Self-directed Learning!

FluentU May 2016

Self-directed Learning? What’s That?   

Basically, anyone who decides to take control of their studies and find what works for them is a self-directed learner.

A self-directed learner might be an adult choosing to take up a language in his or her free time after work.

A self-directed learner might also be a university student enrolled in a number of language classes who chooses to go beyond the requirements and try out different language learning methods after the school day is over.

So how do you know if this is the right approach for you? Well, it’s quite simple, really…

All Language Learners Can Afford to Be More Creative

Classes and classroom mentalities aren’t the only ways to learn new information. Even if you’re studying on your own, it’s easy to keep thinking like you’re taking a class. But with self-directed learning, there are a whole lot more options out there!

Think about it—most classes are designed to cater to groups of 10 to 30 children or adults, as they should be. Organized lessons and textbooks and quizzes help the instructor keep track of everyone’s progress. Not all learning is classroom learning, though, and you can always afford to think outside the box. You’re one person, so even if you’re taking a class, classroom rules need not apply to you when you’re not in the classroom.

Unfortunately, if you’re like most people, the only learning style with which you’re familiar is the one used in schools and universities. You may try to emulate this at home with varying levels of success and, likely, waning interest.

Things can be different, though! You can stay motivated and work towards fluency by getting creative.

Even being creative in small ways will keep you motivated and learning until you reach your goals.

Here are three tips to start you off with breaking the mold!

3 Creative Ways to Have a Blast with Self-directed Language Learning

1. Ditch method loyalty, and try all sorts of things!

Just as some people might try to create a makeshift classroom and curriculum in their house for their language study, a lot of learners are liable to stumble upon one method and stick to it, regardless of how much value it has for them personally.

There are a huge variety of language learning methods out there, and they all have some value.

The benefit of being a vagabond language learner of any kind is that it allows you the freedom to experiment.

Experimentation keeps things fun and exciting, because there’s always something new to try. As long as it’s in the target language, it certainly can’t hurt you!

Here are some ideas of ways to branch out:

Media-based immersion. This means watching TV and movies, listening to radio and reading novels—all in your target language! This is meant to imitate the experience of living in a country that speaks your language. YouTube has plenty of material in major world languages, and TuneIn can lead you to radio stations in your target language!

• All kinds of language learning books. This might sound contrary to what was said above, but many people are unreasonably turned off by all textbooks. Textbooks can be an important resource; you just have to make them work for you. For popular languages, there are endless options. These can give you vocabulary for everyday circumstances and present grammar in an easy-to-understand way. Some newer books are pretty engaging and provide a lot of variety. Check out the Teach Yourself series (easily found on Amazon for many languages) for cheap, well-designed instructional books to use alongside whatever other methods tickle your fancy.

• SRS flashcards. These are flashcards that are timed using an algorithm that maximizes the utility of your memory! This means that you can forget about forgetting vocab and grammar items. The great thing about SRS is that it works well with other methods.

• Shadowing. This is a method promoted by polyglot Alexander Argüelles in which the student repeats audio in the target language, concentrating on rhythm and accent. The key is to speak each word as close to simultaneous with the audio as possible. For example, you could try shadowing an audiobook or a slowed-down dialogue created for beginners. Here’s a video that explains shadowing in plenty of depth.

• Babbling. Babbling is a stage of language development that all babies go through before they say their first words. Even though adults learn differently from babies in some ways (and also have mature musculature to their advantage), I think babbling can work well for adults, too! I like to think of it as the cousin of shadowing. Instead of focusing on following audio word for word (as is explained in the video linked above), focus on simply imitating the sounds you hear. This works well for fast-paced talk radio or movies—audio in which you can’t yet distinguish exact phrases or words. This is great for producing native-like intonation, the “music” of sentences and phrasing that sometimes gets lost when we think too much about each specific word. Think of it like you’re mocking the speakers!

Try a lot of methods and see what sticks. Just because you try a certain textbook or program doesn’t mean you have to stick with it forever, and it certainly doesn’t mean you have to only use whatever you started with.

If you’re a fan of immersion, try cracking open a textbook once in a while. If you love the organization of textbooks or audio courses, try listening to native talk radio or using SRS flashcards to shake things up. You never know what’ll improve your fluency!

Different tools are great for different things. As someone taking control of their language learning, you have a level of independence that works only to your advantage. You can create your own curriculum (or supplement your classes) and decide on any combination of methods to use.

So keep an open mind, because there’s a lot out there. And on the other hand, if something isn’t working or bores you, toss it out and try something new!

2. Leverage your time to your advantage

If you’re taking on a language on top of work, school or family responsibilities, the task can seem pretty daunting at the beginner stage. Time is a commodity hard to come by these days, so how are you supposed to learn a language? Or say you’re in a class, but need to learn more outside of the classroom—with a full course load and a job, things can start to seem impossible.

But remember that with self-directed learning, you don’t need to limit yourself to traditional classroom time blocks of 30 minutes or an hour. You don’t need to imitate your three-credit college German class!

Life is made up of 3-minute chunks, not long stretches.

Most people just don’t have hours of empty time to fill each and every day. Nevertheless, you probably have some three-minute chunks of time between classes, during breaks at work, early in the morning, during your commute, etc. You can easily take advantage of these moments—and they add up fast!

So, what can you do with 3 minutes?

• SRS programs are made for short sprints of repetitions. If you have an SRS program on your phone, you can quickly review some flashcards whenever you’re on public transportation or waiting in line. It’s short, it’s quick and it doesn’t even draw attention!

• Podcasts are another great resource for limited periods of time. Many podcasts aimed at language learners, like the LanguagePod101 series, are quite short in length, and great for a moment of free time. Many podcasts aimed at native speakers—like news and culture podcasts—are also in the three-to-five-minute range. You can find these by searching for “news” in your target language on iTunes. You can also find interesting podcasts by switching your iTunes country to the one in which your language is spoken. All of the suggestions will now be in your target language! (While you can’t buy anything outside of your actual region, you can still download the free podcasts.)

• Are you used to curling up with a good book for an hour or two? Well, it may seem counter-intuitive, but books also work great for short sprints. It takes some getting used to, but fitting in a page or two whenever you have a chance really does count towards larger reading goals. You can find books in your target language through Amazon third-party sellers, Multilingual Books (a site that specializes in selling books in a number of languages) and  Project Gutenberg (YES, Online for FREE !!!!).

• The same methods can be applied to TV episodes and movies—if you can download them onto your phone or tablet, they’re available all the time for some quick language practice. Waiting for a spare hour or two is too restrictive—imagining a movie or TV episode as something that can be broken up into smaller bits is freeing.

Everyone is busy, but it’s what you choose to do with your small amounts of free time that really matters.

3. Treat yourself like a kid again!

I think it’s unfortunate that at some point after elementary school, teachers and textbooks stop using colors and pictures to teach people. They stop trying to engage adults and excite them visually or with humor.

Remember when you lamented the lack of pictures in a book when you were a kid? That’s the kind of attitude you need with language learning. But you might have to create visual excitement yourself. Think of language learning as an excuse to revert back to childhood. You get to experience the whole world a second (or third, or fourth…) time over!

Pretty good deal, isn’t it?  But what exactly should you do?  For a start, use the three C’s.  The three C’s for language learning are color, cartoons and comics.

Color

Bringing color into your language learning life will give you relief from your drier textbooks, and the language will seem way less scary and intimidating. Remember how your elementary school classrooms looked—bulletin boards covered in construction paper decorations, walls plastered with drawings, alphabet across the chalkboard, maps on every bare surface? You can’t help but get a jolt of energy from it, can you?

So how can you implement this? Get yourself to the store and buy some big boxes of crayons. Get some markers and construction paper while you’re at it, too. Make posters captioned with target language text from a favorite TV show or book. Practice your writing and then draw a picture to go along with it.

If you’re learning a language that uses a different writing system, make posters with all of the characters you plan to learn that month. If a specific character is giving you trouble, draw a picture to go with it. You’ll have a blast and feel like a kid again!

Cartoons

I know, I know. You’re a very intelligent and cultured person. You got into your target language for poetry, for film, for high literature! That’s great and all, but have you thought about what cartoons can do to get you to that point?

Esoteric media like literature and arthouse films are wonderful, but they’re hard to understand for beginners and intermediate learners.

Linguist Stephen Krashen advocates using comprehensible input to efficiently learn a language, and cartoons are darn comprehensible!  Cartoons are full of plenty of visual humor that you can grasp even when you don’t understand a lick of your target language. They use a smaller vocabulary since they’re aimed at children. As an added plus, I’ve found that the voice-overs used for cartoons tend to provide much clearer speech than your run-of-the-mill TV show or movie.

If you don’t know where to start looking for cartoons in your target language, I would suggest trying to find dubbed versions of shows you liked as a kid. Search for the TV show in English (or other language) on Wikipedia, and then switch the site language to your target language—this is an easy way to find changes in the title when it was dubbed.

Then, you can search that title on YouTube or a video-sharing website in your target language. If you want to own the cartoons, you can try Amazon third-party sellers, or buying through the regional Amazon website of the country in question. (Just make sure that you have the right equipment to play them!)

Another idea is to find network websites of certain shows. Nickelodeon, for instance, has regional networks (Dutch Nickelodeon and German Nickelodeon, for example) in a number of different countries, each with its own website. Many are region-locked, but if you can find a way around that, these websites often have a good number of complete episodes.

If you don’t have a specific cartoon in mind, I personally like to search “[target language] cartoon” (in English) on YouTube and see what the wellspring of the Internet will give me. As an additional idea, raw beginners can try cartoons meant for very small kids, ages 3-6 (preschool age) or so. These tend to be five to ten minutes in length and meant to be educational for native speakers of your language. This is great for the adult learner, because the characters point out certain objects and repeat things over and over. Kids’ shows that have been dubbed in a number of languages are harder to find, but many English-language shows have been dubbed, so if you’re familiar with those, you might be able to find them in your target language. Just use the same techniques as above to hunt stuff down.

To get more leads on cartoons for toddlers and young kids, I would also suggest checking out forums that discuss your target language—this is especially helpful if you don’t live in the country. Surely someone does, and can tell you what’s on TV. After that, again, check out YouTube, Amazon and TV network websites.

Once you find some favorites, you can try applying some of the creative techniques above to get the most out of this great resource (shadowing the voices to your heart’s content, doodling pictures of the characters to keep you entertained or writing out the titles of the show in crayon).

Comics

The rationale for using comics is similar to that of cartoons—comics have comprehensible input with plenty of context for you to easily pick up vocabulary and expressions. Still, many people avoid comics and head straight for novels and classics, even when their level isn’t high enough just yet. The resulting lagging motivation and frustration is something that’s easy to remedy.

Comics have visual humor aplenty, and the text is broken into smaller pieces. This gets you reading more from the start—comics aren’t as intimidating as straight literature. As for finding comics, use the same techniques as above to see if your favorite childhood comics have been translated. Use the Wikipedia technique to find titles of translated comics, then search for those on Amazon—with luck, third-party sellers will have what you’re looking for.  Multilingual Books, again, is a good resource.

If you already collect vintage comics, MyComicShop.com has a variety of older comic books in a number of different languages. You can also search for fan-made translations of favorite comics online.

Comics have an even more convenient medium, however—webcomics! Webcomics can be short form (think newspaper comic strips) or long form (think graphic novels, superheroes and manga), but I find short form to be especially helpful in learning a language.

Webcomics are addictive and fun to read, and you get exposed to a sense of the humor in your target language. To dig these up, I recommend Googling in your target language “best webcomics” (“webcomics” might remain the same word depending on what your language is). You can add a nationality if you want to get more specific.

Once you’re reading comics regularly, try entering some short sentences into your SRS (with English definitions on the back of the cards!) so that you don’t forget all the new words you’re learning. [If you’re working with a new writing system, copy out the sentences in colorful marker and crayon to practice your penmanship.]

There you go—three ways to get creative with your language learning.

A lot of creativity just has to do with a simple change in mindset.

Take control of all of the different ways to learn out there, and get experimenting!

How to Improve Language Listening Skills: 5 Secrets for Success

Why Is Listening So Important?

First, one-way communication is just no fun. It’s all well and good being able to put together a great phrase, but if you’re lost when the reply comes your way, it’s useless. You have become the proverbial brick wall!

And don’t think this just applies to beginners.  Finding the best kind of material is exactly what we’re going to provide you with here. 

The Best Resources for Listening Practice

Textbook dialogues are clearly scripted, so therefore they are not the best example of natural language.  What we need is original, native sources of language.  These can include:

• Movies/TV Series. Check out this guide to listening practice through movies and TV series and the great resources included!

• Podcasts. Entertainment Weekly offers a list of recommended podcasts from 2015 on their site. To find similar lists of recommendations for native podcasts in the language of your choice, try Google searching the phrase “best podcasts” in that language.

• Audiobooks. Instead of reading those books you’re interested in, why not listen to them?

• News channels and radio stations often have great websites with plenty of videos and articles to go with them. Searching “radio stations online in [country]” will give you plenty of options. National Geographic is also a great multilingual resource with a TV channel, subscription magazines and websites in various languages.

• Talks and interviews. The advantage of listening to talks is that the speakers are generally experienced, speak more clearly and stay on subject. If you haven’t already heard about TED Talks, get on the site right now! You can search by subject and language and listen to some of the best public speakers around the world give inspiring speeches on their subjects of expertise, with the advantage of subtitles in many languages and a written transcript if you ever get lost.

• Songs (on Vimeo or YouTube, for example), with or without lyrics.

• People. Go out! Communicate, listen to conversations, etc. If you live in a city, find a language exchange partner who speaks the language you want to learn. You can do this through language exchange groups, such as Mundo Lingo International, which are often organized through Facebook or on Meetup. Attend cultural events, such as cinema nights, theater or book clubs for countries you’re interested in. If you are in a remote location, there is always the option of finding an online language buddy with websites such as Coeffee, Easy Language Exchange, italki and Babel Village.

Are you convinced that listening is the secret to success in language learning?  Hope so!  Read on to learn more about this important, yet generally underestimated and untaught, required skill.

1. Make Listening Regular and Focused

Like anything worthwhile in life, there’s no quick fix. Anyone telling you it’s pure talent—or that you can push some buttons and voila!—is wrong. For me, language learning follows a simple equation:

Interest + Motivation + Effort = Successful learning!

Languages are vast and rich. There is no one (or hardly anyone!) who’s going to be naturally excellent at all skills required to achieve full fluency. There are always parts that come more easily and others that you’ll have to work harder at.

For some, that might mean grammar is a breeze, but producing the sounds of a language is an uphill battle. For others, understanding what others say seems to come naturally, but which verb tense is used where is a mystery.

No one listens to Russian and just immediately knows what’s being said. Improving listening requires repeated exposure. Whether that means watching soap operas, documentaries, talk shows, podcasts, sports radio shows or your favorite bands, the all-important bottom line is that you DO listen, constantly, while paying full attention.

For this, you need to…

Remove Distractions   You know why.All of a sudden that video your friend posted of a puppy running into a glass window just seems so interesting.  We’re all prone to distraction.  So turn off your email/Facebook/Twitter/WhatsApp/Skype alerts on your computer and phone before you start your listening practice.

If you have kids, partners or housemates who love to barge in and start asking for things, let them know you need 15 minutes of alone time or, if that is impossible at home, find a silent workspace in your local cafe, on the train or in a park—wherever works best for you.

In the same vein, try and leave aside your mental to-do list (I know, it’s hard—there’s just so much to do!) that keeps invading your brain space for just a few minutes.

Listening with half a brain on what you’re doing is only going to give you half the practice you need, and the chances of your brain remembering the material you listen to is minimal.

Keep Your Interest Alive!   We can learn through memorization, but to remember and internalize we need to puzzle over something that interests us and that we enjoy.  So forget textbook boredom. Harness your interest by focusing on subject matter you like.

Push Through!  We all have good and bad days.  The learning curve has a sharp spike at the beginning, where development is rapid (albeit with ups and downs of its own), and then there’s a plateau where it gets harder to make progress. It can be a struggle, but getting stuck in is part of the fun and hugely rewarding when you finally do emerge from the tunnel.

Proceed in Small but Regular Bite-sized Chunks  This is the most effective way of warding off boredom and keeping motivated. 15 minutes every day is a hundred times better than a four-hour cram session every two weeks. I’d say 45 minutes is the limit before concentration starts lagging. But for those who are time-starved, even a quick five minutes will help rewire your brain to the sounds of the new language.

 

2. Set Listening Goals

Setting goals will help get you on the right track and feel good when you hit your target.

Of course, don’t get ahead of yourself: Start with small goals, and reward yourself as you go.

For example, at first, aim for recognizing words, or even just sounds. Give yourself a point every time you hear a word beginning with the letter “p” or the sound [dƷ], for instance.

Aim to learn one or a few new words each time you listen to something. Later, move up to bigger goals—understanding a whole conversation, perhaps, or listening to a song and learning to sing along with the chorus.

If you already have a more advanced level, choose more complex material and aim to focus on expressions you haven’t heard before or perfecting your accent by imitating favorite sections of speech.

We’re all still learning in our own language, so in a new one there will never be a lack of things to improve on!

3. See the Big Picture

Listen Purely for Sound 
This is a good technique at the beginning. It gets you used to the melody of the language. Staying speechless and absorbing the sounds, syllables, pauses and rhythm of the language is exactly what babies do in their silent “sponge” period.
Be aware of how language changes when it’s spoken. If you know how the sounds connect, when they’re deleted or inserted, you’ll need much less time to progress!
In English, we don’t necessarily pause between each word. In fact, we often link words and sometimes join sounds to make new sounds.
For example, “What are you going to do?” becomes “Whaddya gonna do?”
One of my favorite tricks is to try to separate the ongoing flow of words by pressing my fingers against a table (or engaging in some other physical expression) every time I hear that a word is accented. When I use this trick with Portuguese, I can actually understand much more. Somehow, attaching a physical representation to the mental process helps the brain to separate the sounds.
Later, you can move on to trying to understand whole chunks of text.
Get Used to Looking for Context 
Do you ever find yourself finishing the sentences of someone you have known for a long time, someone with whom you feel very comfortable?
Of course you do! You may not even realize you’re doing it. We all naturally trail off at the end of sentences, but everyday speech patterns are so common that most of the time we unwittingly fill in the remaining parts in our heads.
Well, with a new language, the situation is similar, but we have to get even more creative and imaginative. 
It takes too long to translate every word in your head. Use logic and good old creative guesswork to conclude what will follow. 
For example, let’s say I see a mother looking in a fridge, holding out car keys for her husband, and I hear this:

“…go…shops…some things we…dinner?”

I can determine from the intonation that it’s a question, and from the context of the situation, I can guess the missing words:

“Can you go to the shops to pick up some things we need for dinner?”

Even if these aren’t the exact words, the context is there and I have understood.
Use Tools to Get Accurate
Once you’ve understood the general context, it’s time to get more accurate.
For example, if I’m not 100% sure of something I’ve heard and want to check, I can repeat that section as many times as I need to.
If I’m still not sure, I can record the section on my phone and download an app such as Audacity (audio only) or VLC (audio and video files) to slow down that section for more clarity. If there are still comprehension problems, I can use a native-speaking friend or find a buddy on a language swap website to ask for help.

4. Add in Cross-training

None of the skills we need to learn a language can be taken in isolation. They’re a giant web of interlocking strings.
So we must listen in combination with reading and speaking.
What does this mean, and how can we do this?

• Use subtitles. First, in your native language to gain an idea of what’s going on. Then switch to subtitles in the same language as the program you’re watching.

• Use lyrics. For songs, listen once without lyrics to get used to the sounds. You can then listen again with the lyrics. You can look up the words you don’t know and repeat sections as many times as you need to recognize the sounds. Then listen all the way through one last time without lyrics, this time trying to recognize all the sounds and words you have just read. 

• Use listening as a way to learn new vocabulary and idiomatic expressions. Aim to find new words or expressions each time you watch or listen to something. Look them up in the dictionary, find them in context—in newspaper articles online, for example—and try to make some sentences of your own.

• Use mimicking to better understand sounds and sound combinations, and to improve pronunciation. 

• Use your inner voice. We all have a voice in our head that provides us with a running commentary of life. Don’t forget to use that, too (in the language you’re learning).

The great challenge is to be able to think in that language. So repeating things you’ve heard that you liked in your head is practice, too! Chat to yourself about what you just listened to—but try, as much as possible, to think those thoughts IN that language.
The wonderful thing is that in your own head, there’s no one judging you!

5. Crank Up the Difficulty Progressively

Choose your material carefully. It needs to be comprehensible. If you understand nothing, you will simply not listen. Generally, a slight step up from your current level will be stimulating enough for you to learn new things but not so hard that you end up confused and dejected.
Listen to short sections at first, and repeat many times. Listen to a recording once. First to understand the gist, then again (and again, if necessary) to get the details. Slow the recording down if you need to.
You can move on to larger sections of speech once you feel comfortable, repeating the same process. Here are some resources to check out for finding level-appropriate material for yourself:

• Songs, programs and computer games for kids contain the simplest language and often come with very explicit visuals, making them easy to understand.

• Documentaries are great as the speakers are often chosen for their slow, clear speech. The narrator is also often describing something that is happening on screen, so you have visuals to provide you with context.

• Talks, talk shows and interviews can be found on YouTube, TED, online radio channels and podcasts. You can find almost any subject, so you will always be able to listen to something that interests you.

• TV series provide great entertainment and come mostly in nice short episodes that often have a repetitive “formula.”

• Finally, we mustn’t forget about films. We all love them! There is so much we can learn about other cultures through films, so get curious and get watching! As a rule of thumb, slapstick comedy tends to be a simpler genre. You can start there and move on to action, and then drama and dark comedy on the more advanced end.

Of course, if you’re tired of watching strange cultures and unknown actors and just want to relax, you can also always find your favorite Hollywood films dubbed into almost any language out there. Another advantage here is that the speech used for dubbing is often clearer than in original-language films.

Keep these 5 secrets in mind, and you’ll be reaping the benefits of awesome language listening skills in no time!

5 Clever Tricks to Learn Any Language on a Busy Schedule

1. Snooze Your Way to Foreign Language Fluency

You’ve probably heard that it’s a good idea to work on your new language right before bed so your brain keeps processing what you’ve learned during the night and you wake up a bit more fluent than you were before you went to sleep. But have you ever tried doing a little language learning immediately after waking up? -- Without even having to get out of bed? Well, if you have an alarm clock or, more likely, a smartphone that lets you use custom alarm ringtones, simply create some voice memos involving new vocab words, grammatical structures or whatever else you want to “study” while cowering in bed and wondering how it can be morning again already. By using these memos as alarm sounds, you’ll have your brain fired up for language learning right from the break of day. This moves a little slice of your language practice into that gap between the time your alarm gets going and the time you get going. The best part of this technique is that the more times you hit snooze, the more you learn!

There are several smartphone apps that let you set voice memos as custom alarms. For instance, the Wake Up Babe iPhone app allows you to “wake up to sounds of your boyfriend or girlfriend’s voice, while a romantic song plays in the background”–or, for our purposes, wake up to the sound of new foreign language vocab words while a romantic song plays in the background!

My Voice Alarm is another iPhone app that lets you record our own alarm sounds. Over in Android land, apps like Recording Alarm Clock and Voice Alarm will do the trick.

If you’re an iPhone user and don’t feel like downloading any new apps, you can also just create voice memos and add them as alarms using iTunes. Doing these in batches is a good way to avoid having to sync up through iTunes every day. Or, if you want to take your learning-while-snoozing game up a notch, you can buy this alarm clock that lets you add custom sounds. It has the bonus feature of being able to actually leap off your nightstand and roll around your floor when it goes off ...

Even if you’re like me and feel little inclination to do anything other than guzzle coffee most mornings, give this technique a shot. You might be surprised to find that you can actually get some language learning done even while hitting the snooze button like your life depends on it. At the very least, you’ll get some speaking practice in just recording the voice memos!

2. Link Language Learning to Everyday Tasks

The average person drinks about half a gallon of water a day. If you think about it, half a gallon is a lot of water, and drinking this much water a day is a significant commitment. It would take a fair amount of time to drink half a gallon of water in one sitting!  But you never hear anyone say “Oh, I’d like to drink half a gallon of water a day, but I’m just too busy!” or “My schedule is packed–I think I’m going to have to skip my half-gallon of water today” or “I really want to drink half a gallon of water a day, but I guess I’ll have to wait until I retire.” The one ingenious trick used by billions of people who manage to fit drinking half a gallon of water a day into their busy schedules, of course, is that they take many smaller helpings of water at regular intervals throughout the day.

So if you want to fit half a gallon of language learning into your daily routine, why not use the same approach? One easy way to do this is to link your language learning to the little tasks you perform dozens of times over the course of a day. Promise yourself, for example, that you’ll learn a new vocab word every time you take a drink of water.

Your thirst will then act as a periodic reminder not just to get a drink of water, but to keep on top of your language learning. Plus, you’ll be doing part of your language learning in frequent little sips rather than trying to find time in your busy schedule to gulp everything down at once. (This language learning strategy can also double as an educational drinking game, although not one I’d necessarily recommend.)

By binding your language practice to repetitive everyday tasks, you’ll turn routine daily chores into powerful language learning tools and get in your half-gallon of language study before you even know it. The power of this technique is limited only by your imagination and the repetitiveness of your daily routine!

Here’s a place where being addicted to checking your smartphone can actually work to your advantage. If you commit to, say, learning a new word and using it in a sentence every time you look at your cell phone, you’ll be amazed at your progress (or, worst case scenario, you’ll start thinking twice before reaching to see if you have any new text messages).

3. Use Flashcards Without Borders

If you’re a flashcards kind of person, you probably already know that flashcards are great way to integrate language learning into your everyday life. They’re portable, convenient and extremely powerful. (And if you’re not a flashcards kind of person, you should think about becoming one.)
But if you’re trying to learn a language on a busy schedule, sometimes just having flashcards isn’t enough. Sometimes you need a reminder even to look at your flashcards in the first place.

And this is one place where going old-school and making some actual paper flashcards can help. Once you’ve written up your flashcards, distribute them across different places where you’re bound to run into them as you go about your daily business. Put a couple in your kitchen to find when you wake up in the morning, leave a few in your car, place some on your desk at the office, and so on.
Then as you go through your day, you’ll have regular chances to review a few vocab words at a time (or whatever else you decide to put on the flashcards) without having to make any effort whatsoever to schedule in your language learning. When you finally lie down to go to sleep at the end of your day, you’ll be surprised at how much you’ve learned with so little effort. And you may be equally surprised to find a few more forgotten flashcards lurking under your pillow, so you can get in some last-minute vocab review before slipping off into dreamland.

4. Narrate the World Around You

For a language learning strategy that you can use literally anywhere, try practicing your new language by keeping a running narrative of the world around you. Besides giving you a chance to review all the words and grammatical structures you know, and to build fluency by keeping a running monolog, this technique is infinitely adaptable.

Walking down the street? Try narrating the things happening around you.  Waiting in line? Talk about the other people you see and even make up stories about them (using your inner voice–not out loud, of course!).  Stuck in a boring meeting? Maybe describe what the meeting is about and try translating some of what’s being said.

In addition to being a useful tool to help you learn any language on a busy schedule, narrating the world around you is a great way to practice thinking on your feet in a new language. Responding to the things happening around you will help you get better at drawing on your new language on the fly, and having all the new words and grammatical structures you’re learning ready at your fingertips.

5. Write on the Go

One of the best tricks to learn any language on a busy schedule is to start a language learning notebook and make it your bester Freund. If you’re already keeping a vocabulary book, all the better–just block off a section you can use to start building your written fluency while you’re on the go.

Depending on your personal preferences, there are a few ways to do this. If you’re the practical type, you can integrate your language practice into everyday organizational tasks by using your language learning notebook mainly for to-do lists and notes-to-self. If you’re more introspective, you can start keeping a diary in your new language, writing down your experiences and thoughts whenever you have a chance. If you’re feeling creative, you can even try maintaining a notebook of stories and poems. Or, if you like variety, you can go for some mixture of all three!

Writing on the go is basically the written equivalent of narrating the world around you. It’s a highly adaptable technique that’s great for fluency-building. If you use these strategies to integrate writing and speaking practice into your daily routine, plus the other strategies listed above, you’ve already relocated a huge chunk of your language study into the little empty spaces that recur throughout everyday life.

In the end, you won’t be able to get rid of dedicated language study time altogether. To return to the nutritional analogy: Even if you drink your half-gallon of water in little sips over the course of the day, you’ll still want to eat dinner at night (it’s just not practical to eat your dinner in periodic bites over a span of 12 hours).

But the trick is to make sure you don’t have to eat your dinner and drink half a gallon of water at the same time. Use these techniques to integrate a good portion of your speaking/writing and vocab practice into your everyday routine, leaving only the essentials for your dedicated language learning time.

And before you know it, “I wish I could learn a language, but I just don’t have time” will become “I didn’t think I had time to learn a language, but I did anyway ’cause I’m a boss!”

Lead With Languages (ACTFL Film 2015)

75% of the world's people don't undrstand any English.
Connect with 95% of World's customers
Empower our diplomatic, our military; our intelligence communities.
(Remember, German is today's language of espionage -- and Vienna its capital, per the US Dept. of Defense.)
Wake up!
Let's make languages a national priority, to prepare America for a connected world.

GERMAN IS 4 U !

This video has some really bright spots!



Let us know why you have started learning German!

FluentU Free Account -- I just joined. Join me?

HERE IS A VERSION OF WISE GUYS SONG "LAUTER, LAUTER!"

with the FluentY treatment -- Line-by-line lyrics, under the screen, and it mice type, the English translation.  I've selected all levels of learning, not just "beginners". 

I'll probably show their version of O Tannenbaum soon in class.

This is another example of a FluentY clip --
FROM A COMEDY SHOW IN GERMANY:  Let us know if you think this is funny!

I also JUST HAVE TO POST THE MALEFICENT TRAILER FROM FLUENTY (since Rupert suggested I bring my little granddaughters to see this version of Dornröschen)!

How about THIS CLASSIC AD FOR VOLKSWAGEN?  ITS BEGINNING GERMAN IS EASY TO LEARN FROM!
The screen I copied the URL from isn't directly the film, but rather FluentY's introductory screen.  Select WATCH after reading the blurb.  (I think the Vocab building choice involves a paid subscription.)

So now I'm wondering why I didn't think of starting something like this on Deutsch-heute!?  Isn't this great?!?    Anyway, I set up 2 free accounts under mine in case you'd like to try it out before signing up (for free):  FrauBaker209 ...
  1.  AdiAdler
  2.  WilliWau

Viel Spaß beim Lernen!

Singing helps tune into foreign languages

Here's a brief post I couldn't wait to pass along!

The University of Edinburgh

Singing in a foreign language can significantly improve learning how to speak it, 

according to a new study.

Adults who listened to short Hungarian phrases and then sang them back 

performed better than those who spoke the phrases, researchers found.

People who sang the phrases back also fared better 

than those who repeated the phrases by speaking them rhythmically.

 

Best performers

Three randomly assigned groups of twenty adults took part in a series of five tests as part of a study conducted by researchers at the University of Edinburgh’s Reid School of Music.  The singing group performed the best in four of the five tests.  In one test, participants who learned through singing performed twice as well as participants who learned by speaking the phrases.  Those who learned by singing were also able to recall the Hungarian phrases with greater accuracy in the longer term.

Why Hungarian?

Hungarian was chosen because it is unfamiliar to most English speakers and a difficult language to master, with a completely different structure and sound system to the Germanic or Romance languages, such as Spanish and French.

The research was carried out by Dr Karen M. Ludke, Prof. Fernanda Ferreira and Dr Katie Overy.

This study provides the first experimental evidence that a listen-and-repeat singing method can support foreign language learning, and opens the door for future research in this area. One question is whether melody could provide an extra cue to jog people’s memory, helping them recall foreign words and phrases more easily.

Dr Karen M. Ludke

Postdoctoral researcher at the University of Edinburgh’s Institute for Music in Human and Social Development

Lernlieder (Learning through songs)

This is from Richard Graham, an English teacher in Japan.  His program is called Genkie English, and he calls his teaching style "getting Genkie."  He uses songs and hand motions for most everything.

1) Rock 'n Roll

****************

Loud music works best.  Especially for shy students.

 

(University of Manchester research says: "music fans are stimulating part of the inner ear known as the sacculus, which responds to the beat in music. This gives the brain pleasure and makes us feel good -- during the music and afterwards.")

 

Quiet, slow music puts kids to sleep.  Pretty obvious.  A lot of traditional songs are great at bedtime, but probably not in school!

 

*Secret Teaching Tip* If you get told off for being too noisy, tell the kids to be super genki (i.e. excited, full of life and energy) but .... whispered! Really over exaggerate as you move and sing.  It gets lots of laughs and works *nearly* as well as being super loud!

  

 

2) Don't *reuse* the same tune

*****************************

 

Great songs work because of the link between the words and melody.  They become "Earworms" which stick in your head all day.

 

(University of London research says: "The term earworm refers to the experience of having a tune or a part of a tune stuck in your head. Often a person experiencing an earworm has no idea why a tune has popped into their head and has little control over how long it continues. ")  Earworms are why Genki English is so successful.*

 

But ... if you re-use a famous melody ... then the link between words and music is broken and the effect can be lost.