7 Bullet Points About Languages - Week 10
Hi everybody,
I hope your study of your language(s?) is still going strong!
Each week, I share 7 things that could be useful to your learning odyssey. I hope they can help you improve your journey, tickle your curiosity, and inspire you to keep exploring.
Let's dive right in!
One video: JLPT N1 & Fluent in 18 Months | MvJ Interviews #10 - Stevi — By Matt vs. Japan
This interview was amazing, to say the least. I have to admit I'm a bit jealous of him as it took me close to 8 years to get to JLPT N1 (the highest level in Japanese), but it's proof of how well immersion can work. I've loved manufactured immersion for a long time and always struggled with it because of the fact I was learning more than one language at a time. Still, Stevi's dedication to the immersion system helped him get the holy grail of any learning: compounded knowledge. If the method you've been doing isn't working well, watching this could give you ideas. Either way, it'll raise your motivation through the roof, as it did for me!
One article I read: 4 Important Ideas I Wish My Students Knew About Learning a New Language — By JJ Wong
I found this article very interesting but there was one particular aspect that really stuck with me. Here, JJ talks about making a difference between your "Ideal L2 Self" and your "Ought-to L2 Self". The first one is hopeful and empowering while the second is fearful and overwhelmed by expectations (maybe his own). Take a second and look at which one you're focusing on nowadays. Are you sure you're following the right one? If not, what can you change today to get closer to your ideal L2 self tomorrow?
One article I wrote: How to Turn Any Language Resource Into a Useful One
In this article, I talked about the importance of context and making connections to your own life and likes to improve faster at your language. Don't learn vocabulary you don't care about or grammar patterns for overly polite situations if you don't plan to be in such situations. Learn what matters for you. In context.
One podcast episode: AJATT's Khatzumoto on how to immerse yourself in Japanese & innovate your language learning methods — The Language Mastery Show
Everything here is about immersion in this interesting but old podcast with the creator of All Japanese All The Time (AJATT). I found his advice on watching corny and predictable movies in the target language particularly interesting. Having just started to watch Hilda in Korean without subtitles, I indeed found it quite predictable and that's made watching the show easier.
One tool to try: Flewent
This tool can be quite useful if you're learning a romance language. Once installed, you can choose among a long list of languages (and can add more in the settings) and choose how much of the webpage you want to have translated. Reload the page and a few words, at random, will be translated into the language. You can click on them to get the source language to reappear. Quite useful in theory but the chosen words for Asian languages often don't fit well in the texts!
One quote: "Do not give your attention to what others do or fail to do; give it to what you do or fail to do." — Gautama Buddha
One challenge for the week ahead: Find an audio file and transcribe it
One skill language-learners need to work on is recognizing words and sentences. By transcribing an audio file, you have to direct all your attention to the audio and recognize words. You also have to listen to the audio many times to write everything. I plan on doing it for Korean (one of my strongest languages) and German (one of my weakest languages). Of course, I'll find a shorter and easier text for German.
Do your best to find an audio file that has its content written as well, so you can double-check!
Last week's challenge was to find a song and translate its lyrics. I chose this song in German and struggled a lot. This turned out to be harder than I thought to do as I am still a beginner in this language. Still, I had a lot of fun and learned many words. There's also no way I'll ever forget the word "Irgendwas" since I heard it more than a hundred times within a week!
Let me know how it went for you by sending me a mail at barra.mathias(at)gmail.com !
As always, thanks for reading!
Mathias Barra
For more of my articles, you can find them here.