I just ran across a post by the Linguist Steve Kaufmann:
I am indebted to podlearner.com for the following quote from St. Exupery's Le Petit Prince.
"If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea."
I regularly see reference to approaches to language learning that focus on training us to hear certain sounds or to respond in Pavlovian fashion to different stimulus. I just cannot get interested.
To me language learning is all about motivation and interest. This comes from content and communication. You can build in some systems, as we are doing at The Linguist, but these are there to facilitate the main activity of interacting with the language in a meaningful way.
Find out more about the Linguist Method of language learning.