5 steps to speak a new language

 A few days ago , i read an e-book named "5 steps to speak a new language" of the author Phạm Quang Hưng, and i see it is a great e-book for those who are struggling with learning a new language. Let talk about specific language of English.

There are some main ideas here:

1. Core vocabulary

2. Core structure and phrases...

3. Text mapping

4. Sound mapping

The first one, "Core vocabulary": 

The data of 2023 show that, English have about 170,000 to 230,000 words. Imagine if we learn 10 new words each day, we need 17,000 to 23,000 days to learn all the words. It approximates 46.58 - 63.01 years. You may cry, "Oh, my god! It takes me whole life to be able to speak English".

Just calm down! We don't have to take the whole life to be able to speak English.

Do you know Pareto principle? Do you know the 80/20 principle? Something like 20% of population own 80% of wealth, or 20% of employee make 80% of result. The number is not exactly, but the idea is that just a little percent of a thing make the most result. Research show that 2000 - 3000 words make 95% of content.

There are words that appear frequently than other, and 2000-3000 appear more often and make 95% of content. 95% is enough for us to understand the whole idea, right? So we just need to focus on 2000 - 3000 common words, and then we can speak English fluently.

The second one, "Core structure and phrases":

Each language always has core structure and phrases. We have so many topics in life, for example: bank, sport, business, IT... and each topic has its own specific word. And we can be able to learn all the words in each topic to speak fluently. All topics are using common structure and phrases, and we just need to focus on that and each time we have to speak a new topic we just need to learn some words of that topic.

So the advice is, focus on a topic that you are interested in and master it. Sine the topic that you like will make your learning process more interested and quicker. And then when you master that topic, you absolutely master the core structure and phrases. And when you master that core zone, it's easy for you when moving to other topic.

The third one, "Text mapping":

The common mistake that a learner got when learning English is they tend to translate words to their mother tongue to understand the sentence. That is a big mistake. Imagine the process: When they hear a sentence, they collect words then translate the sentence to their mother tongue in their head, and then answer that sentence in their mother tongue then translate it back to English and talk to the facing people. It takes a lot of time, right? And sometimes, they can't find a corresponding word to translate, they try to figue out but can't, that make they can't speak and make them down.

So we have to build a text mapping, so we can understand immediately what that people say. For example, let read this sentence: "The man is walking on the street". Read the text, don't translate it, just imagine in your head the picture or a clip about a man is walking on the street. So every time when you read that sentence, you can understand immediately its meaning.

The fourth one, "Sound mapping":

Have you ever faced the situation when you're watching a movie or a clip, you hear something, but you can't figure out what it says, but when you're looking at the transcript, you see that is the word familial with you? 

That's because you are lacking of sound mapping for that word. You see it, but never heard the word before. It's you don't have sound data for that word in your head. So you have to build sound data.

This is a way to build it:

When you hear a sentence, pause it and try to imitate its sound to make your brain recognize the sound, just need to imitate 1 time. If you don't know the word, look at the transcript to see the word. Don't try to search for pronunciation of that word, just hear it and imitate it. When you imitate the sound, your brain makes a mapping between the sound and the text unconsciously.