Golden Box Book Publishing Pico The Pesky Parrot | Page 18

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The Author
La autora
Erika M Szabo
www.authorerikamszabo.com
When I decided to learn German, I signed up to take a language course. Well, it
didn’t work for me. The instructor made us repeat words ten times as a chorus and
ten minutes later none of us remembered the word or its meaning. It might have
been that the dry and repetitive teaching method was too boring for me, or perhaps it
was the fact that I always learned best at my own pace. As a result, I quit the course
after just two lessons.
Later on, I came across fun looking picture books written in German for
children. My daughter was a toddler, and she wanted to know what the story was
about, so I grabbed a dictionary and started translating the words into Hungarian.
After I translated a paragraph word for word, some of the sentences didn’t make
sense. So, I rearranged the structure of the sentences to sound correctly in
Hungarian, and then I compared it with the German paragraph. I grabbed a few
words from each paragraph, wrote them down and looked up the words in the
dictionary. Following this easy method, I learned the meaning of some of the words,
how the words are used in a sentence and the plural of words. When we moved to
the US, I used the same method to learn Basic English.
Cuando decidí aprender alemán, me apunté a un curso. Y la verdad es que para
mí no funcionó, el profesor nos hacía repetir las palabras diez veces como si
fuéramos un coro y diez minutos después, ninguno de nosotros recordaba la palabra
o su significado. Puede haber sido que el repetitivo y monótono método fuera
demasiado aburrido para mí, o quizá fue el hecho que yo siempre he aprendido
mejor a mi propio ritmo. En consecuencia, dejé el curso sólo después de dos
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