Tag Archives: learning methods

How to create a language immersion environment (or a day in the life of a polyglot)

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The Tower of Babel, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 1563

Today’s blog post is about how to create a language immersion environment at the place where you live, which will permit you to learn your target language(s) naturally by ‘absorbing’ them in your daily life. Learning a language to fluency is perfectly possible even if you cannot travel to the country where it is spoken and spend some longer periods of time there. I personally learned all of my languages from abroad and never in the countries where they are spoken (with exception of my two second languages), and I have done so via an immersive environment which I created for myself. This is not difficult and to illustrate how it can be done, I will describe a ‘typical’ week in my life in the following paragraphs. 🙂

To start with, I have to say that I am a freelancer with several, very different, jobs, so each day I have to perform quite different tasks which permit me to integrate my language practice to a greater or lesser extent into my daily routine, depending on which task is due on a particular day. One thing I virtually never ever (!!) do is sitting at a desk studying a language from a textbook! My daily language learning routine is completely integrated into my daily life and cannot be separated from it – I virtually live my life in the different languages I speak 🙂 . In this way, I also manage to practice (and learn) my languages for about more than 20 or 30 hours each week.

So how do I integrate my language learning into my daily life? On a typical day, one of the first things I do each morning is to study my current main target languages from a textbook for about 15-30 minutes, sometimes longer, even before getting up properly. While getting ready for the day, I usually learn some new vocabulary in the otherwise ‘lost’ time (= while making breakfast, getting dressed, etc.) – in my opinion it is the most time-efficient way of learning vocabulary . 🙂

Often, when my work for that day permits it, I also hone my language skills while working:  Especially good for language practice are days on which I have to perform ‘manual’ tasks which leave my mind free to wander, like illustrating, or designing or making/assembling new products. This often gives me the opportunity to listen to language tapes in various languages for several hours at a time while working.  Sometimes, my work also involves customer service for a small business I work for, and this correspondence will then be in any language the customer has chosen to write in – another opportunity to practice my skills. So if your work permits it and you want to integrate more language practice into your daily life, try listening to language tapes while you work instead of to the radio or to music (unless they are in one of your target languages of course 🙂 ). On other days, for example when I have to work on machines which are too loud to permit the use of audiotapes, I usually learn vocabulary while working. So during an average workday, I can often integrate quite a substantial amount of extra learning practice, though not always.

In my free time, I continue learning and using my languages, both directly and indirectly.  A language learning practice I really do every single day (!!) is listening to the Word of the Day online, in about 40 languages (in every language for which I have found a daily post!) . This takes me about an hour, on the average 1-2 minutes for each language. This might not seem like much, but this adds up quite substantially over the course of a month and a year: 1-2 minutes per day per language means at least (!!) 7-15 minutes of language practice per week in each of these c.40 languages, and again at least 30-60 minutes of practice per month for each language, etc.! Then, I have recently joined duolingo, which is quite fun, and where I have signed up for the intensive streak of 5 exercices per day, but I usually do more than that since it is quite addictive 🙂 . So there I spend another hour or so practising languages, learning new ones as well as using it to brush up old ones.

Internet: This is another great opportunity if you want to immerse yourself in your target languages. Whenever I use twitter, I log in using a different language each time. 🙂 Both my twitter and facebook feeds are multilingual themselves (!!) – I pursue my hobbies in my various languages! So I do not only follow and read posts about learning languages, but I subscribe to pages about my various interests in a variety of languages, so that my newsfeed is totally multilingual. To illustrate this, if your interest is kittens for example 😉 , search for facebook pages about kittens in the languages you are learning .and subscribe to them, if your interest is politics, subscribe to political pages from various countries, etc. So in this way you can both pursue an interest that personally captivates you while practising your target languages at the same time. This is what immersion is all about, namely that language learning cannot be distinguished from ordinary life any more and that you start to live your life in the languages. 🙂

My final language practice of an average day takes place at night. I don’t have a TV, so I never watch movies every night like most people do. Instead, I enjoy reading. Often, I spend another 30 minutes or an hour working through a textbook (on nights with plenty of time) or just reading (in any language). But each night before going to bed, I read the Harry Potter books for at least an hour, usually in one of my intermediate-level languages to take them to a higher level eventually. (See a previous blog post of mine on how you can use the Harry Potter books or any other novels to boost your intermediate language skills). So on an average day, I manage to immerse myself in my languages at the very least for 3 or 4 hours, if not more. 🙂 And this time is NOT spent studying at a desk 🙂 .

I rarely watch movies, but if I do, I get myself a DVD and watch it in my target language. If I am proficient in the language, I use no subtitles, but if it is in one of my intermediate languages, I usually turn on the subtitles in the target language (NOT in English!!) so I can read along if I don’t understand something. I find this really helps to improve my skills. Another thing I do very frequently is just listening to films (usually documentaries, which I prefer) while working on the computer. Mostly I don’t need to see the pictures or the footage, and this is a great way of honing my listening comprehension. 🙂

As you can see, language immersion does not require you to actually live in the countries to be immersed in the language, you just have to create an environment in your daily life in which you live your life in the language.

 

 

 

 

 

 

How to learn vocabulary without ‘studying’ it

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Today’s blog post is about learning methods, more precisely about how to learn vocabulary without ‘learning’  or studying it actively or consciously.

This can be done with audio courses, in particular with bilingual ones, and the method  belongs to an intuitive and immersive approach to language learning. So how can you do this?

Basically, what you do in order to learn vocabulary and phrases without studying them consciously is to listen to audio tapes repeatedly, quite literally *for hours* while doing something else (housework, cooking, waiting at the doctor’s or while commuting, etc.) and to repeat these sessions at regular intervals. Spaced repetition is absolutely essential for this approach: in the beginning when starting a new language, it is best to listen to the tapes every 2 or 3 days (or every day, if you are so inclined), and when you become more familiar with the language and start to pick up vocabulary and expressions quite naturally, you can increase the gap between sessions, but once a week or at least once every two weeks is best, in my experience (at least, so it works for me… 🙂 ), to reactivate the vocabulary and phrases you have learned.

Depending on how familiar with your target language you already are, the dialogues you listen to might sound quite like incomprehensible gibberish in the first few sessions, especially when it is a language that is unrelated to any you already know. But don’t worry – this is quite normal! Just keep listening to the tapes, and from about the 4th or 5th session onwards, you will notice that things are starting to fall into place, and that you have subconsciously learned (!) some of the vocabulary and phrases and that you can discern individual words and that is no longer just ‘gibberish’ 🙂 .

While this method or approach to language learning won’t (!) eliminate the need to also study grammar with a textbook to learn how the language ‘works’, this approach is suitable to get a basic intuitive grasp of your target language and to achieve basic fluency (A1 or even A2 according to the European framework for language proficiency, but here it depends very much on the course you are using and how much basic vocabulary and phrases are treated!). A nice side effect is also that this approach will boost your listening comprehension.

This method also works because all the vocabulary and all the phrases are absorbed in context, and in the context where they naturally occur and in which you will need these words. As I have written in a prior blog post, learning vocabulary in isolation almost never leads to good results and it is always best to learn the words as collocations (=words that appear frequently together as a set phrase, e.g. ‘to go by bus’, ‘to read a book’) and as expressions.

What audio tapes or courses are suitable for this method? Well, basically you can use any audio tape you might have, but bilingual tapes are best, since they will tell you the meanings of individual words or phrases and explain basic grammatical structures. If these special bilingual courses or tapes are not available for your target language, e.g. because it is a language that is only rarely studied and there is not much material on the market, you can also use a monolingual tape with dialogs (those that accompany textbooks), but then it is absolutely essential that you make yourself familiar with the content of the individual dialogs before listening to them – you will want to understand what the speakers are on about to be able to subconsciously absorb the vocabulary and phrases through repeated listening! Basically, this approach to language learning is like listening to your favourite songs or music on tapes – after a while you will know the lyrics and could sing along. Just here, you will know the words and expressions that make up dialogs. 🙂