Listen!!!

Babies can make, reproduce, and hear ALL the sounds IN ALL the languages in the world. Very approximatively that's 40 to 150 sounds in over 6500 languages! They have "phonemic awareness". There is no genetic code when it comes to learning languages. We are born with that capacity. It is because children LISTEN, adults don't lose the ability to learn, but the ability to listen. Instead of retaining that phonemic awareness they become self-conscious. In order to overcome this, stop trying to learn to speak a language and consequently "translate" which has nothing to do with communication and LISTEN. Conversations, albeit buying bread at the 'Boulangerie' and saying 'Bonne journée' to your neighbour, the sheer repetition will get you there. Whenever your hear something, repeat it out loud... this can be done face to face, as a person will always instinctively "correct" you by repeating it or by listening to media of any kind and repeating words or sentences. Start with themes that have immediate relevance to you: food, children, sport. Here's a good plan, free audio-books downloads, with varied choices. So even if it makes no sense to you at all, LISTEN... English never made any sense to you when you were a baby! The more you listen to those "foreign" sounds the more you'll be able to reproduce them... ALLEZ ECOUTER ! http://www.bookinalex.net/html/bonsplans/audiolivres.htm