Wow! This seemingly simple looking topic is about as heavy and complicated as it gets in terms of language learning. Before I tell you my recommendation I need to make a few points.

First, I’m not actually that big a fan of textbooks. They can be very helpful in the early stages, but from what I’ve read, polyglots don’t, on the whole, use them. Textbooks have two basic problems. One is that written out dialogues don’t actually represent particularly natural language use. The other is that they present grammar in a carefully worked out sequence irrespective of whether the learner needs that grammar at that particular time. Honestly speaking, if you are learning something without having any need for it then your brain and your heart are not that interested in remembering it.

The second point I would like to make very strongly is that although there are many online platforms where we can interact with native speakers, it is not at all necessary to practice with a native speaker in order to get one’s chosen language up to at least a high intermediate level, which is about as far as most people want to go.

If you really want to learn a language well, one of the most important things you have to do first is study basic sounds that make up the language. Omitting this step is a very bad idea. I am quite sure I am correct about this because most of the polyglots I have read about focus on the pure sounds of the new language quite a lot right at the beginning.

Having made these points, I would like to give you one of my favourite ways of learning a language. The first thing to do is buy a very cheap app. called Speater. What Speater does is allows you to choose chunks of a download and repeat it over and over again. You can repeat single words over again, sentences and paragraphs and even the complete download. It’s extremely easy to use. There are similar language repetition tools available, but I have found  Speater to be the most reliable and easy to use by a long way. Then all you need to do is start downloading things that interest you in your target language. These will probably include songs, podcasts, news broadcasts and the like. Then you simply start shadowing them, that is repeating them over and over again. You can either do this while looking at a text or you can practice writing out the content of your downloads as listening practice. This will develop your language ability very quickly! (You may need a native speaker to make sure you have not made any mistakes if you are doing dictation of a very complex download.) The next step in this process is to choose any language in that download you find interesting and you think you are going to want to use in a conversation. You simply write out that sentence (never just learn single words!) and a translation next to it. You should underline or highlight the word in a sentence that you are particularly interested in. By this means, you will build up a collection of expressions and sentences that you are going to use in conversation and when you are writing essays. 

You may be thinking ‘that sounds good, but how about the grammar?’ Well, when you find an interesting grammar point in the language that you have chosen you should really study it very hard. Get out three or four grammar books, read about it online and really master that particular grammar point very deeply. In this way, using mini  grammar projects, you can quickly develop a deep understanding of the grammar underpinning the language you are studying in a very communicative and useful way.

That’s it for this week. I hope you found this useful. If you want to know more please come and talk to me about it sometime.

Cheers,

Buri