Example Based Learning

People who already know about this might disregard this approach as soon as they see it. But this seems to be a more fundamental way of how we initially grasp a new spoken language. It is true that the extent to which you can proceed with this approach is limited. But this method is a good starter.

This method can be applied to translate between languages, learning from given examples. Let me give an idea of how this works and teach you some Sinhala ;).

English : I go to (the) school
Sinhala : Mama pasela ta yami

English : I go to the shop
Sinhala : Mama kade ta yami

Now if you are asked to translate "I go to campus", now you can translate some of this as "Mama xxxx ta yami". You just have to find out the translation from campus to Sinhala and you are done.

This is the simplest way one can use learning. As you can see this will become harder for long and complex sentences, but this is very useful to start learning languages.