7 Bullet Points About Languages - Week 1
Hi everybody,
Happy New Year!
We're only a few days into 2021 but I hope your study of your language(s?) is already going strong!
For the new year, I've decided to revamp the format for this newsletter. Each week, I'll share seven 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: The Soft Skills in Language Learning That Nobody Talks About - by Robin MacPherson
In this video, Robin dives into a few skills that can make you a better language speaker before you even reach a high level. Among those, my favorite is the ability to find keywords in sentences to get an overview of the topic at hand.
One article I read: 3 Reasons Why You Should Consider Learning a New Language
This is the kind of short article I never get tired of. In a few minutes, Daniel A. describes well reasons to learn a foreign language. Having learned 6 languages myself, I couldn't agree more with what he writes. If you're still having doubts about learning a foreign language, give this a quick read.
One article I wrote: 12 Great Free Tools for Learning Any Language
With the new year just starting, you're certainly still setting getting everything ready to learn your language well in 2021. Learning a language on your own can be a daunting task but, with the right tools, it can become much easier. This is a list of 12 tools without which I would have never reached my current level in my languages.
One podcast episode: Overcoming Language Learning Obstacles - Steve Kauffman
This short interview of Jeremy from the YouTube channel Motivate Korean was quite interesting and showed different ways to overcome obstacles on a language-learning journey. I especially liked the final tip Jeremy gave about letting his subconscious take over sometimes after having exposed himself to a lot of native content he didn't even understand fully.
One tool to try: Notion2Anki
This rather new tool allows you to transform Toggle lists from Notion into Anki decks automatically. The creator has a lot of videos on his YouTube channel on how to use this. I'm currently playing around with the combination but it seems very promising.
One quote: "When it doesn't feel like work, you can accomplish so much more." - Benny Lewis
One challenge for the week: Read a text above your level
We'll finish the list with a language-learning challenge each week. The goal is for you to get out of your comfort zone and push your knowledge above its current limits.
For this first week, I'd like you to read and understand a complete text that is one level above yours. First, judge grossly your capacities based on the CEFR levels. If you're just starting, anything in A1 level will do. You can find texts on Google by searching your language followed by the level needed and the word "text" or "reading". If by the end of the week you can read it again without a dictionary, you win. Here's the short text I'll work on for German this week.
Let's make this year a year full of learning and growing!
And as always, thanks for reading!
– Mathias Barra
For more of my Medium articles, you can find them here.