One of the things on my bucket list is to learn Spanish fluently. I learnt the basics 16 years ago, took an evening class at UCL in 2010, and have also dabbled with Rosetta Stone and Duolingo. In the lead-up to our big trip, I decided to get serious and enrolled in a Rosetta Stone course online. I tested at intermediate level B1 and am currently working my way up. Meanwhile, Peter is brushing up on his basic French. Between us, we should have large parts of the South Pacific and South America covered.
Linguistics is one of my passions (one day, I hope to do a Masters in it), so naturally when I started learning Spanish, I read up on some of the theory around language learning. To my surprise, some of my assumptions were proven wrong. Here are 5 myths any language learner should bear in mind.