{"id":8971,"date":"2013-07-31T17:16:45","date_gmt":"2013-07-31T17:16:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/blog\/?p=8971"},"modified":"2013-07-31T17:16:45","modified_gmt":"2013-07-31T17:16:45","slug":"learning-by-doing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/?p=8971","title":{"rendered":"Learning by doing"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Today is the last day I focus on Irish after doing so for a whole month. That may not sound like much, but for me it is &#8211; I tend to flit from language to language and rarely spend very long on any one of them. Every day, with only a few exceptions, I&#8217;ve written something in Irish on my <a href=\"http:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/rywsut\/\">other blog<\/a> and recorded it. There were a few days last week when I didn&#8217;t find time to write something, but I caught up later. I&#8217;ve also been listening to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.rte.ie\/rnag\/\">Raidi\u00f3 na Gaeltachta<\/a> (Irish language radio) every day, and spent last week in Ireland speaking a lot of Irish. My ability to speak and write Irish has improved, and I think that the practice of writing in it every day made a big contribution to that. My listening has also improved. From tomorrow I will be focusing on Scottish Gaelic, and might continue writing in Irish, as well as Scottish Gaelic and English, on my blog, so that I keep it ticking over.<\/p>\n<p>I know other people have probably had these thoughts, but I have come to the conclusion that regular use of a language you&#8217;re learning in writing and speech is possibly the best way to improve. When learning languages I tend to spend a lot of time listening to and reading, so I am usually a lot better at those skills than at speaking and writing. The way I&#8217;ve done it also gives me chances to practise speaking, or at least reading aloud. <\/p>\n<p>Do you try to actively use languages you&#8217;re learning as you learn them? Does this help?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Today is the last day I focus on Irish after doing so for a whole month. That may not sound like much, but for me it is &#8211; I tend to flit from language to language and rarely spend very long on any one of them. Every day, with only a few exceptions, I&#8217;ve written [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[104,127,10,13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8971","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-english","category-irish","category-language","category-language-learning"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8971","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=8971"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8971\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8971"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8971"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8971"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}