Welcome to the NeoFluent blog page, here are some of our latest entries.
Who we are 8/14/2018
Here at NeoFluent, we want to create a new type of language learning site. We want to help you achieve fluency through fun, through interactive games, through fast paced communicative activities. Our name, NeoFluent, describes you, the learner developing a new fluency in the language of your choice.
If you think about it, fluency isn’t just the ability to remember hundreds or thousands of words on demand. In your own native language, you automatically convert thoughts into words and words into thoughts. We might think of fluency as the ability to think of objects as names or of facts as collections of words. In fact, if you’re not thinking about it, when you’re listening to a story, you may not even think consciously about the words themselves at all. If you’re like me, you enjoy sitting back while reading or listening to a good story as you visualize the people and events. I recently had the experience rewatching some of the Harry Potter movies, thinking that there were certain scenes that I enjoyed, only to realize that the visual memory I had of the story was from the book! I felt like they had deleted scenes from the movie before I realized that I had experienced the book so vividly that I remembered it as a movie.
This kind of native fluency is what we might call “full fluency.” It is seamless and vivid. We experience words and objects as if they were one and the same thing in our minds. This kind of deep or full fluency takes years of experience to develop. It is possible, and it is the ultimate goal.
Beginning students, in contrast, often experience foreign words like a wall that is impenetrable. It may feel like the meanings are on the other side of the wall and the words are standing in your way. As a classroom teacher of nearly 25 years, I have seen that look on many students’ faces. Some easily get frustrated and resentful because they feel locked out of the conversation. In reality, much of the traditional teaching that goes on in schools produces exactly this kind of result. As a teacher, I have been at various institutions with different expectations of their students and their teachers, some that help students AVOID this experience and others that seem to CREATE this kind of experience.
Believe me, no one is having fun when the words are experienced as a barrier to communication. That is exactly why here at NeoFluent we want to give you the experiences that will tear down those barriers. Rather than simply testing and quizzing, we want to give you the experience of understanding in a new language that will become a foundation, step by step, for greater and greater complexity and versatility. We are exploring ways to adapt proven learning strategies to an online format for individual study, partner study, small group study, or as an aid to traditional classroom study.
