Myths about language learning Myth: After puberty it’s impossible to learn to speak a foreign language without a heavy accent. Truth: Scientists have proven that the brain is fully capable of re-learning the lost ability to hear subtle nuances in pronunciation. If you listen to native speakers’ and your own pronunciation, after a time you will begin to sound exactly like them. Myth: Your vocabulary consists of the list of words you have memorised.  Truth: You have an active and passive vocabulary, as well as a conscious and unconscious vocabulary – even in your own native language. If you have heard and understood the words “mature", "PREface", "PREceed", and "PREclude”, then you will probably understand the word “PREmature” if you hear it used in a normal context. You already know what “mature” means. You will probably have developed an implicit understanding of the prefix “pre” in English, even if you can’t articulate what “pre” means. There’s also a good chance you will understand words such as “maturity, prematurely, maturing and preceeding” – all variations of the above words you already know. You don’t need to memorise every form separately in order to have a broad vocabulary. Because your mind will draw these sorts of conclusions automatically, starting with the beginning of the course it will always be the case that 'you will know more than you are aware that you know'. Myth: You need to memorise grammar diagrams in order to speak grammatically correct Swedish. Truth: We all have an innate ability to learn languages, and it consists in our ability to observe tendencies and draw conclusions. We are born with what Noam Chomsky calls _Universal Grammar_. The proof of this is that we all learned to speak our native language grammatically as children. Our parents certainly didn't sit down with us as two-year-olds and explained about nouns, subjunctives and predicate nominatives. We absorbed the grammatical rules for our native language by listening to native speakers -- our parents, mostly -- use language correctly. We learned how to hear when something was 'said right' versus something that was 'said wrong'. Later, when we went to school we may have had classes in grammar. And when we tried to learn a foreign lanauge, we were definitely exposed to the 'grammatical rules' school of language acquisition. However, if we were observant, we noticed a few problems with this approach. Many of the very best students in our language classes, the ones who ended up bi-liungual or nearly so were those who had the most trouble in learning grammatical rules, including that of their native language. What they had, instead, was called 'a good ear'. They could tell when an utterance in a lanauge was correct, or when it was not, even though they could not tell you which grammatical rules were being violated. On the other hand, there were other students, of a more abstact bent of mind, who were perfect or nearly so at understanding grammars. And many of them never became proficient at speaking, or understanding the language they were trying to learn. With others, of course, the skills went hand-in-hand. But it is obvious that there are two independent skill sets being used here -- and for actually being proficient in undestanding and speaking a foreign language, it is the 'good ear' that is needed. Try as hard as one might, one does not get a 'good ear' from learning abstract grammatical concepts. Myth: Some people have a gift for learning language. If you don't have it, then learning languages is just one of those things you cannot do. Truth: Some people do indeed find it easier than others to learn languages. But the So To Speak courses are designed, not for gifted language students but for everybody. XXX we want to refer to something here to back up this claim.