Steps Toward Multilingual Learning: A Trial of Pronunciation Correction and Narrative Imagery Memory

DeepL Translation Results

The purpose of this blog is to document my journey of the "unfulfilled dream" of becoming a polyglot (a multilingual speaker).

This blog is a sort of "diary" of sorts.

I have taken basic grammar and reading courses in several languages, either privately or at university, but I have always felt frustrated that I was only halfway through them all.

Around December of 2022, I suddenly decided to give languages another try, and I keenly felt the need to start over with English.

After all, following the ironclad rule that "language starts with sound," I began trying to improve my English listening and speaking skills.

I think it was good that I relentlessly worked on thorough analysis of "DUO 3.0" and memorization of example sentences as a preliminary step to achieve this.

There were probably about 20 example sentences that I did really thoroughly.

Still, I was surprised when I searched for English videos on youtube and started listening to them. I was surprised to find that I could hear the English.

Of course, it was not a natural conversation of a native English speaker, but rather a well-prepared educational English, but I was so motivated by this that while listening to the videos, I kept checking "watch later" one after another.

Then the videos introduced by the suggestion function started showing new and interesting ones one after another, and I accumulated about 3,000 videos in the two months so far.

I noticed that the search expanded to include not only English, but also Chinese, French, German, and other languages.

In order to stay out of the school language rut, I have mainly watched learning methods and pronunciation correction.

Since Chinese and French are easy to listen to because of their clear pronunciation, and I had learned to listen to some English, I decided that the next step was to get used to the German sound.

For this purpose, I thought it would be better to listen to a story that I could recite, so I started listening to the German version of Saint-Exupery's "The Prince of the Stars".

At any rate, the two months so far seem to have gone by very quickly.

From now on, I will combine pronunciation and reading comprehension.

So, first of all, I'm going to start the phase of reading aloud while watching "Watch Later" saved on youtube.

I found the following article, which I will paste here for the time being.

This one recommends (1) "memorization of good example sentences". I agree. However, it is too much effort for me, so for French and German, I would like to try mainly (2) "narrative image memorization".

That's all for today.