7 Bullet Points About Languages - Week 52
My favorite tool discovered this year, by far. Very far.
Hey language lovers,
I hope your holidays have been filled with love and relaxation!
Updates
Mine have been family-packed! I spent a lot of time resting and recharging with my loved ones playing card games and solving a 1000-piece puzzle.
Language-wise, I didn’t do much. I spent 10 studying Thai here and there and watching TV shows in all my languages on Netflix. As I mentioned last week, I’m taking time off for this bi-weekly “challenge!”
This new week will also be spent with my family and friends so there won’t be much studying happening either! A clean break for a clean start, you could say.
I’ve been thinking about skill acquisition a lot these days, following conversations with writer friends Danny Forest and Eva Keiffenheim, and creator of a 20-hour skill challenge Nicole Cleckley.
We’ve all learned many varied skills and have fallen in love with the process. How could we not! It’s so mesmerizing to discover all the possibilities that can open to us once we gain confidence in our skills.
We’ve been talking about gathering our respective expertise to create a course on learning how to learn (and more!)
We’re still discussing how we can make it as useful as possible for you but stay tuned for more in the coming weeks!
You might see me in your inbox again later this week so I’m not wishing you a Happy New Year yet!
Alrighty then. Let's dive in!
7 Bullet Points
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.
🎥 One video
Why you keep failing your goals. Can bucket goals help? — By Bianca Learns
I mentioned last week discovering Bianca through an interview with Dan Yo. Since then, I’ve watched all her videos. I love her relaxed and funny way to make her points.
In this one, she explained how to set goals for learning a language in clear detail. Perfect for the season! I love how she reduced “understanding a podcast” to something more manageable and have already started looking for specific podcasts for Chinese that’d fit my newly set goals.
Fun fact: This video was posted in June and Bianca joked about making it at the wrong time of the year. And now you get to see it at the right time! 🤭
📚 One article I read
3 Scientifically-Proven Ways to Improve How You Learn — By Sheena Chen (Glossika Blog)
Did I mention I was diving deeper into skill acquisition already? Well, I fell on this piece by Sheena at the right moment. I loved the third way, desirable difficulty. It’s often mistaken for Stephen Krashen’s “comprehensible input,” but the difference lays in the search for more complicated input.
✍🏽 One article I wrote
Most People Are Great Language Learners Without Knowing It
Well, the idea is in the title! In this piece, I not only showed what great language learners do but how you can tweak your daily habits to improve your language just as much!
🎧 One podcast episode
Buy Yourself Some “Think Time” — By The Hypopolyglot
A shorty but a goodie! I had never thought of actively learning ways to buy time in the middle of conversations. Using the right ways to buy time in Japanese has been extremely useful to me (once I lost the habit of using “like” in the middle of Japanese sentences!) I’m going to learn a few ways to say it in Thai, right away! And you should probably learn it in your target language too!
🧰 One tool to try
Slowly (iOs, Android, Website)
Oh. My. God. This was the most beautiful discovery I did this year. By far. I absolutely love this app and have been struggling not to say it too soon. 🥰
Slowly is an app to send digital letters. And just like physical letters, they take time to reach the recipient. For people in the same country, they take about 2-3 hours to reach my correspondent.
When I exchange with people in Korea, however, they take 29 hours! (This is also why it’s taken time to really try the app’s capacities!)
Because they take time to arrive, you can take your time reading the ones you receive with a dictionary if you need to. You can also go into deep conversations pretty quickly because each letter is longer than a simple “How was your day?”
You also use an avatar so there’s no creep lurking around for the wrong reasons. Everybody’s there to meet new people and slow down their lives while still discovering new languages and cultures.
Absolutely brilliant.
(This might sound sponsored here but I’m not. I’m just that in love with this app!)
📜 One quote to ponder
“We don't make mistakes. We make happy accidents.” — Bob Ross
💪 Current biweekly challenge
Rest! Or Start right now!
2021 was a long year. Many things happened and many others, well, didn’t. For the last two weeks, here’s what you should do:
If you’ve learned a language for the entire year and never took a proper break, take one now.
If you’ve been considering starting a language (and especially if you didn’t the last challenge of finding goals for 2022), start right away!
Review of the first week of the current challenge:
As mentioned above, I took some time off so not much to say here!
Let me know how it went for you!
As always, thanks for reading!
Mathias Barra
For more of my articles, you can find them here.