the source and target languages.

The different approaches are: Short Word Based Approach. Frequent Word-Based Approach. N Gram Based Approach.

Bilingual Method also helps in giving proper training for different skills namely listening, speaking, reading and writing. 6. The use of mother tongue saves a lot time and makes learning easier. Complex things can be easily explained in the mother tongue.

Students learning a second language move through five predictable stages: Preproduction, Early Production, Speech Emergence, Intermediate Fluency, and Advanced Fluency (Krashen & Terrell, 1983).

Widely considered one of the best ways to learn a foreign language, the immersion method involves diving into a language completely, sometimes being exposed to foreign vocabulary even before you're sure of its meaning.

A two-way dual language program is based on the premise that two groups of students (each with different home languages, in the United States one being English) learn together in a systematic way so that both groups become bilingual and biliterate in the two languages.

There are eight types of translation: word-for-word translation, literal translation, faithful translation, semantic translation, adaptive translation, free translation, idiomatic translation, and communicative translation.

What is language learning method? ›

There are three teaching methods that dominate the business of language instruction: the Direct Method, the Grammar-Translation Method, and the Audio-Lingual Method.

A child's first language usually refers to the language the child learned from birth (before the age of 3) and heard most often in their environment. However, some children may have more than one first language: this is the case with children learning two languages at the same time, from birth.

Languages symbolise identities and are used to signal identities by those who speak them. People are also categorised by other people according to the language they speak. People belong to many social groups and have many social identities.