tt Ojamets
The LIVE Method
INTRODUCTION
First of all – welcome! You are reading the LIVE-method. It´s an innovative language learning solution that gives you everything – every tool and all the knowledge that you need to learn basically any language out there. There are more than 25 languages in our language selection at the moment and we are adding new languages constantly.
The LIVE-method is a combination of an e-book and a web-environment. The e-book is like a guide that will direct you to the goal of efficient language learning and it will teach you to use all these learning tools and materials that you will find in our web-environment.
It´s important that you understand the foundation and the main ideas of this innovative learning system before you start using it, and therefore we will first explain you where this methodology comes from and what its foundation is. All this to make sure that we are on the same page before you start with specific learning steps.
WHY A NEW LANGUAGE LEARNING METHOD?
Often when learning we mimic the actions of others, and we presume that it’s the best way. But that is not always the case. This same principle also applies to learning languages. If you want to learn languages fast and efficiently then you actually have to do things very differently and the following book will be your guide in this journey.
I’ll describe in a few words how this methodology was conceived and the main reasons for publishing this book in the first place. 10 years ago I went to university to learn French and Spanish. Before that I had also studied several languages, but never acquired the level that I was hoping for. At university the learning process was also pretty slow, and because of that my motivation dropped to zero – I had the feeling that I was no good at memorizing words, understanding French dialogue (which to my ears sounded like Chinese for a really long time) and languages altogether were something really hard, not playful, interesting and natural, as they actually should be.
I remember studying Spanish in a group with 15-20 students and consequently I only got a really basic level after learning the language for 2 years and I was never really into it. Despite the fact that I wanted to speak in Spanish, for some reason the learning experience in the classroom didn´t engage me – so I felt down and lost hope of speaking fluent Spanish some day. I´m sure that you have felt the same at some point in your life and you can really relate.
A few years later – after researching about innovative language learning, to be better at languages myself – I understood that the feeling of having low motivation for doing the homework and feeling down in general was the direct result of how I was taught – the learning methodology and its foundation was basically built on the wrong values and beliefs, which don´t work with human beings in general. And when I say that they don´t work in human beings, then I mean it literally. The traditional language learning methods don´t take into account how our minds, bodies and psychology work to acquire a language in the first place.
I understood that the way that we learn languages at school and in language schools everywhere – from the US to Japan – is fundamentally wrong and has to be changed to get good results that everybody is looking for.
This was a revelation for me and after having this epiphany I started researching everything there is to know about efficient and innovational language learning. I wanted to understand how we as human beings acquire languages in the most efficient and natural way. This process took about 5 years, during which time I tested everything myself, trying to learn different languages individually. And with every experiment and every new idea I came closer to the understanding that the key idea here is NATURAL LANGUAGE LEARNING.
After much research and preparation I published the LIVE-method as a book for the first time 5 years ago and today an international language learning company is based on the foundations of this same book and web-environment that I once created. Today more than 25,000 people all-over Europe use the LIVE-method actively on a daily basis and this number is growing fast.
This book is the latest version of the LIVE-method, which has been polished and updated to give you the best results in learning any language you need.
HOW CAN LANGUAGE LEARNING BE NATURAL?
For example, how did you learn your mother tongue? Did your mother come to you, as a baby, and start repeating the conjugational patterns for verbs that you really need to know? I presume that the answer is no. This question even seems a little silly to you – doesn´t it? But isn´t this the way we acquire languages at school? We take a holistic system, hack it into pieces and try to learn it. This is basically the system that traditional language learning uses, isn´t it?
Now, if you think about your learning manuals at schools then there are subjects that are formed into little exercises to make learning as easy as possible for you. Rather than being individually tailored, they have been designed for the mysical “average learner” that actually doesn´t exist.
This is a big problem and we will adress it later on.
Let´s come back to the example of your mother and verb conjugation tables. This silly example carries us forward to the right path and to the right questions.
If my mother didn´t teach me how to use the grammar of the language and she actually didn´t teach me words or verbs then how is it possible that I could use the language at a very early age?
Let´s go even further. How is it possible that many have learned to understand and to speak several languages just by watching cartoons from the television as a child? I´m sure that you know many people like that. I´m one as well. I watched German cartoons as a child and later on I realized – as a teenager – that I could actually understand German very well. Looking back, I understood the language without consciously realizing I did so, because it was so natural for me. Isn´t it weird? I´m sure that you or someone among your friends or family has had the same experience. It´s very typical.
But how is it possible to learn a language like that? Without learning any sentences or words separately? And to speak a language absolutely well. Doesn´t it sound profoundly divorced from the way we learn languages at school using learning manuals and dictionaries? But why is there such a difference in these approaches and what is the reason behind that?
Finding the answer to these questions is actually the key to understanding efficient language learning and I can promise you that if you use the following learning methodology exactly as it´s described then you will excel at languages as well. It just requires a different perspective. We need to change everything you have known and experienced about language learning and give you a concrete structure and tools that you can use on a daily basis. This is exactly what the LIVE-method is all about!
Now – if you´re reading this and you´ve come into contact with different language learning solutions online that give you the opportunity to click and write (and sometimes even repeat) words and sentences, then you may be thinking: “All these online solutions like Rosetta Stone or Duolingo and etc are actually quite good and I´ve heard that they´ve helped many people”. And you´re absolutely right – they have helped people to acquire languages, but the question here remains “How efficient is it really?” What you will see throughout this book is that no computer program can ever connect perfectly with an individual person, because all computer programs are created for the “average” learner. But this learner doesn´t exist. You may think that it does – but it doesn´t. There is too much scientific proof otherwise.
And if something is created for everybody, then it´s actually created for noone. This is an important idea that you really need to become accustomed to, because it´s one of the foundational ideas of the LIVE-method.
This is something that you will see very clearly in this book as well – if particular learning activities work well for one person, then they may be highly inefficient for another. Therefore in traditional language learning the results are random and can not be controlled.
This is the main reason for why the LIVE-methodology is based on the individual choices you make, once you are aware of the manner in which you learn the most efficiently.
Therefore