I spent yesterday in Aberystwyth with two Czech friends and we talked in a mixture of Czech, Welsh and English, with occasional bits of other languages thrown in for good measure. When they were speaking Czech to each other I found that I could understand or guess enough to get a basic idea of what they were talking about, and in some instances I could understand quite a bit more. <\/p>\n
While I have been learning Czech on and off (more off than on in fact) for quite a few years, I rarely get the chance to listen to Czech conversations, apart from on online radio, and I was pleased to recognise quite a few of the words and phrases my friends were using. I couldn’t contribute much to the Czech parts of the conversation myself, but that will come with practise.<\/p>\n
Quite a lot of the vocabulary and structures they were using have appeared in my Czech courses or in Czech texts I’ve read, so I was at least somewhat familiar with them already. Hearing these things used in context really helped to fix them in my mind. It also helped that I could ask about anything I didn’t understand – this is not possible when I’m listening to online radio or watching films or TV programmes.<\/p>\n
This kind of immersion can happen anywhere you can find some native speakers of a language you’re learning (L2) who are willing to help you. Being in a country where your L2 is spoken is an even better form of immersion, but might not be possible for everyone.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I spent yesterday in Aberystwyth with two Czech friends and we talked in a mixture of Czech, Welsh and English, with occasional bits of other languages thrown in for good measure. When they were speaking Czech to each other I found that I could understand or guess enough to get a basic idea of what […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[99,104,10,13,77],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5320","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-czech","category-english","category-language","category-language-learning","category-welsh"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5320","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5320"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5320\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5320"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5320"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5320"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}