Get started Learning Indonesian – Free audio files

Hi, just a quick invite to everyone interested in learning Indonesian. I’m trying to get started with RSS feeds, but unfortunately it’s not ‘really simple’ like it says. Nothing is ever totally simple until you’ve done it a few times.

Anyway, come visit us at learnindonesian.org and check out our first podcast at Podcast Alley.  (They said paste this in a new posting in order to claim our feed, so here it is:   <a href=”http://www.podcastalley.com/”> My Podcast Alley feed!</a> {pca-43478a218039fd77194829da5fc68399}

Sampai jumpa!!

Learn a Foreign Language – It can be fun!

Learning a foreign language doesn’t have to be a painful experience.  I know, all of us who ever tried in high school or another time have painful memories and almost zero ability at the end of it. Well, it doesn’t have to be that way.

I’m currently working on French and Russian and Japanese, so to help others follow in my path, I’ve started a website: languagelearningonline.org It’s brand new but I’ve been involved in foreign language learning for several years now and have had a lot of success teaching people English and Indonesian.

I’ve also spent quite a bit of time searching the internet for good sites, and unfortunately haven’t found very many.  Lots of them claim to have ‘revolutionary new methods’ but when you really look at it, it’s not much different from all the rest and the student is still left struggling much of the time.

I’ll continue this post shortly, but wanted to first get the news out.  More soon.

Set up your RSS Feed and Podcast

As with everything on the internet and with computers.  Once you’ve learned how, it’s easy.  Until then, it’s frustratingly confusing and time consuming.

So, we’re setting up a podcast and rss feed for audio files to learn Indonesian.  I used RunStream to set up a feed, and they have some good stuff, but it seems they limit free accounts to just 3 posts.  I also discoverd SpringWidgets which is very cool.  And now I’m trying to set up my podcast at PodcastAlley.  They say copy the following at publish it, so here goes nothin’.

<a href=”http://www.podcastalley.com/”> My Podcast Alley feed!</a> {pca-43478a218039fd77194829da5fc68399}

ciao for now,

Brian

Learn Indonesian (or any language) quickly and easily.

Learning a foreign language can and should be a fun and pleasant experience. Unfortunately, in most cases, people find it a daunting and frustrating experience with minimal or poor results.  Why is that?

Well, it’s because the method used by almost all books, schools and teachers isn’t effective.  It’s like trying to force a square peg in a round hole.  It just doesn’t work!

So what’s the solution?  Well, if you’ve every tried to learn a new language, you already know the solution.  You already know what you need as a student.  The problem is, you have no idea where or how to get what you need!

Well, now you do. This is a problem I’ve been working on for several years now, and I’ve approached it completely from the ’stupid’ student’s perspective.  I have a terrible memory for names or new words in a foreign language.  I can be told a name or the meaning of a new word, and seconds later I will have forgotten.

I’ve also approached it from the perspective of an engineer seeing a problem, analyzing it, and coming up with a solution.  As such, I was free from any bias or baggage aquired by learning how to teach a foreign language.  Similarly I gained a lot of experience teaching English, but with no bias or baggage about how it should be done.

When teaching English I was typically stuck in a situation using material which was bordering on useless, so I usually tossed it to the side and just started teaching in my own way, my own style; gradually discovering what worked and what didn’t.

I eventually decided to make a program for learning Indonesian (Bahasa Indonesia) based on “what I wish I had had when I was a student”.  I also included my general ideas on intuitive learning, ‘left logical brain’ versus ‘right creative brain’, etc.  The results were amazing.  The speed at which students learned Indonesian was amazing even for me.

For those of you who don’t know, Indonesian is perhaps the easiest language in the world to learn because of it’s relatively simple grammar and it’s flexibility in word order.  Still, the improvement over other methods and my own learning of Indonesian years before was really quite incredible.

One example in particular was with a Japanese lady who had been living in Indonesia at that time for about 8 months.  She saw me playing with the kids one time and asked me if I could teach her daughter English.  I said sure, I love teaching kids.  She then asked if I could teach her English.  Again, I said I’d be happy to.

We were talking in English and she was often struggling to express herself and sometimes she would use a word in Indonesian when she couldn’t think of the word in English.  I asked her if she spoke Indonesian and she replied, “No, I don’t like Indonesian.”

I was surprised, since it’s such an easy language to learn.  Certainly much easier than English.  She was insistent; she didn’t like Indonesian and didn’t want to learn it; even though she was going to be living there for 5 years!

Okay, no problem, and we arranged a time for her to start learning English.  After her third lesson she said she’d like to try my Indonesian program.  Hehehe…. I guess she saw a big difference in how I was teaching and decided to give it a try.

During the second lesson; just reading the basic dialogues and working on her pronunciation; she started saying, “Ahhh….!!!”  The light was finally coming on.  I also discovered that she had already had 25 private lessons for learning Indonesian!  After 8 months and 25 lessons, she couldn’t speak Indonesian and didn’t like the language or want to learn it.  Now, during the second lesson with me, she was finally ‘getting it’.  She was finally understanding the new language.

All I could do was laugh.  It’s sad but funny.  To have had so much difficulty, and now to find it so easy.

Square peg, round hole.  If you give the student a round peg they won’t have any more problems trying to put it in the hole.

If you like to see more of our material for learning Indonesian, please visit our websites: BintangBahasa.com and LearnIndonesian.org. (Don’t know why the link wouldn’t work with learnindonesian.org)

And selamat belajar!  (Best of luck learning!)

Brian

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