the art of language learning

There are a couple of things we discovered that make learning a language fast and efficient. Read on to find out what ...

Let us talk a bit about the original SKILLCRUISER idea and its evolution, as well as some other things that can make a real difference in language learning. The original idea was simple.

Children learn their mother tongue just by being surrounded by it and by playfully learning whilst learning many other things at the same time: walking, balance, learning the first rules of life, to name just a few. No child ever memorizes words, studies grammar or goes through well designed exercises to master its mother tongue.

Wouldn't it be nice if we could learn a language with the same ease as our children.
Children have no need to study their mother tounge, have they?

Discover the art of language learning

So the first insight was: you have to make sure that you regularly surround yourself with the language. And when I say regularly I mean

...daily, not once or twice a week in a foreign language class.

With our technology today this is no problem;

you can listen to Serbian radio all day long on the internet, if you want to (if you are learning Serbian, that is)

you can watch Romanian TV via satellite (if you are learning Romanian, that is).

etc.

But the problem is that you don't interact with these media, as you do when you are surrounded by a language as a child. And that slows down the learning effect significantly.

The fastest way of learning a language

It is obvious that the fastest way of learning a language is to move to the country where it is being spoken and be totally immersed in it. But for most people that is not a feasible alternative, because we have a job, mostly limited financial resources and also an environment we aren't prepared to leave just for the sake of learning a language.

So your may ask yourself: How can I surround myself with a particular language in such a way that I really progress fast, even though I do not interact with "it", as I would in real life and with real people?

There are two aspects to this question, as we figured out via trial and error, testing things ourselves and with some other language addicted friends.

Key Number 1: AYF-C.com came to the conclusion that ONE HOUR PER DAY is what you should strive for.

You want to have the language around you as much as possible so that it really sinks in. One hour is enough to have a lasting effect on your brain and not too much, in other words: there is still enough time for the rest of your life.
Everybody can squeeze in two times a half an hour. Obviously you need to work with audio because that allows you to do other things at the same time and also you can listen passively, much like kids do when they learn their mother tongue.

Key Number 2: One lesson needs to build on the other and every lesson must teach your 3 essential and different skills.

The language material with which you surround yourself needs to teach you things progressively; it needs to demand a lot, but not overwhelm you. The audio material needs to be logical, one lesson needs to build on the other and it must train three different skills which are essential:

understanding the language as the natives speak it

speaking grammatically correct and speaking with a good accent

This means that the audio material must be prepared by experts and recorded by native speakers in real time

Once this basis was clear, www.ayf-c.com language experts discovered many other things; things which would make language learning a lot easier.

Eventually the www.ayf-c.com language experts came up with a formula which encompasses all their insights and can also be used as a marketing slogan. They named it as follows:

The SMART IMPACT principle. The five letters of SMART stand for the following concepts:

S Smart little words
M Movement factor
A Associative Emergence
R Repetition applied
T Total impact

Each letter and concept stands for a breakthrough in language learning technology and methodology.