hello, pals!
I'm writing you in my native English to ask you what some of your favorite ways of studying are - whether you are new to language learning or very experienced!
a little bit about my language learning journey: I started learning Spanish in october 2020 and at first I was studying A LOT. every day. I was having a lot of fun using babbel, watching robin's videos, watching spanish language tv, listening to music in spanish and using other youtube channels like Easy Spanish. my interest in language learning right now is to communicate on a basic level, write posts on journaly about my interests and to enjoy entertainment in spanish. I'm not concerned with being extremely formal or exact, however my favorite thing to know when being corrected is why? rather than just receiving the correction. when people correct me on journaly and don't leave context, I go and look it up and sometimes I am just as confused as when I originally wrote it. was I being corrected for grammar, or to sound more natural, or something else?
so, my studying has slowed down. I've been clinging to my progress by doing my babbel reviews each week and I still love learning spanish, but I am curious what other people are doing to study. I'm sure you all have a lot of ideas and approaches to share! I am looking for things that can be done alone, and I am especially hungry to understand sentence structure. I also love talking to myself! :P
talk to you soon! <3
If you like knowing the "why" you should check out Language Transfer, a free audio course available on several platforms. It's pretty amazing. They have a bunch of languages, but I believe the most complete courses are on Greek (which I have completed! And it was awesome!) and Spanish. For myself, though, I just hate repetition (so anything remotely similar to Duolingo). So what I do to study is I read about the language (the grammar, the culture behind it, etc) and at the same time try to write something in the language or translate from it. I make a point of listening to music in these languages and looking up the translation as well. My hope is I'll eventually glean enough vocabulary to be able to hold (simple) conversations and read books in the language. I have no hope of it happening anytime soon though hahaha
I've been studying Spanish for the last 3 months and I'm starting to feel my study pay off. Here are some things that have been helpful for me:
Forcing myself to speak alot even when it's akward. You can pay for 1:1 conversation for pretty cheap with italki. You can also find partners for free with tandem. Of you want to get good at something you have to do it alot 2. Learn all the grammer rules. Language Transfer was the app I used for this. And I highly recommend it. It focuses alot on the structure of the language. Bit it's very time consuming. I'm on lesson 80 out of 90. Each lesson is like 15 min when you pause it to do the responses. 3. Youtube ... Tons and tons of youtube in spanish. Easy Spanish is great.
During the quarantine I decided to learn German. I had some previous knowledge from High School but really couldn´t speak or write at all. My best advice would be to step out of your comfort zone as soon as you start feeling comfortable. I used iTalki to speak with native german speakers. I also tried to write and read everyday, and also tried to expand my vocabulary as much as I could. All and all learning languages should be fun but challenging at the samen time. Hope I could help you
This was interesting, I have to admit when I correct people in German, I do not usually tell them why because when someone corrects me in French, I am at the level where it's usually a duh-moment. The other reason is, that looking it up makes stuff stick better than being told. However, that could just be a preference of mine. You guys have made me interested in Language Transfer; even though I do love a lot of repetition when it comes to Chinese (I use Duolingo for that), I dislike it for French, Spanish, and Italian.
I guess that many native speakers know the correct and natural use of the language, but they're not language teachers so maybe it could be difficult for someone to explain why. Frequently a sentence could be gramatically correct but it's not the natural usage of the language and for a native speaker its use could be weird (English isn't my native language so please indulge me for my writing mistakes). I tried many methods for studying other languages. Besides all great advices from Robin, I have found that reading and listening an audiobook at least for 30 minutes a day improved my listening skills and writing because I'm exposed to the most used structures of sentences in my target language.
Hi Bailey, I also started learning a new language in October, but I choose Italian. So I can relate to your struggles. I really like to know how things work and why things are expressed in a certain way. That’s why I bought myself a grammar book with exercises. I started studying verbs. After posting my first texts here I noticed that I often get corrections on prepositions. So I’ve decided to concentrate on those :) I prefer the book over an app because this way I can choose what I want to learn and don’t have to follow a certain preplanned program. I hope this helps a bit :)
Caro, I also bought a very dry Spanish grammar textbook for that reason! ;) I looked for one that had a lot of good reviews and I'm happy with it. I think what I'm suffering from is Not Doing It haha. your comment inspired me to bring it back into my routine
UrsaRomero, you make a great point! I guess I'd be content if someone wrote "I don't know why it's like this, but this is how I would say it." I'm fine without an academically sound reason. I like the audiobook idea, thank you!
Silly7, I agree - looking it up does help it stick but sometimes it isn't clear what I should be looking up. like if someone just corrects me by reorganizing something and changing words, I'm not sure what to google to look up more information. I think this will get easier as I learn more, as you say about your French experience!
Thanks everyone who has commented so far! I'll definitely check out Language Transfer now!
Sorry that comment is all smashed together, it didn't retain my formatting when I posted it!
I get bored very easily with things like Duolingo, so I look for other ways. For improving my french I found listening to an audio book while reading the same text in writing was a great help with speaking ease and speed, natural intonation etc. For Danish, as a complete beginner, I also read the same page of the book in english first. It's slow but interesting!