Yourself Beginner
What is the best lesson plan for teaching yourself a language?
Well, I plan on trying to learn 5 languages before I turn 20, that's 6 years from now, and I would like to know how to approach it. And when I say lesson plan, please be specific, something like
Week One : Voc building
Week Two : Beginner's grammar, nouns
Week Three: Beginner's grammar, verbs...etc.
And the five languages are:
Spanish
French
Japanese
Igbo
Italian
First thing is to define what you mean by learn a language. For the purpose of this, I would suggest that you define learn a language as the ability to read a newspaper in the language and understand the majority of it. I use that as the definition since communication on a social level in a language takes a long time, but the ability to read, understand, and speak could be done in a shorter period of time.
Ok, thinking about the lesson plan, the first thing I would do is define where you are, and what language you have access to learn in social situations. For the purpose of this, I am going to assume you are in the US, which means that Spanish is probably the best language to start with. It is the 2nd most widely spoken language in the US. Then from Spanish, I would move to Italian (I am fluent in English and Spanish, and based on my spanish, I can get a pretty good idea of Italian), which should make it relatively easy to work with. From there, I would go into the 3rd of the romance languages on your list which is French. That will give you a good base of the romance languages. They have similar alphabets to the English language, which should make them easier to learn. Then, from there, it is a toss up. I am not at all familiar with Igbo, but I reviewed their alphabet, and it looks more similar to the English language which means it should be easier to grasp than Japanese. Finally, you will have your mind trained enough in learning languages that the extra challenges of Japanese alphabet, sounds, etc. should work better for you.
As for lesson plans within the language, there are 4 main language learning skills (reading, writing, speaking, and listening). My learning plan would be to study a new situation each week (ie: Go to the Bank, Purchase tickets for a movie, etc).
Day 1) Review the vocabulary for that lesson.
Day 2) Work on reading documents within that situation.
Day 3) Work on writing on that subject
Day 4) Try to speak on the subject
Day 5) Try to Listen on the subject
I would do it in that order since first you need the vocabulary, then reading, you can identify the vocabulary used by others, then, you need to come up with the vocabulary on your own by writing, then just focus on the speaking of what you have written to work on pronunciation, and finally listening.
I am hopeful that this is useful. You have a challenging goal in front of you. Good luck.
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